TODAY, the world is faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in everyone's thinking so that humanity stops threatening its life-supporting system called climate.

Global climate is changing and it is human beings in their lifestyles, their rapidly increasing numbers and the massive scale of their consumption and production that change it.

Climate change is often seen as a scientific issue, but its human dimensions are at last moving to the forefront. They will do so even more as the impact of climate change unfold and societies respond to them.

This impact is likely to exacerbate gender and other social inequalities that are already acute today. Working now to reduce or eliminate such inequalities is thus key anticipatory strategy for addressing climate change as well as contributing to development and the fullest exercise of human rights.

The complex nature and momentum of human-induced climate change suggest areas of work needed now, with immediate, near term and long term benefits.

Because it is already too late to prevent it some amount of climate change, humanity must immediately learn to adapt to it and become more resilient to ongoing changes in the long run. Without halting the rise in global emissions of greenhouse gases and then rapidly reducing them, adaptation to climate change will become an endless and maybe an impossible challenge.

The push to build resilience both at national and international level to climate change cannot divert from the need to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible, starting now. But this requires a shift in human behavior and a new mindset about the way to dealing with the environment individually, collectively, locally, regionally and globally.

Even the critically needed early successes in reducing emissions will be a prelude to a task to preoccupy humanity for decades, even centuries prospering globally while keeping human activities from sending the global atmosphere and climate outside the range of human habitability.

Tourism, Environment and Natural Resource Minister Catherine Namugala says climate change has the potential to reserve development gains of the past decades and the progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly those related to poverty, maternal health, gender and environmental sustainability.

Ms Namugala notes that adverse effects of climate change are already affecting most developing countries including Zambia as can be seen from the increased incidences of severe floods and drought.

UNFPA Launch

She was speaking in Lusaka recently during the launch of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) 2009 state of the world population report under the theme, 'facing the changing world: women, population and climate'.

'Climate change is regarded as one of the emerging challenges to the potential of the population to contributing to accelerated development and attaining good standards of living and quality of life. This is because of its adverse effects on various sectors of the economy including human population,' she says.

The world needs innovative ideas on how to bring all gas emitting countries together and come up with agreements that can reduce emissions and provide the financing and technology needed to enable all countries and all people to adapt and build resilience to climate change.

Whether these specific ideas move forward or not, a global conservation is increasingly needed to generate workable ideas to address climate change mitigation and adaptation on the basis of equity and human rights.

Adaptation

Societies' adaptation and resilience to climate change can benefit from greater gender equality and access to reproductive health care. Both facilitate women's full participation in their communities' and societies' development and climate change resilience.

The gender dimension of climate change and its impact reveals that men and women are affected differently and that women are the most vulnerable to the suffering brought about by climate change.

UNFPA country representative, Duah Owusu-Sarfo says research shows that the earth's surface is warmer now that a few centuries ago caused by the large build up of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.

'The accumulation of these gases are as a result of rapid population growth, rapid industrialisation and other human activities channeled towards the productions of energy and the satisfaction of demand and supply of goods and services,' says Mr Owusu-Sarfo.

Speaking at the same launch, Mr Owusu-Sarfo says the impact of a rise in temperature on people now and in the future will be profound.

Immediate mitigation in the rapid reductions in emissions is a complex and politically sensitive challenge. As the negotiators meet in Copenhagen in a few weeks time, the 2009 state of world population report has five suggestions that may help humanity retreat from the brink.

The first one being the need to bring better understanding of population dynamics, gender and reproductive health to climate change and environmental discussions at all levels of society. Population control in the sense of government pronouncements and targets on fertility levels has no ethical place in existing rights-based policymaking.

What is ethical and in the long run far more effective than governmental controls are policies that enable women and their partners to decide for themselves if and when to have children and to do so in good health, and actions that promote equality between the sexes in all aspects of economic and social life.

Demographic research has demonstrated for decades that when women and their partners take advantage of client-focused family planning services, fertility falls. Particularly when combined with education for girls and economic opportunities for women, family planning services and supplies are, especially powerful in delaying the age of first pregnancies and reducing the size of completed families.

Secondly, the need to fully fund family planning services and contraceptive supplies within the framework of reproductive health and rights, and assure that low income is no barrier to access.

The need to prioritise research and data collection to improve the understanding of gender and population dynamics in climate change mitigation and adaptation is a vital element too. Although population data are generally regarded as among the success stories of social science, their integration with integrations with the developing science of climate change and its human dimensions remains poor.

The environmental factors that induce people to look for new homes may be related to causes other than climate change and may be only part of the cause of any particular movement of people.

Therefore, this cause for the improvement of the sex-disaggregation of data related to migration flows that are influenced by environmental factors and prepare now for increases in population movements resulting from climate change.

Integrating gender considerations into global efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change is also a prerequisite to finding a lasting solution to climate change. The mandates of Government and other institutions to consider women's circumstances and gender relations have been established in declarations of rights and other agreements predating the world's current focus on climate change.

None of these are suggestions to be taken in isolation from broader social efforts to achieve gender equality. There is still time for the negotiators about to gather in December this year in Copenhagen to think creatively about population, reproductive health and gender equality, and how these may contribute to a just and environmentally sustainable world.

These linkages may indeed offer an arena where the universal exercise of human rights would help resolve what today seems an almost mysterious challenge, managing human-induced climate change and improving human lives and livelihoods even as it occurs.