Women and Girls and Climate Change

In rural Kenya, the Paradigm project¹ has been providing families with fuel-efficient cook stoves.  The cook stoves burn wood so efficiently that they cut the use of wood by 40 to 50%, while burning hotter and producing less smoke.   Fewer green-house gases are emitted, deforestation is reduced, family expenditures are saved, and women and children spend less time collecting wood and have reduced exposure to dangerous air pollutants in smoke from indoor cooking.  By one estimate² nearly 3 billion people in the developing world cook by burning wood, charcoal, or dung, and could benefit from efficient stoves that also aid the environment.

Rape
“I was in Santa Maria Xalapan of Guatemala when a group of women said young girls were being kidnapped and raped because there was a water crisis,” said Carla Lopez, the executive director of a women’s fund based in Central America.³ As a result of a drought, worsened by climate change, women and girls had to walk farther to fetch water and the number of kidnapping and rapes more than doubled.  This is consistent with a global pattern of sexual violence increasing in wartime and in disasters. The climate crisis will create more and more situations characterized by lawlessness–situations in which women and girls typically suffer more violence and sexual exploitation.  One study has predicted an increase in rapes in the United States as a result of climate change over the remainder of this century.

Solving Climate Change
While it is true that women and girls are disproportionally at risk and impacted by the effects of climate change through greater odds of displacement, injury, and death, especially under conditions of poverty, it is also true that women and girls are key to solving the climate crisis.

Women and girls have played, and are playing, key roles in bringing about the societal change that we need to solve this crisis, from Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for founding the Green Belt Movement that has planted over 51 million trees across Africa; to Naomi Klein, who wrote This Changes Everything; to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who co-introduced the Green New Deal; to Greta Thunberg, who started the recent school strike for climate taken up by 1.6 million people this spring.  The wisdom of women and girls, including indigenous women, is vital to stopping climate change.

Women Grow Food
Women farmers raise 60 to 80% of the food crops in low-income countries.⁴  Even though they farm as capably and efficiently as men, women produce less on the same amount of land.  The reason is that they are systematically handicapped by less access to land ownership, credit (often needed for seed, tools, etc.), technical support, and sales outlets than men have in similar situations.  According to Drawdown, (4) if this equity gap were closed, it would increase women’s farm yields by 20 to 30%.  This would, of course, reduce hunger, increase female wealth, and improve health, but it would also significantly reduce the pressure to clear more land to grow more food.  The amount of deforestation avoided would be great enough to be significant in reducing global climate change.

Family Planning and Educating Girls
Around the world millions of women want the right to decide whether and when to have children, yet lack the necessary access to contraception.  This is true in many low-income countries and in some developed nations as well, including the United States where 45% of pregnancies are unintended.⁵  Guaranteeing the right to high quality family planning services for all women and girls must be fundamental to any notion of a just society or equity for females.  It affects women’s health, control, and income, as well as the economic and social development of their communities.

Globally, 130 million girls are currently denied the right to attend school.⁶ Education must be seen as a basic right for all girls.  In addition to the tremendous difference having an education makes in the life of each girl, educated women are needed to address all the problems of a world still struggling with widespread poverty, disease, lack of economic development, as well as climate change.

Climate Impacts
Climate change is significantly driven by greenhouse gas emissions.  When the population grows, emissions grow, and climate change gets worse.  Doing what’s right for women and girls with regard to access to family planning and education not only has all the obvious direct benefits, these two factors can also have a dramatic impact on global climate change.  When women and girls have access to family planning services and education, they have fewer and healthier children. 

The effect is so large that experts believe that population growth worldwide would be reduced by almost 1 billion people by 2050, if all women and girls had full access to family planning and education.⁶ By 2050 that would have a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions and therefore on climate change. Securing these rights for women and girls is not only the right thing to do, it is also an essential part of addressing climate change. (It would, however, have little, if any, impact on our more immediate and urgent need to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030.⁷ This will require all-out implementation of strategies with more immediate effects.)⁸

Dismantle Male Domination
Of course securing women’s rights is not just a matter of changing policies and practices and finding sufficient funding, it also means taking apart the system of male domination that prevails throughout our societies.  Despite the gains that women have made, men still have disproportionate economic, political, and social power in every nation.  Collectively men tend to use that power to keep men in control and leave women more likely to experience limits, exclusion, poverty, sexual violence and/or being silenced.  Women and men of good conscience must together work to secure equal rights for women as part of building a just society and stopping climate change.
_________________

1  https://www.theparadigmproject.org/join-us/  This project claims to have avoided 1.2 million tons of CO2 emissions and saved 7.9 million trees and 74 million hours of labor in Kenya alone since 2008.
2  https://www.cleancookingalliance.org/country-profiles/focus-countries/4-kenya.html
3 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-women-finance-idUSKCN0YB1V5
4 Edited by Paul Hawken, Penguin Books, 2017https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/women-and-girls/women-smallholders
5  https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/women-and-girls/family-planning
6 Revised number of girls currently denied the right to attend school based on a new source: https://www.ted.com/talks/katharine_wilkinson_how_empowering_women_and_girls_can_help_stop_global_warming/transcript?language=en
7 UN IPCC report, 2018 https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/10/SR15_SPM_version_stand_alone_LR.pdf
8 Note: This paragraph has been edited for clarity since the original posting.