While everyone’s talking about carbon credits and technological solutions to climate change, no one’s talking about the people who are going to be affected most: women.
One of the rewards of being an editor is the opportunity to learn something new. That was especially true when I was editing UNFPA’s State of World Population 2009.
The report deals with climate change, a topic I’ve been following for years as an editor at the United Nations. But as I started editing the report, I realized there was still a lot for me to learn.
One of the things that surprised me was that climate change is progressing a lot more quickly than I thought. Scientists cited in the report show that Artic ice is disappearing at an alarming rate, and so are the world’s tropical glaciers, the source of drinking water for millions of people in rural areas and cities alike. I knew that there are now more and more severe storms, but I didn’t know that 7 of every 10 natural disasters are now considered “climate related.”
Living in Manhattan—an island—I often worry about what might happen to my home if the water in New York harbor were to rise a few feet. Since editing this report, I’ve become alarmed at how vulnerable we New Yorkers are to rising seas. I had never thought of myself as living in a “low-elevation coastal zone,” but like the report mentions, we may be at just as much risk as cities like Shanghai, Tokyo or Mumbai.
The human dimension
What also took me by surprise is how much people figure into the equation. Each of us contributes to the greenhouse-gas emissions that are driving climate change. Climate change isn’t just about industrial carbon emissions or the exhaust from all the cars on the road. All of us are responsible, but in different ways and in different amounts. Climate change is about what and how much each of us consumes. Whether we living in a city or the countryside makes a difference. Whether we’re young or old also matters. Whether we live alone or share a home with others also has an impact of how much carbon builds up in the atmosphere.
The report’s subtitle is “Facing a changing world: women, population and climate.” Why should we single out women in the report, I wondered when I started working on it. At first I thought the links between women and climate change were tenuous at best. But as I delved into the topic, the picture became much clearer.
Coping with the effects of climate change will be far more of a challenge for women than men, particularly in developing countries, where they lack the financial means or the access to services that would help them adapt to rising seas, worsening droughts or increasingly fierce storms. In many parts of the world, women run the farms, feed their families and make sure there’s enough water to drink. And in these same parts of the world, crops are failing, food is in shorter supply, and streams are drying up.
Poor women at greater risk
Poor women tend to live in marginal areas—on hillsides prone to landslides, on river banks vulnerable to floods, and in coastal areas at risk from rising sea levels.
And even though women are more at risk from climate change, they have been mostly overlooked in recent international climate negotiations. And this alarmed me. Why would anyone charged with tackling a problem as overwhelming as climate change think it’d be a good idea to ignore the half the world’s population? Doesn’t a gargantuan challenge like climate change require us to mobilize everyone?
Before working on the report, I was like many Americans who read the newspaper every day and think that if we just take gas-guzzling cars off the road, build wind farms and convince industries to burn less fossil fuel, climate change can be reined in.
But now I know that this is a much bigger challenge and that there are no simple or easy solutions. But I also now know that there are things we can and should do to stop climate change from careening out of control but that the power of women everywhere has to be realized.
Read the State of World Population 2009.
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About
Richard Kollodge is the editor of the United Nations Population Fund's UNFPA's State of World Population report. He has worked in communications and publishing in the United Nations and the World Bank for 25 years.
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Stuart Fish
Saturday 19th December, 2009, 7:41am
I wrote this poem this morning, waiting for the Copenhagen Conference to agree:
Brave New World
A boy stands on the farmhouse porch
And looks across the land
The earth is red, the dams are dry
“No rain again, just sand”
Far fewer cattle graze here now
They’ve all been shipped to town
“My boy, it’s gone on far too long
This drought has brought us down”
“The weather’s not the same no more”
He grumbles to his son
“It’s far too hot and dry to farm
I’ve given up…we’re done”
A girl stands barefoot in the sea
That laps now at the door
Her home is close to being swamped
There’s water on the floor
For fourteen years she’s lived here
Growing up and learning skills
But now the elders say, at church
The sea will reach the sills
With polar icecaps melting
As the temperature goes higher
The level of all seas creeps up
And soon will douse the fire
The boy looks over at the girl
He sighs and bows his head
Cos they both see, was long foretold
The world they knew is dead
If only they had acted
When they all still had the choice
But now it’s far too late to try
To alter Nature’s voice
This story takes place years from now
Unless… all adults act
And make decisions, take the steps
So temperatures contract
For all the children of the world
Who’ve yet to live their life
Let’s do what must be done to stop
Our planet taking strife