Climate changes and women

Climate changes are real, and the global emergency it has created is already happening around us. Floods in Cumbria from the hardest rainfall ever recorded are but a small example of the extreme and extraordinary weather conditions that threaten people’s homes and livelihoods around the world. Women’s Environmental Network have calculated that already of the 26 million people worldwide who have lost their homes, attributed directly to climate change, 20 million of them are women.

Statistically, whenever environmental disaster strikes, women and their children are hit hardest, and first. They are more likely to die in climate related disasters and more likely to suffer in increased workload, loss of income and worsening health and violence after each emergency. 70% of the worlds poor are women and that means directly and specifically they suffer, and die first.

In Europe during the 2003 heatwave more than 70% of those who died were women, in part to socio-economic hardships, women living longer and many women over 60 having less ability to regulate their internal body temperature.

Global and national strategies that fail to support women are at the root of environmental inequalities. Just as they are the root of problems of poverty, health and land injustices. These problems will never be solved with a political strategy that misses this crucial point.

But the conversation is being held by women’s, developmental and social agencies at the moment, rather than the necessary environmental strategists, financiers and politicians, and often a woman’s perspective is missing. At one crucial summit just 7% of the negotiators were women.

That’s why the eco-feminist lobby continues to say again and again that financing women out of poverty and giving them access to healthcare including their rights to control their own fertility is crucial to create equality and environmental justice.