Women and sustainable development a reflection [editorial]

This editorial introduces a special issue of the journal "Population and Environment" which presents an interdisciplinary examination of the evolutionary roots of male and female patterns of resource consumption and sexual reproduction. This study reveals that humans appear to have evolved to seek and use resources to enhance their survival and reproduction and that males and females have followed different evolutionary patterns governing the amount of resources they use and the risks they are willing to incur. This insight leads to the question of whether knowledge of these male-female differences can be exploited to promote sustainable development. Consideration must be given to the possibility that humans are responding to cues that were reliable correlates of success in the past but which are no longer attached to their evolutionary purpose. Thus the goal of attaining low fertility through a simultaneous reduction in consumption and fertility is quite novel from an evolutionary standpoint. Some of the individual papers in the journal examine womens roles in environmental projects in the Philippines and Viet Nam trace the effect of changing conditions on womens fertility in developing countries and look at some largely unexplored outcomes of sustainable development including changes in the status of elderly women in Sri Lanka. The analyses reveal that womens roles are diverse but united by common patterns which exclude women from high-stakes risky resource work as well as from the control of significant resources or resource policy. The papers in the journal provide a starting point for the continued analysis of the role of women in solving population-environment problems.