Climate Change and Women

Climate change has far reaching effects, but it particularly impacts women, especially those living in developing nations.

It is crucial that women’s voices are included in the dialogue on climate change- in multiple ways. And it is equally important that women in low-income countries are made part of the global discourse.

Climate change is affecting the way of life of Mongolian nomadic families. A new citizen media project is teaching Mongolians how to use internet tools to tell these stories.

We cannot maintain the level of consumption of resources we have today with 6, 7 or 8 billion people. Sooner or later we will have to make the difficult choice between reducing the population or our standard of living.

Even in the most extreme circumstances when survival is at stake, Bangladeshi women stand out for their capacity to unite and together overcome climate change’s effects on their lives.

What connection does finishing the food on your plate in New York, saving the water and the energy here, have to children and women in third world countries? Many.

It is a popular saying in Latin America that women always get what they want. For 20 years, fearless women from the Kichwa community, an indigenous group in Ecuador, have been resisting against oil companies’ presence on their lands.

Firstly, we simply cannot exclude such a large group of people, if we are serious in our ambitions to turn the tide. Not tapping into the resource of young people is foolish. Secondly, young people will always be the best experts on youth.

The Alzar las Voces (Raise the Voices) project in Nicaragua brings farmers in rural communities the possibility to speak out through video.

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.

Activist Ursula Rakova has been leading the way to raise funds to help relocate the residents from the Cataret Islands in Papua New Guinea, where it is estimated that by the year 2015 all of the islands will be completely submerged attributed to climate change.

Al Gore speaks about his new book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Global Climate Crisis”, and emphasized that family planning and empowering women are among the best ways of fighting climate change. Is he right?

A group of women in India have demonstrated that despite the existing gender inequity and their low economic status, they can become a powerful resource to tackle climate change and reduce the emissions that cause it.

Invisible Women Melting is the title of a play written by a graduate student in the United States that seeks to draw the comparison between the negative effects of climate change felt by African-American and African women.

What is the relationship between the economic meltdown and environmental sustainability? How would the meltdown affect the course of environmental sustainability? How can we effectively manage our environment in the face of the present economic meltdown?

If population, family planning and reproductive health are left out of the climate change adaptation debate, there is probably little hope for many of these failing states.

We must press for more attention to women’s roles in clean energy and ‘green’ economies. Much can be done to move social and economic habits towards sustainability by engaging women as promoters of family health, safety, and prospects for a safe and satisfying world.

Desertification is silently but rapidly spreading around the world and Latin America is not escaping its devastating effects.

And not incidentally, caring about women translates into caring about the planet. The only way to slower population growth – eventually limiting our collective footprint – is to make it possible for women to have only the pregnancies they want.

Women and young people play a crucial role. They have the skills to adapt to climate change, and can be powerful actors e.g. by planting trees, maintaining forests and developing ecological food production and sustainable household energy which are also creating new sustainable jobs.

The disappearance of glaciers in the Bolivian Andes Mountains is causing a concern because the future water shortages will affect the availability of suitable drinking water for a vulnerable migrant population.