How can women respond to climate change?
We’re all responsible to some extent for climate change because each of us is responsible for the greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere and warming the earth’s surface. But some people—and countries—are responsible for more greenhouse gases than others. The developed countries have so far contributed about three-fourths of all carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Developing countries have contributed only one fourth.
Impoverised women in poor countries are already bearing the disproportionate brunt of climate change. They farm land in areas stricken by drought. Their homes are often built in marginal areas that are vulnerable to floods and rising seas. They often lack the means and resources to relocate their families when natural disasters strike.
While women, particularly in developing countries, are facing greater challenges coping with climate change, their situations—and their potential as agents of change—have been largely overlooked by policy makers and global climate negotiators.
Improving women’s access to reproductive health, including voluntary family planning, and educating girls can help empower half the world’s population to better adapt to the effects of climate change that are already being felt and to become more resilient to the climate change that is still to come. Empowerment includes enabling women to decide how many children to have and when to have them. Actions that empower women generally result in lower fertility rates, which may help reduce humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run.
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Get the facts
- The ‘carbon footprint’ of the poorest 1 billion people is about 3 per cent of the world’s total footprint.
- Between 1850 and 2002, developed countries accounted for 76 per cent of cumulative carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion, while developing countries accounted for 24 per cent.
- The 10 warmest years since 1880 all occurred since 1997.
- Ice loss from the West Antarctic ice sheet increased 60 per cent between 1996 and 2006. Ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 140 per cent.
- Recorded natural disasters have doubled from approximately 200 a year to more than 400 a year over the past two decades, with seven out of 10 disasters now recorded as ‘climate related’.
- Natural disasters kill more women than men or kill them at an earlier age than men.
- An estimated 200 million people may leave their homes in response to environmental degradation or climate change by the year 2050. Most of the population movement is likely to take place within national boundaries, mainly from rural areas to cities.
- An estimated 200 million women in developing countries who would like to prevent or postpone pregnancies but who do not have access to family planning.
- International funding for family planning fell from a high of $723 million in 1995 to about $338 million in 2007.
What must be done?
- Empowering women to decide how many children they want to have and when they want to have them will reduce fertility and slow population growth. Slower population growth may result in lower greenhouse-gas emissions and will ease the challenge of climate change adaptation.
- Increasing access to voluntary family planning will contribute over time to both the reduction of climate change and improved resilience to climate change.
- Existing research on the impact of gender and population dynamics on climate change is based on estimates and educated guesses. To fully and clearly understand the links, reliable and appropriate data are needed. Censuses in 2010 should gather data that will shed light on these issues and help shape climate-change policies.
- As climate change progresses, migration will accelerate. Formulating policies and programmes to help environmentally induced migrants adapt to climate change will depend on reliable and sex-disaggregated data detailing the demographics of people in vulnerable areas and to determine who is likely to move where, when, and under which circumstances.
