In its 2009 state of the world population report, the agency said the world's poor are the most vulnerable to climate change and the majority of the 1.5 billion people living on $1.0 a day or less are women.
- Women need better, easier access to help with reproductive health/contraception/family Planning.
- Poor women have limited options for providing for family, they mainly rely upon agriculture which is already feeling the effects of climate change.
- Women generally have the burden of caring and providing for children, other family members and the sick, which means they need to supply more than just themselves.
Because women are often the poorest in society and have less power over their lives, less recognition of economic worth and bear the brunt of raising children, they suffer more...
Clearly, one of the easiest, cheapest things we can do to help lighten the burden on those who contributed least to the phenomena of climate change is help empower them to make choices about family size as this article from the BBC attests:
Slower population growth would help cut greenhouse gas emissions, [the UNFPA] added.
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"The report suggested family planning, reproductive healthcare and "gender relations" could influence how the world adapts to rising seas, worsening storms and severe droughts.
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"Girls with more education, for example, tend to have smaller and healthier families as adults," it said. "Women with access to reproductive health services, including family planning, have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run."
(We don't cost that much and we change lives)
Scientific American article
"With the possibility of a climate catastrophe on the horizon, we cannot afford to relegate the world's 3.4 billion women and girls to the role of victim," Obaid said in a commentary on the report. "Wouldn't it make more sense to have 3.4 billion agents for change?"
But there is more than that we need to do. It will take time but we need to ensure many of these girls and women find other means of supporting themselves that are less climate-dependent. That means education and better jobs.
"They do most of the agricultural work, and are therefore affected by weather-related natural disasters impacting on food, energy and water, [the UNFPA report] said.
CNN (slides show at site) details the story of Quispe, a 60 year old mother, grandmother and potato farmer from Bolivia:
Each day Quispe spends hours hauling two five-litre containers of water by hand from a nearby river. "We used to be able to get water for irrigation from the streams that came down from the glacier. But the streams are no longer there, so now we supplement the water from a river further up in the valley," she explains.
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Jaime Nadal, the United Nations Population Fund's (UNFPA) representative in Bolivia, said that Quispe's situation was far from unusual. "Young people tend to leave these areas. Old women are typically left in the community having to perform harder and harder tasks to keep up the household. We already see mostly old women in many of these communities."
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"For many people, especially poor women in poor countries, climate change is here and now," said UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid.
There are storms, floods, droughts, slowing ice melts that contribute to a failure of agricultural crops and a lack of good, clean drinking water.
And it’s not a regional problem it’s a world-wide problem. Nguyen Thi Lanh, 51, has battled poverty her whole life. She and her husband managed to raise 4 children in dire poverty in Vietnam, then the flooding began.
...they persevered, managing to raise four children. But hardship remains, with erratic weather adding more stress to their lives year after year.
Viet Nam, with some 3,500 kilometres of coastline and large populations concentrated in low-lying delta regions, is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Storms have become more intense and frequent, and the storm season now lasts longer. Ketsana, the typhoon that hit the country in late September, affected 3 million people, causing 163 deaths, 10 of which were in Quang Tri, and nearly $800 million in economic losses. Typhoon Mirinae, which struck Viet Nam in November, claimed about 100 lives.
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When my husband is not at home, I have to work in the field. And in order to pay the school fees, I work extra time in construction, even though I am not in good health," Lanh says adding that she does her best to remain prepared for floods. Her home, like many in the area, has raised lofts so she can move belongings to higher places and keep the children safe when the waters rise, she explains.
Programs aimed towards economic bolstering of hard hit areas, also programs aimed towards getting women education and out of the fields, might improve their stability and the impact of climate change on their lives.
Per the Stern Report (see sources cited), "Development on the MDG dimensions (in particular income, the education of women, and reproductive health) is the most powerful and sustainable way to approach population growth", and by extraction to curb and minimize the effects of climate change on their lives.
But it also cautions that, "Little can now be done to change the likely adverse effects that developing countries will face in the next few decades, and so some adaptation will be essential. Strong and early mitigation is the only way to avoid some of the very severe impacts that could occur..."
More from Australian news:
Drought and erratic rainfall force women to work harder to secure food, water and energy for their homes.
Girls drop out of school to help their mothers with these tasks. The cycle of deprivation, poverty and inequality undermines the social capital needed to deal effectively with climate change.
Through it all, women like Quispe and Lanh are caring for their children, trying to provide them food, shelter and warmth. Climate change is making that increasingly hard to do, so they are forced to rely on their children to help them, mostly the girls, because the boys tend to leave for work in urban areas.
The book Gender, Development and Climate Change by Rachel Masika states that, "Lack of education, and often neglect, means that poor and marginalized people will have little alternative but to remain in, or return to, disaster-prone areas, with diminished assets."
It also suggests that we as citizens of the world address, "the transformative requirements of social change that are inherent in addressing gender inequality and giving greater visibility to women’s contributions to environmental conservation." Additionally, it also suggests that we not forget that those who are paying the highest price are the ones who contributed the least to the problem we are now forced to face.
The UNFPA also determined there was a disproportionate burden on women and called included a call for greater equality in its 2009 report.
By implementing programs geared towards improving economic, educational and health issues for poor women in developing countries, we can go a long way towards minimizing the effects of climate change not only on them, and future generations, but on ourselves as well.
We’re all in this together.
Sources:
http://www.unfpa.org/...
http://www.unfpa.org/... (State of World Population Report 2009)
http://we.care.org/...
http://books.google.com/... (pages 105, 110)
http://books.google.com/...
(pages 3, 6, 8, 10-14, 17, 18, 23, 28, 34, 36, 37, 41, 45, 47, 52, 54, 56-58, 60, 72, 78, 80, 81-82, 93)