Help A Woman, Help The Planet

The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world.”

In honour of International Women’s Day, and all of the amazing women I have the privilege and honour of knowing, here’s a repost from It’s Getting Hot in Here, written by Caroline Howe and entitled “Half the Sky: Women and Climate Change”:

When drought parches wells and streams,
someone must carry water. When storms bring devastation
and disease, someone has to nurse the sick.
Climate change hits hardest on the planet’s vulnerable edges.
If women hold up half the sky, what do we do
when it seems the sky is falling?

– Barbara Kingsolver, Ripple Effect Images

On International Women’s Day, it’s hard not to think about the most vulnerable, the women all around the world whose lives are being most impacted by climate change. As Kingsolver described, it’s women and girls who are travelling farther to bring water to their homes, walking for hours a day, eliminating many girls’ already-slim chance to attend school. It’s women who cook for hours in their kitchens, breathing in the smoke from cookstoves that pollute their lungs and their air. And, it’s women who are often last to eat, even when the first responsible for putting food on their families’ plates, even in the face of increasing food scarcity.

Hillary Clinton recently echoed Madeleine Albright in saying that issues of gender equality are issues of national and global security, and the impacts of climate change are woven tightly between the two. We cannot solve the challenges of climate change without empowering and educating women, and we cannot solve our other global challenges without addressing climate change. As Time recently wrote, “If you want to change the world, invest in girls.”

Empowering female entrepreneurs and political leaders has never been more needed nor more possible. There’s Solar Sister in Africa and Barefoot College in India, training women as solar engineers and entrepreneurs; Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement, planting trees and hope across Africa; dozens of groups of women constructing rainwater harvesting and catch dams. See the impact of giving female leaders better information about development decisions, training women on basic green technologies, and getting cleaner cookstoves into women’s homes.

These programs not only make women stronger, but help their families and communities. The World Food Programme reports that women who earn, invest 90 percent back into their families, and back into their communities. Investing in women means investing in communities, in truly sustainable development. Today, the problems and their solutions are closer than ever: “Help a Woman. Help the Planet.”

The following video features a Cameroonian woman talking about how climate change is affecting women in her country:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XJ3WOUsKnc]

Take Action:

From Oxfam Canada: Demand climate justice for women:

Canada will soon be joining with other world leaders to establish a climate fund to help poor countries adapt to the droughts and floods caused by climate change.

We want to make sure this fund recognizes that women are often the first and worst affected by these disasters. Go to Oxfam.ca for more info and to email Minister of the Environment Peter Kent to ensure that women play a key role in envisioning and implementing climate change solutions.

More links:

It’s Getting Hot in Here: Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement

Women and girls in developing countries bear the biggest burden as climate change impacts the world. It is in the daily lives of these women that the battle to save their family, the planet, and the future is played out. These women and girls are forces of nature, and Ripple Effect Images is telling their stories. RippleEffectImages.com

Stand With The “Sisters on the Planet” on International Women’s Day

Oxfam’s Sisters on the Planet initiative recognizes that climate change hits poor people hardest—especially poor women, who are disproportionately affected. As their website states:

People like to talk about global warming like it’s a problem to deal with in the future. But the reality is that poor people are already struggling with it right now. You don’t have to go to drought-riddled Ethiopia or flood-threatened Cambodia or malaria-prone South Africa to witness it. Just take a trip to the hurricane-battered US Gulf Coast or look at the damage done by the wildfires in California. Climate change kills off crops, destroys homes, and creates massive refugee problems. There’s no time to waste. We must help poor communities deal with the effects right now…

If we act quickly, we can reduce the damaging impact that climate change has on poor people’s lives and livelihoods. But if we fail to help in time, they will suffer far greater damage, and at a much higher human and financial cost.

Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) recently presented an extensive report on women and climate change to the British House of Commons.  The report documents how catastrophe related to climate change will have a much greater impact on women. Entitled ‘Engendering Change’, the report points out that because of ongoing gender inequality, different social roles, and simple biology, women are more likely to die in extreme weather conditions, to  suffer from increased workload,  and be subject to abuse, including sexual violence, in resource conflicts exacerbated by climate change.  As their Women & Climate Change blog states:

The report’s conclusions include a sobering fact, that women constitute up to 80% of climate refugees, that 20 million women have already lost their homes and livelihoods due to climate change related weather chaos. The IPCC says that extreme weather conditions are set to increase and become more frequent. The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction shows clearly that since 1970 the numbers of extreme weather events has increased from around 25 per year for floods to 200 per year with incidences of droughts, wind storms and related disasters also increasing. As we discovered in Copenhagen, climate change is already causing chaos around the world and disproportionately claiming women’s lives, safety and health.

If you are a woman, or you have a wife or a daughter or a mother that you care about, use this International Women’s Day to take action to ensure a better, safer future for them.  Some of things each of us can do are:

Tell our political leaders that climate change is an urgent issue and needs to be addressed.  Click here for more on how to do this.

If you are in the US, click here to go to the “action” page of Sisters on the Planet, and sign up to become a sister (or brother).

To read about how climate change is affecting women in Africa, go to allAfrica.com. To find out more facts and figures on gender and climate change, go to this UNIFEM page.

Click here to visit the Women’s Environmental Network blog.