Population, Health and Environment

Balancing People and Nature

The world's human population reached 6.7 billion people in 2007. By 2050, the United Nations' medium estimate is that it could increase to 9.1 billion. In developing countries population growth due to high fertility puts pressure on many remaining wild places, resulting in habitat destruction for agriculture and settlement, unsustainable natural resource use and pollution.

Around the world, migration of people to areas of high biological diversity - or biodiversity - such as the forest frontiers of the Eastern Himalayas or the coastlines of Coastal East Africa is affecting key landscapes.

In many developing countries, high population growth rates combined with weak governance of natural resources creates a vicious cycle where nature's supply is unable to meet increased human demands.

The result is the declining health of both people and the environment.

Even though populations have stopped growing in many developed countries, population is still important because of the high per capita consumption of natural resources which affects biodiversity around the globe. 

WWF works to reduce population pressures on nature by providing better access to voluntary family planning and lessening the environmental impacts of migration.

Recognizing the close connections between population issues, health and gender, we take a multi-pronged approach at the local, national and international levels to build a sustainable balance between people and nature. As with all our conservation programs, collaboration is key to achieving lasting results.

With partners such as USAID, Conservation International and Johnson & Johnson we are able to expand our reach to mobilize the health, development and environmental sectors.

Over the coming years, WWF will grow our population, health and environment (PHE) programmes to accomplish greater success for people and conservation. We will:

• Expand our PHE approaches from local to global levels, including work with government and non-governmental health partners to serve remote communities with poor access to health services.
• Produce a manual for conservation practitioners on how to integrate family planning and health into conservation projects, based on lessons learned from our pilot projects in nine countries.
• Map population trends to identify places with migration flows affecting biodiversity and with unmet family planning and basic health services needs.
• Develop and test approaches to reduce the impacts of migration on biodiversity by encouraging people to stay in their areas of origin and reducing negative impacts in areas of destination when migration does occur.