Across the regions and cultures of the world, women play critical roles in relation to their natural environment. Women are often heavily reliant on existing natural resources for food, fuel, and shelter, making them more sensitive to environmental changes or dangers. Because women’s workloads are frequently focused on managing natural resources, biodiversity, and ecosystems, their experiences and viewpoints are critical to sustainable development decisions and activities at all levels, ensuring a healthy world for future generations.
In the developing world, women are primarily responsible for resource management and conservation for their families. Women spend a lot of time gathering and storing water, obtaining fuel, food, and fodder, and maintaining land, whether it be forest, marshes, or agricultural land. Whole communities rely on women as major caretakers for children, the elderly, and the sick. Their traditional and generational knowledge of biodiversity, for example, provides medicines, nutritional balance, and crop rotation systems to communities. When drought, unpredictable rainfall, or severe storms disrupt access to these essential supplies, women’s lives – and the lives of their families – can suffer greatly. In fact, studies have demonstrated that natural disasters disproportionately hit women, lowering female life expectancy rates and killing more women than men, especially where levels of gender equality are low.
Women make up slightly more than half of the world’s population, but they are responsible for feeding the majority of it, particularly in developing-country rural areas. Women produce 60 to 80 per cent of food in underdeveloped nations, yet according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, they control only two per cent of the world’s land. Historic inheritance laws and conventions sometimes prevent or limit women’s direct control over property; even where women are permitted to own and lease land, they may be unable to get loans or insurance to protect their assets. The lack of fair land rights continues to be a significant barrier to women’s empowerment and poverty alleviation.
Whole communities rely on women as major caretakers for children, the elderly, and the sick.
International treaties have established critical linkages between women and the environment; the task now is to act. The Worldwide Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979), an international “bill of rights” for women, tackles a wide range of environmental concerns. Similarly, the Beijing Platform for Action, which emerged from the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, has a full chapter on women and the environment. It foretold the many effects of global warming on men and women, which are now being felt throughout the world.
Major sustainable development accords have also recognised the critical importance of women’s engagement and a gendered viewpoint. In 1992, United Nations Earth Summit (UNCED) generated two significant conventions – on biological diversity and combatting desertification – that have served as models for implementing gender-sensitive environmental activities. Agenda 21, the overarching UNCED plan, includes a chapter on gender that underlined the essential role women play in industrialised nations as sustainable consumers. Indeed, the ties between women and the environment are not limited to the global South (i.e., developing countries), women in the North (i.e., developed countries) have a smaller carbon footprint than men, making the majority of “green” decisions at the household level.
Women and women’s led movements have achieved enormous advances in maintaining and safeguarding the resources around them, demonstrating great capacity as leaders, experts, educators, and inventors. In the 1970s, women led the grass-roots Chipko Movement in India, when campaigners halted tree destruction by physically embracing – literally hugging – the trees. They also kept corporate ownership over water supplies at bay.
Similarly, the Green Belt Campaign, a conservation and forestry movement that began in Kenya on Earth Day in 1977, is another well-known initiative started by women. A globally recognised project of “Hope Spots,” which aimed to preserve the marine protected areas was led by Dr Sylvia Earle. She alone initiated mission blue with 200 organisations. Dr Wangari Maathai-First African Woman PhD-trained 30,000 women and planted more than 51 million trees. With a commitment to ecofeminism and equitable participation, Maathai has had a monumental impact on the global environmental movement, and who can forget Shahla Zia of Pakistan who fought for the fundamental right to live in clean environments? The court verdict is a historic document that incepted environmental law in Pakistan.
Women, throughout the world, are fighting climate change by adopting more sustainable consumption decisions and enhancing access to, control of, and conservation of resources.
Protecting the Earth is simply a matter of recognising our place within it.
For the sake of future generations, their voices must be fully included in the policy and implementation activities at all stages. We all understand it superficially, but implicit bias stops this change.
In the end, I scream: “Hear me.”
The writer is Research Associate (Sustainable Development Policy Institute) and can be contacted at nudratfatima@sdpi.org