The world’s health leaders have neglected the issue of family planning, and funds have been raided to support diseases with a higher profile, such as AIDS and malaria, a UK expert has said.

Judith Stephenson, who holds the Margaret Pyke chair of sexual and reproductive health at University College London, was speaking at the annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust. The trust argues that reducing population is a key factor in controlling climate change.

Professor Stephenson said that governments were too much under the “long shadows” cast by bad examples of coercive family planning programmes in the 1970s and 1980s and had neglected the importance of family planning.

“Family planning has been a huge success,” she said. “The …