It's estimated that some 63,000 pregnant Haitian women face the prospect of delivering in the aftermath of the earthquake. Of these 7,000 of these will deliver in the next month. Fifteen per cent of the pregnancies will require emergency care for life-threatening complications. Newborns face even higher risk.
One of UNFPA's top priorities is protecting the lives of mothers and their newborns. UNFPA in Haiti has already supplied 18 safe delivery and reproductive health kits to still-standing hospitals, NGOs and mobile clinics with enough supplies to meet the needs of 150,000 women for three months. The kits were in a warehouse in Port-au-Prince that escaped damaged, allowing for rapid distribution of life-saving medicines, supplies and equipment for sterile deliveries, Caesarean surgeries and treatment of other reproductive health issues.
PSN has brought together a number of key actors to arrange the UK's first International Policy Symposium specifically dedicated to analysing the links between population dynamics and climate change in ways that explicitly respect and protect rights is taking place on March 1st in London. To reserve your place at this event, register now!
For full details please visit the Symposium website
The highly anticipated UN Climate Change summit was held in Copenhagen in December 2009, with representatives from 192 countries. PSN was there to highlight the links between population growth and climate change.
PSN had a high profile presence at the conference, with Co-ordinator Karen Newman speaking at, and facilitating, a number of key meetings.
An updated review of the impact of population increase on Millennium Development Goals was launched by PSN at Westminster on July 27th.
Internationally acclaimed as a seminal assessment that has since had considerable impact on policy development, the 2007 Report has now been updated with new statistics and charts by PSN who were commissioned by the All Party Parliamentary Group.
One month after the Copenhagen climate summit, its achievements are being appraised. Whilst the lack of strongly binding agreements and commitments to tackling emissions was disappointing, there was some success in highlighting the links between population and climate change, and bringing the question of population growth onto the agenda.
PSN will host a major symposium on the 1-2 March in London to further explore the links, with speakers and participants from both the developed world, and from the less developed southern countries which face the biggest and most urgent challenges of climate change.