Gender Justice Is Crucial for Climate Justice, part 1
Gender equity and gender equality are increasingly crucial to humanity’s survival. They are one of the only fast tracks and most critical steps needed to address climate collapse. Women’s funds paid attention to the impact of climate change on women’s gendered roles long before climate change became a major concern on the global stage. They funded women to create solutions to drought, flooding, and innovations in climate adaptation. More recently, in 2013, environmental activist and author Paul Hawken recruited a large team to assess and model practical solutions to climate change based on available data and research from numerous sources.
The results are summarized in Drawdown, a book edited by Hawken that identifies 100 substantive ways for people, governments, and companies to reduce the pace of global warming over the next 30 years. “Drawdown” refers to the desired point at which the current buildup of atmospheric carbon is halted.
Hawken’s team ranked solutions by their estimated capacity to stanch the carbon buildup through 2050. And here’s the big news: increasing girls’ education and access to family planning ranked sixth and seventh on the list (number one is most impactful). The authors noted that these two solutions are so closely linked in a practical sense that they should be considered together, yielding a combined impact that would top the Drawdown climate solution rankings by a wide margin.
Also making a strong case that gender equity is necessary to address climate change successfully are the six authors of the 2022 book Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. In the book, these illustrious authors—all leading climatologists and economists—contend that climate collapse is still avoidable and that it is possible to stabilize temperatures below 2°C, but reaching gender equity by 2050 is vital. Their model shows that to achieve what they termed “The Giant Leap,” we must achieve full gender equity in the next 30 years. The authors posit that without full gender equity, rising gender, racial, and economic inequity in the next three decades will “lead to increasingly dysfunctional societies, making cooperation to deal with existential threats like climate change more difficult.”
The climate field is an example of where the women’s movement has contributed an intersectional analysis that elevates new learning for the wider public and for decision-makers.
Tomorrow we learn more about: Gender Justice Is Crucial for Climate Justice in Part 2 of our blog series. We will discuss ways to apply a gender lens to climate change analysis, which allows us to appreciate that women and children are 14 times more likely to die in a disaster than men. Including this fact: The girls and women who don’t die are at far greater risk than men of suffering ill-health effects, facing unemployment, losing assets, slipping into poverty, and experiencing forced marriage or sexual violence following a disaster. Eighty percent of people displaced by climate change are women and children.