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Gender equality builds resilience to climate change, says new World Population report |
Discrimination against women and the lack of attention to the ways gender inequality hampers development, health, equity and overall human well-being all undermine countries' resilience to climate change. This is concluded in The State of World Population 2009, released November 18 by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
– Poor women in poor countries are among the hardest hit by climate change, even though they contributed the least to it, says UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid in a press release.
The majority of the 1.5 billion people in the world living on $1 a day or less are women and depend on agriculture for a living. Consequently, they are more likely to go hungry or lose their livelihoods when droughts strike, rains become unpredictable or hurricanes move with unprecedented force. In addition, these poor women tend to live in marginal areas, vulnerable to floods, rising seas and storms. Hence, women are more likely than men to die in climate change related natural disasters, with this gap most pronounced where incomes are low and status differences between men and women are high.
Empowering women and girls
Considering all this, The State of World Population 2009 affirms that the international community’s fight against climate change and poverty is more likely to be successful if policies, programmes and treaties focus more on empowering women and girls, particularly in the fields of education and health. Women with more education and access to reproductive health services, including family planning, tend to have smaller and healthier families and contribute to slower growth in greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run, the report’s authors argue.
Ultimately, concludes the report, the elements likely to make societies resilient to climate change “are probably the same ones that lead to equitable development, full exercise of human rights, social and enviromental justice, and an environmentally sustainable world”.
/Fredrik Moberg
More at:
http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2009/en/ |
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