The Population and Climate Change Alliance

PSN is the Secretariat of the Population and Climate Change Alliance (PCCA), a network of civil society organisations that work together on population and climate change issues through a loose umbrella coalition.


Member organisations

Member organisations of the PCCA include:

Mission statement

water security climate change

Women walk to a nearby pond to collect drinking water in Khuri, Rajasthan, India. © 2006 Sandipan Majumdar, Courtesy of Photoshare.

The Population and Climate Change Alliance is committed to raising awareness of the extent to which population dynamics can affect vulnerability to the effects of climate change, and the role that securing universal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights can play within successful climate change adaptation programmes. In doing so, the PCCA seeks to enhance political and financial support for universal access to sexual and reproductive health, and for the integration of sexual and reproductive health into climate change adaptation plans and programs. The PCCA also seeks to foster constructive and accurate dialogue about population dynamics and climate change, and to counter misinformation or oversimplification of these complex but critical relationships.

PCCA brings together a number of organizations which are: -

  • Committed to bringing about universal access to sexual and reproductive health, and supportive of a comprehensive vision of sexual and reproductive health and rights which includes increased access to family planning programmes that respect and protect human rights;

  • Aware that the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change are those that are least responsible for the high levels of per capita consumption and carbon emissions that are its greatest causes. This awareness means that our advocacy of increased access to sexual and reproductive health and rights is within the context of global social solidarity within which the developed nations of this world make significant efforts to reduce consumption and also support the developing world in their efforts to adapt to the impacts of climate change;

  • On record as supporting sexual and reproductive health and rights programmes which respect and protect rights, and speaking out against programmes which are coercive or which have the effect of reducing, not increasing, individual and young women’s and men’s reproductive choices;

  • Working at community level in programmes which combine the provision of voluntary family planning services with environmental programmes which increase resilience to the effects of climate change.

Background and activities

Born out of a meeting in Geneva in June 2009:

"The point of departure for the PCCA is that the climate change agenda is one of the most decisive one for all future international cooperation - and the linkages with the population-theme are obvious and controversial at the same time. If the progressive sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) movement doesn't get the arguments around population policies right - others will take over the agenda". 

PCCA members agreed to develop joint advocacy efforts in order to influence the climate change agenda, and in particular the COP 15 process prior to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in October 2009, with the goal of ensuring the integration of a rights based approach and voluntary family planning in the adaptation programmes to climate change in countries which are most affected. Read about the PCCA's input to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit here.

Since the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, the PCCA has now grown to encompass additional NGOs, and the alliance is working on further opportunities for profiling the links between population dynamics and climate change.

Most recently the PCCA has been working to ensure a focus on population dynamics and sexual and reproductive health and rights at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development taking place in 2012. You can read about this work here.

Further information is available on the Population and Climate Change Alliance website.