Women and climate change

Lynda K. Wardhani in the Jakarta Post: …Climate change is more than just an issue of energy efficiency or industrial carbon emissions; it is also about people, where and how they live, what they consume, and the rights and opportunities available to them.

It is therefore fundamental to reflect on how climate change will affect women, men, boys and girls differently around the world, within nations, and how individual behavior can undermine or contribute to the global effort to cool our warming world. Climate change will not only endanger lives and undermine livelihoods, it will also exacerbate the gap between rich and poor and amplify the inequities between women and men.

Prior to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) published a book about the state of the world’s population in 2009 entitled, Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate. This publication explores the critical connections among population dynamics, reproductive health, women’s lives and climate change as they relate to greenhouse gas emissions and societies’ resilience against the impacts of climate change.

According to the report, international climate change agreements and national policies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they take into account population dynamics, family planning, gender relations, reproductive health care, women’s well-being and access to services and opportunities as these elements could influence the future course of climate change and affect how humanity adapts to rising seas, worsening storms and severe droughts.

…Women are currently suffering disproportionately as a consequence of climate change. Environmentalists estimate that 70 percent of the poor, who are more vulnerable to environmental damage, are women. Women die in greater numbers in disasters than men, and they tend to die at younger ages, but there are few reliable studies to document this phenomena, largely because there has so far been little focus by the international community on the gender impact of natural disasters….

Girls carrying water in India, shot by Tom Maisey, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License