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New UNFPA Report Says Women Hold the Key to Solving Climate Change
Washington, November 18, 2009 – Climate change is more than an issue of energy efficiency or industrial carbon emissions, according to a new United Nations report issued today. State of World Population 2009, from UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, shows that it is also an issue of population dynamics, poverty and gender equity.
Released in more than 100 world capitals in anticipation of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, the report shifts the climate change debate from abstractions and technical science to the realities of the ways that individuals and the world’s population influence and are affected by climate change.
Subtitled “Facing a changing world: women, population and climate,” the report shows that climate change relates differently to women, men, boys and girls, and differently among countries around the world, and even within nations.
In London, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid noted that environmental damage “is one of the most inequitable risks of our time.” The carbon footprint of the poorest billion people on Earth is 3 percent of the world’s total, yet it is the poor, especially poor women, who will bear the disproportionate brunt of climate change, she said.
“For many people, especially poor women in poor countries, climate change is here and now,” she said. “Women work hard to keep their households together. They fetch the water, find the food and the fuel to cook it, and clean up afterwards. They watch their children’s health and care for their illnesses. In recent years, both food and fuel have been harder to find. The available water carries parasites. Malaria is creeping into areas that used to be mosquito-free. And floods, rising seas and drought present growing challenges.”
The report recommends that countries invest in green technology and reduce emissions, but says they should also empower women to make their own decisions and be involved in public decisions that affect their lives. Nations should invest in women by ensuring alternatives to wood and imported fuel; secure clean water supplies; better roads; access to education for girls; and access to health care, including reproductive health services, especially for women, the report said.
“Helping women to make their own decisions about family size would protect their health, make their lives easier, help put their countries on a sustainable path towards development – and ensure lower greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run,” Obaid said.
The report includes a supplement, At the Frontier: Young People and Climate Change, featuring profiles of young people who are already facing the challenges of a warming world.
Report author Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute will keynote the Washington launch, along with U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY); UN Foundation President Timothy E. Wirth; Karen Hardee, vice president of research at Population Action International; and Jose Miguel Guzman, chief of the population and development branch in UNFPA’s technical division.
Additionally, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid and the participants at the Washington briefing participated in an audio conference call.
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