Empowering women and girls is key to stabilizing population growth and creating a healthy and sustainable society. We advocate for better policies on a range of issues impacting women, including education, health care and voluntary family planning, reproductive rights, gender equality, ending child marriage and land rights.

Addressing the needs of women and girls through rights-based approaches can benefit communities and the environment. Women are on the frontlines of coping with the effects of environmental degradation and climate change. In most countries around the world they are the main providers of food, water, and other resources for their families. When women are empowered, they can better support their families and adapt to environmental impacts.

A current area of focus is the Women’s Climate Center Initiative. Women all over the world are on the front lines of increasingly severe climate change impacts. We are collaborating with several other organizations in the U.S. and East Africa to create centers where women can come together and share local and traditional knowledge and best practices to overcome climate challenges. Part of this will also include a focus on the need for integrated development that includes reproductive health and family planning.

The population, health and environment development model, or PHE, simultaneously addresses the need for healthcare and family planning while helping communities manage their natural resources in a manner that will protect and empower the people who depend upon it for their livelihoods. This little-known, integrated approach is being implemented in communities around the world, from Ethiopia to Indonesia to Nepal.

We research and advocate for the PHE model as a sustainable means to improve the health of people and the environment.

When people everywhere understand the link between the size of the human population and the many forms of environmental degradation facing our planet, we will be much more effective at dealing with social and environmental problems. Both abroad and in the U.S., a surprising number of young people lack the information or access required to make thoughtful choices regarding reproduction.

Despite recent decreases in teen pregnancies, the U.S. still has some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases of all industrialized nations. It is critical to reach this demographic, which is entering peak reproductive years, and help them understand the impact of their choices on a global scale. Presentations and activities encourage conscious decision-making among students – both as citizens shaping public policy, and as individuals regarding family planning, consumption and the environment.

We are currently available to give free interactive presentations to high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you are a high school teacher or student, and you are interested in finding out more, please email us at info@transition-earth.org

Maasai Harmonial Development and Sustainability (U.S.) is a project of Transition Earth and works with the Maasai Harmonial Development and Sustainability project in the Emburbul Depression in the Ngorogoro Conservation Area in Tanzania. The major concerns for this community are population growth and its impacts (i.e. deforestation, livestock competing with wildlife for grassland, water shortage), child marriage, poverty, and famine.

Maasai Harmonial Development and Sustainability (U.S.) supports several community based solutions, including education, family planning, sustainable livelihoods, village-based banking, water system maintenance and water conservation, and conservation projects such as planting trees.

MHDS is an example of how health and environmental challenges are interrelated and require multi-sectoral solutions that can positively influence health (including family planning and reproductive health), enhance environmental conservation patterns, build resilient communities, and help balance environmental protection, natural resource use, and increase human well-being. To support this project, please donate here.

Society’s obsession with economic growth and consumerism is unsustainable and if we are to pull people out of poverty, reduce inequality, empower people and protect the planet we need to think bigger.

Our work looks at efforts to redefine economic growth and enable the transition to new economies. It also addresses ways to shift consciousness on the rights of nature as the path to protecting ecosystems around the world.

Rather than treating nature as property under the law (as women and slaves once were), rights of nature acknowledges that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles. Rights of nature laws eliminate the authority of a property owner to interfere with the functioning of ecosystems and natural communities that exist and depend upon that property for their existence and flourishing.