Navigating megatrends: ICPD30 Briefs

The transformational vision and principles within the International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action have made sexual and reproductive health and rights – and the equality of women – central to development agendas worldwide.

The Programme of Action affirmed a rights-based approach to sustainable development that placed human well-being at the center, emphasizing the benefits of universality, non-discrimination and inclusive human capital development. Recognizing environmental stress, it called on all governments and development actors to reform unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, and to eradicate inequality and multidimensional poverty.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, UNFPA commissioned five think pieces to take stock of progress and provide future-focused blueprints on how the Programme of Action can be achieved in a world of radical transformation.

These five briefs summarizing the think pieces – which will be published as individual publications – highlight the key findings and recommended actions:

The world is very different than it was three decades ago, and new efforts are needed to advance the objectives of the Programme of Action in 2024 and beyond.

While all countries were growing in population 30 years ago, the world today is characterized by the greatest demographic diversity in history. Countries that continue to have high fertility and rapid population growth are now concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with challenges to meet basic needs and provide social protection for all.

At the same time, two-thirds of the human population now lives in a country with fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, with very different issues, including shortages of labour and challenges with sustainability of pensions and long-term care for an ageing population.

Highlighting the drastically different population dynamics in different regions of the world today: The median age of populations in West Africa is 17 years, while it is more than 40 years in Western Europe.

Not only are demographic trends vastly different today, but climate change has evolved into a global crisis, affecting all aspects of development – water supply, food production, infrastructure, biodiversity and human health, including sexual and reproductive health. It is already rendering parts of the world uninhabitable, and all projections suggest it will leave ever more people dislocated, as climate events threaten communities and destroy the livelihoods on which they depend.

A third major change in the past 30 years has been the transformative development of digitization. In 1994, unbeknownst to many drafting the Programme of Action, a quiet revolution was under way to digitize global knowledge and information. Within a decade, the world had embraced the world wide web, and by 2007, 94 per cent of the world’s information storage was digital.

Digitization and technology, including artificial intelligence, offer massive potential in accelerating the pace and scale of development, yet they are also opening new divides and inequalities, and providing new avenues for discrimination and gender-based violence, demanding new and better protections for users, and for personal data.

In light of these dramatic changes over the years, UNFPA commissioned these five think pieces to highlight the progress and challenges in advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights and investing in population data, and to examine how demographic diversity, climate change and digitization are transforming future demands. The think pieces are intended to prompt discussion on future priorities for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and accelerating, advancing and amplifying the vision and principles of the International Conference on Population and Development.

Watch the ICPD30 Briefs launch event that took place at the margins of the 57th Commission on Population and Development.