Population Matters

Population Matters campaigns to achieve a sustainable human population, to protect the natural world and improve people’s lives. We campaign, inform, undertake research and do all we can to encourage an open, fair-minded and constructive debate about population and work with supporters, partners and stakeholders globally to achieve a better future for everyone.

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Empower to Plan

Women around the world want the power to choose how many children to have – and when. Evidence shows that where women are empowered, there’s a natural fall in birth rate. However, many women – in both high and low-income countries – lack the contraception, knowledge and freedom to take control of their fertility.

To help tackle this issue, we’ve joined forces with selected grassroots NGOs to create Empower to Plan crowdfunding. It’s your chance to get behind effective family planning providers, back their projects and increase their impact.

Help us empower more women to plan – for their own sake, and for the wellbeing of future generations and the planet that sustains us all.

Our partners are carefully selected grassroots NGOs. Each is taking practical action, aligned with our mission and values, and with a proven track record of impact.

URGENT: Governments must tackle population to save biodiversity

Human activity has caused a biodiversity crisis. To prevent further biodiversity loss, we must address the impact of our growing human population. In the run-up to the crucial COP15 biodiversity summit later this year, please call on your country’s environment minister to ensure that positive, choice-based population solutions are included in the new global biodiversity agreement.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity is the key international agreement protecting global biodiversity. In 2010, ambitious global biodiversity goals were agreed, called the Aichi Targets. These expired in 2020 without any of the targets being met. While there are many reasons for this, the failure to address the issue of human population growth is certainly among them.

The world’s nations are in the process of drawing up a new biodiversity agreement to replace the Aichi Targets – the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. This will be further negotiated in Geneva this March, and then adopted at the COP15 summit in China later this year. It is vital that this agreement explicitly addresses the role of human population growth in biodiversity loss to have any chance of success.

Smaller Families Matter

What sort of family we have is a deeply personal choice, that everyone has the right to make freely. When we make it, we also have the opportunity to help protect our precious planet. Sadly, millions of people still don't have the freedom to choose.

Choosing a smaller family is also one of the kindest things that you can do for the Earth. A 2017 study suggested that the single most effective measure any individual in the developed world may be able to take to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions over the long-term is to have one fewer child.

About us

We believe that population is one of the most important, but neglected, contributors to almost all of the major problems facing us today. In particular that means the multiple environmental threats our planet faces, but an unsustainable population also contributes to poverty, conflict, resource depletion and a poorer quality of life for many people.

A growing number of scientists, activists and members of the public are recognising that action to address a global population of 7.9 billion people and growing will help people, the living things around us and the planet we live on.

That action is simple, positive, and improves people's lives: lifting people out of poverty, providing education, empowering women and girls, providing good modern family planning to all and promoting the choice to have a smaller family.

Despite that, there is still resistance among some politicians, organisations and campaigners to that positive message. Addressing population is not the only solution to the challenges we face. There is much else that needs to be done - but adding ever more people to the billions already here makes each of those other solutions harder to achieve.

The role of Population Matters is to spread that message, encourage smaller families, and ensure that positive, ethical and empowering action to achieve a sustainable population happens. That will help to create a just world, in which everyone has a decent standard of life and the opportunities they deserve, and the natural world is healthy and flourishing.