Population, Climate Change, and Women's Lives

The growth of population is a major factor behind climate change today. Human-caused climate change is fundamentally an imbalance of scale, as people release heat-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere faster than the oceans and living things can remove them. This imbalance stems from both the explosion of technologies made possible through the combustion of fossil fuels since the late 1700s and the more than sevenfold increase in human numbers since that time.