The United Nations and the streets of Manhattan are going into global warming saturation mode, from Sunday’s People’s Climate March through the Tuesday climate change summit convened by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and on through an annual green-energy event called Climate Week.

Largely missed in much of this, as always seems the case with climate change discussions, is the role of population growth in contributing both to rising emissions of greenhouse gases and rising vulnerability to climate hazards in poor places with high fertility rates (think sub-Saharan Africa).

That’s too bad given that on Monday a separate special session of the General Assembly is scheduled to hold a 20th-anniversary review of actions since the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. As Bob Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute mused at a Wilson Center meeting in Washington last week, there needs to be much more crosstalk.

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