Heat Waves, Water and Health

Health warnings are being issued in extreme conditions as the temperatures in the UK reach 31C (87.8F) and this will affect women more than men. The current hot temperatures have triggered health alerts from the Met Office. It warned this weekend that night-time temperatures were of major concern. Wayne Elliot is the head of health forecasting for the Met and says “High humidity and the lack of a breeze could make matters worse for people with underlying health problems.”

In heat wave conditions women suffer much more than men, being less able to regulate their internal body temperature effectively especially over sixty years of age.

In the European heat wave in 2003, the excess mortality for women was 75% higher than that for men of all ages. Similarly, the excess mortality in the 1995 heat wave in Greater London was more pronounced for women, in ways that cannot entirely be accounted for by age. While the explanation is complex, factors are likely to include poverty, which affects women in all cities and countryside areas statistically more than men. Other key factors are deprivation and living alone, vulnerability to associated air pollution and the associated risks of dehydration of the body.

Water is essential for all life. Drinking water is the most obvious solution but of course for women around the world, but safe cool drinking water is not necessary available. In temperatures reaching 47C in India already in 2010 families have found that cool water is only available during the early morning 2am – 5am as pipes have heated in the entire system due to prolonged and extreme temperatures during the daytime hours.

In the heat and dry season women in many developing nations have to walk further each year to find safe water for drinking and cooking, spending up to 8 hours a day on the road, often in dangerous and tiring conditions spending 40 billion hours every year hauling up water. In Africa, women do 90% of the work of gathering water and food, and children, in particular girls, often share these responsibilities. Concern has been raised by many developmental NGOs regarding the widespread practise of sending girls to collect water instead of sending them to school.

Already one third of the world’s population faces water shortages and that figure is expected to rise to two thirds by 2025. Even with a moderate increase in global temperatures of 1oC it is estimated that the small glaciers in the Andes will disappear, threatening water supplies in South America for 50 million people. A 2oC increase would decrease water availability across the planet by 20-30%.


Met Office Heat Wave Advice
Before a heatwave
• Ensure you have plenty of cold fluids available.
During a heatwave
• Try to keep your house cool, closing blinds or curtains can help.
• At night, keep your sleeping area well ventilated. Night cooling is important as it allows the body to recuperate.
• Try to stay cool by taking cool showers or baths and/or sprinkle yourself several times a day with cold water.
• Avoid too much exercise, which can cause heat exhaustion or heat stroke, and can even be fatal. Watch for signs of heat stress — an early sign is fatigue.
• Drink plenty of fluids, but not alcohol, which dehydrates the body.
• Try to eat as you normally would. Not eating properly may exacerbate health-related problems.
• If driving, keep your vehicle well ventilated to avoid drowsiness. Take plenty of water with you and have regular rest breaks.
• If you have elderly neighbours who may be at risk during a heatwave, try to visit them daily.
• If you do go out, try and avoid the hottest part of the day (11 a.m. to 3 p.m.) and seek shade where possible. Avoid being in the sun for long stretches.
Before going out in the sun
• Check you have appropriate sun cream for your particular type of skin.
During sunny weather
• The UV index (the strength of the sun) can be high at many times of the year — it doesn't have to be hot. The UV index can be strong through cloud even when the sun isn't directly shining.
• If you go out, wear lightweight, light-coloured clothing, high factor sunscreen and a wide-brimmed hat.
• Avoid being in the sun for long stretches.
• Reapply an appropriate factor sun cream at regular intervals during the day.
Do not leave children or animals in parked cars. Even on cool days, strong sunshine can make car interiors very hot.

Women's Representation in Politics & Policy

This week saw the first all women NASA space shuttle journey when Naoko Yamazaki, Stephanie Wilson and Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger made history into herstory in Florida.

But elsewhere it has not been a good week for women. With just 19% women in parliament we now wait to see how many will be re-elected and how representative the government will be. Based on the last weeks performance from the top parties they will be woefully inadequate, in all the coverage I failed to see any key women speaking about their politics other than the Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas MEP who is standing for MP in Brighton.

It really does matter if more women are elected. Female political representation means women's interests are more likely to taken into account at a leadership level. Steps have to be taken in political decision making forums to address problems in a gender sensitive way and when they so often are not, men are not necessarily there remembering we exist. In fact there is evidence that without women, policies are introduced that are unhelpful to women, increasing our workload, exacerbating gender discrimination and widening inequalities.

There is evidence that developed countries with higher levels of female political representation have been most successful in reducing their carbon dioxide levels overall. In fact of the 16 countries ranked by the UNDP as having high human development which had reduced CO2 emissions between 1990 and 2004, 13 had a higher proportion of female politicians.

Strong evidence also exists over a number of years, that women tend to be more concerned about environmental issues than men. It has also been shown that when they are allowed in the negotiations, they influence the outcome with female policy-makers tending to favour education and behaviour change methods over technological solutions.

The world economic system is patriarchal and women statistically hold few positions f power globally. Men dominate decision making in the most polluting industries too, which have failed to prioritise climate change. In fact, the Women's Environmental Network report Gender and the Climate Change Agenda, shows that of those companies responsible for 67% of the FTSE 100 emissions had 100% male chief executives, and of the 42 combined committee members, only 6 were female.

In fact women represent only 17% of FTSE boardroom appointments, and constitute only 19% of scientists and engineers. The Norwegian government took a risk in 2003 when they made a law stating boardrooms had to have 40% females. Business was furious and resisted but from just 6% representation the target was met ahead of schedule. Research highlighted the fact that the policy had improved the quality of the debate and the financial performance.

But equal representation between men and women in politics is right and just because it is our right as human beings, not because of environmental gains that may be possible. There are so many reasons why we need to have an equal and just world, being inclusive seems to me to be one of the very fundamentals.


Women's Environmental Network report available to download free: www.wen.org/resources

Poverty and Empowerment

A new report from the United States compares the UK record on poverty with other countries and the results are actually remarkable.

The Columbia University Professor Jane Waldfogel presented her findings this week in New York. In fact she shows that the UK has managed to reduce absolute poverty in children by a half since 1999, that's some 1.7 million children whose lives have been changed. America did not do so well and still has 20% of their children in absolute poverty. Other European countries found that their poverty levels have only stagnated at the same levels and they have been unable to unlock the secrets to success.

Women are particularly affected by poverty and their empowerment helps them bring their children with them into a better future. 90% of all single parents are female headed households with dependant children in the UK. These families will disproportionately suffer from fuel poverty, economic support and opportunities to increase their life chances such as access to higher education.

What has worked so far in the UK is a complex series of measures that have involved local and national government programmes to empower children and to support low paid workers, which have especially helped women. Economic credits have included the Sure Start children's programme and working family and children's credits. Other measures have been specific programmes that identify specific children in need of support at an early age and at a street by street level.

Women who lead families are more likely to spend their meagre incomes on essential items for the whole family such as food, fuel and clothing. Their national and global impact on the environment is negligible in every single sense.

Women's Environmental Network have pioneered a programme to influence and empower women and their dependent children in poverty in the UK. For more than ten years WEN has been supporting women and women's groups to grow their own food. This is healthy, sustainable, organic and superior quality fresh food. In one holistic project, local sustainability in action affects the health and quality of life of every single member of the family.

Rosie Boycott, London Mayor Boris Johnson's "Food Tsar" visited one of our Cultivating the Future projects in December 2009, and she, like the local police, were very impressed.

"A few weeks before I took up my job as the Mayor's food adviser, I went to see some food-growing projects in the capital, the first being in the centre of four ugly grey tower blocks in Tower Hamlets.

Unlike many such places I've since visited, this space wasn't full of rubbish, old beer cans, used condoms or yesterday's crumpled newspapers.

Keys were needed to enter the garden, which was surrounded by a cheery, bright-blue fence and divided into three sections: one for a kids' play area with swings and slides, one with picnic tables and a barbecue and the third, a series of raised beds where women of many nationalities were growing herbs and vegetables, talking and laughing as they did so.

The project was the brainchild of the Women's Environmental Network, which aims to make life better for women in very practical ways.

Its great work on the garden has spun off other benefits. Now all the residents felt safe to walk through the central space because it is tidy and litter-free."

WEN had found that there was very little practical help for women from ethnically diverse backgrounds living together in areas of deprivation like those in Tower Hamlets and cultivating the future was the response. Women involved have realised other health, social and educational benefits. The project has encouraged women to reconnect with nature and grow traditional vegetables from their homelands. The wider community is affected, with many other local people becoming interested in sustainability and community empowerment.

From its success the Taste of a Better Future national network of community food growing projects has evolved, with groups meeting in the popular Culture Kitchen evens when women come together and share their ideas and stories while sharing the fruits of their labour in cooking and feasting. One such event was held this March by WEN in London's East End.

WEN was also recently praised for its empowerment programme Getting to the Roots, which trains volunteers to support new and existing groups offering specific skills, education and training and personal confidence and empowerment.

But to wholly integrate sustainable practices these projects need to be mainstream, in almost every housing estate, using all available land and gardens, plots and spare earth or fields. People and especially those in dire need of help and support, can be taught how to grow their own food.

The cost to a government if one of their departments paid for this sort of WEN project is about £200 per person, per year. That's not a lot if you compare most training programmes, offering slim deliverables and no job at the end of the training. For women in London, these projects offer a lifeline, to a better healthier future for their whole families.

For those in poverty, the ability to eat fresh organic produce created by your own hand is a priceless gift for the environment and each family.


They can stop buying costly vegetables from supermarkets, uniformly produced, expensively packaged, environmentally tarnished, from pesticide use to transportation and even air freighted, sometimes refrigerated for good measure, which can even be peeled for "convenience".

Millions of people could be eating more healthily, and growing foods that they like and will enjoy more. From an exercise and health perspective, growing your own food is fabulous. Forget the gym or running, putting energy into gardening will pay off handsomely in terms of personal health and fitness.

Urban food growing could be really big.
Urban food growing should be really big.
This could be the big idea for the whole country to get behind to create a greener, more local, more prosperous and safer future. What better to help people in poverty than to give them seeds and tools and education so those that want can help themselves?

Gender & the Climate Change Agenda

Last night in the House of Commons Grand Committee Room, in an event chaired by WEN matron and Liberal party shadow health spokesperson, Sandra Gidley MP, WEN set out the case for ecological feminism. Our report, Gender and the Climate Change Agenda was launched giving a comphrensive overview of how the current economic and political model creates climate change and exacerbates and exploits poverty and lack of democracy in women.

The reports conclusions include a sobering fact, that women constitute up to 80% of climate refugees, thats 20 million women who have already lost their homes and livelihoods due to climate change related weather chaos. The IPCC say 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 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.

Nicky Gavron, former Deputy Mayor of London, said at the launch "this is a firecracker of a report, comphrensive and will become a very, very important document." She spoke passionately about her meetings with Mayors from around the world and the Practical Cities project she was involved in targeting now 40 cities to lower their CO2 emissions. Her overriding message was that Collaboration not Competition is a recipie for success.

Peter Ainsworth is MP for East Surrey and Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Environment and Sustainable Aviation. He spoke highly of the report and its contents and urging us to remember that the recent scientific debate around the evidence of climate changes were irrelevant.

Natalie Bennett from the Green Party, Tamsin Omond from Climate Rush, Eugenie Harvey from the 10:10 movement, Betty Moxon from WI and Maria Adebowale from Capacity Global were also speakers at the inspirational launch event.

You can download the report free at www.wen.org.uk

A Spiritual Perspective on Climate Change

Climate change is being discussed in Copenhagen in terms of numbers, money and technology which often ignore people and the truth that the earth is a living system. By looking at symptoms and failures of these systems we reduce and dissect ourselves and our world into boxes that don’t fit together.

Many people see the failures to understand the interconnectedness and the relationships between the parts and processes of the living systems as part of the problem. The fragmentation of systems, governments and institutions keeps citizens minds fragmented and disorientated and therefore disempowered.

Never before has the planet faced such an unprecedented emergency, and the need to join up our thinking is now more urgent than ever before. The issue of climate change brings together and exacerbates all the crisis of humanity; poverty, hunger and disease, desertification, loss of forests, lack of safe drinking water, drought and weather related disasters.

Many indigenous peoples share a spiritual vision, that the earth is a sacred, unified and interrelated living organism, rather than a toy or business to be exploited for financial gain or political power.

The poorest and most vulnerable people on the earth are suffering the most and disproportionately from climate change. Already 26 million have lost their homes, some 20 million of them are women. The future predictions are catastrophic for the worlds poor and COP15 is reluctant to discuss solutions that are people based rather than technological or financially based.

This lack of humanitarian and holistic vision is the core problem of our system. Caucus groups for indigenous people, women, youth and poor were under-represented, considered a sideline rather than a central issue. This further alienates and ignores those very agents of change that can create solutions and human scale visions.

Brahma Kumaris is one of the worlds leading spiritual organisations with a women led and women’s focus to their mission. They were founded in 1937 by 97 women in India and now have branches in over 100 countries. Their humanitarian work has been recognised by the UN where they have consultative status with ECOSOC and UNICEF. Their solar feeding programme in India supports tens of thousands of people in poverty and projects include teaching positive thinking to prisoners across the world.

The intellectual leader of Brahma Kumaris, and one of only a few female spiritual leaders with such a global platform, Dadi Janki, was in Copenhagen and asked for a new consciousness, a profound shift in awareness and thinking to include an inner dimension, to transform the quality of conversation and the possible agenda for action among stakeholders. She asked us to expand our vision to see the whole delicate system instead of being blinded by our own desires.