Population and Environment

Population, health, and environment (PHE) programs can play an important role in areas where demographic trends such as growth and migration place pressure on the environment; where degraded natural resources impact the health and livelihoods of local communities; and where a lack of effective health services, including reproductive health, threatens long-term prospects for sustainable development. The key objective of these programs is to simultaneously improve access to health services while helping communities manage their natural resources in ways that improve their health and livelihood even as they protect the environment.

Since 1993, USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health has worked to better understand the synergistic relationship between population, health, and environment. In 2002, the PHE program expanded to include field programming in response to legislative language originally included in the FY02 Foreign Operations Appropriations bill – and repeated in all subsequent bills – stating that under the Child Survival and Health Programs Fund some portion (unspecified) of the funds for family planning/reproductive health {should be allocated} in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species. These field-based projects, often implemented by conservation organizations, have developed innovative models of integrating population, environment, and health where appropriate in and around areas of high biodiversity in 10 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.