Over the past year, Aspen Global Health and Development has brought together communities across different development sectors to explore how the world’s growing population impacts the most important issues of the day. From management of resources like food and water to issues of good governance, state security, human health and the environment, we’ve talked about population throughout our DC-based roundtable series, at last November’s International Conference on Family Planning in Senegal, at the COP 17 in South Africa, at the World Health Organization’s annual assembly in May, and just last week at the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil. We’ve been working with our partners to ensure that population and family planning are understood as critical to development, and that we continue reaching new audiences with this message.
So this summer, GHD was very excited to play a supporting role at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival (June 27th-July 3rd), the Aspen Institute’s annual, high level conference bringing together our most influential leaders, our world’s biggest questions, and our hopes for tomorrow’s values. Calling itself a “week-long summer university for the mind,” the annual Festival engages participants in a variety of programs, tutorials, seminars and discussion events united by eleven cross-cutting themes. GHD’s executive director, Peggy Clark, was an official advisor to the “Our Planet: Seven Billion and Counting” conversation series, and our team was on the ground in Aspen, Colorado supporting a series of conversations around this theme (named in recognition that world population surpassed seven billion last fall).
If you weren’t able to follow along with the conversation by following what the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health had to say at @GLCRHresolve or monitoring the Festival blog, our team is hard at work editing video footage and pulling clips to share so you can see why the Festival decided population matters to just about every other issue featured this summer. But you don’t have to take our word for it:
