Girls are our best bet for a sustainable future
(Courtesy of Deepti Asthana / Malala Fund)
Girls and women are often hit the hardest by the climate crisis, but too often they are left out when leaders develop solutions.
The world is in a climate crisis — but we're not experiencing its effects the same. Girls and women often feel the impacts of this emergency first and are hit the hardest.
Extreme weather events caused by rising temperatures — like droughts, floods and storms — kill more women than men and tend to kill younger women. This is in part because girls and women of reproductive age are more likely than boys and men to live in poverty, which limits their access to medicine, housing aid and other life-saving resources. Where work opportunities do exist for women, they are often low-paying, precarious positions in the informal sector that rely on natural resources, like jobs in agriculture. This means that climate-fuelled disasters have a greater impact on women’s livelihoods.
Following extreme weather events, women are more likely to be displaced than men. Their lower socioeconomic status and positions as caregivers and providers of food and fuel make relocation necessary for survival when flooding and droughts affect infrastructure, jobs and housing. The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. This statistic is particularly grave considering the effects of climate change could displace over 143 million people across Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South Asia by 2050.
In many parts of the world, social norms mean that girls and women are more severely impacted by scarcity whether displaced or not; girls often have to drop out of school and face greater health risks when natural disasters compromise water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). The International Union for the Conservation of Nature finds that environmental degradation is a driver of gender-based violence.
The gendered effects of the climate crisis are clear, but girls and women are often denied the opportunity to participate in developing the climate policies that directly affect them. At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21), a landmark event for global climate action, women comprised only 9% of the heads of delegation. More recently at the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland (COP24), just 22% of heads of delegation were women. If governments want to meaningfully curb climate change, girls and women must have a hand in shaping their solutions.
In addition to addressing unequal representation, leaders also need to recognise girls’ education as an essential component of any climate solution. Researchers cite girls’ education as the sixth most effective measure against carbon pollution, ranking it above well-known and understood solutions like solar energy (10th) and electric vehicles (26th). Education equips girls with the behaviours and knowledge they need to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. For every additional year of schooling a girl receives, her country becomes more resilient by 3.2 points on the ND-GAIN Index, which calculates a country’s vulnerability to climate change. Girls’ education also has a cascading effect, benefitting not only the girl herself but also her family and community. An educated girl typically marries later, has fewer and healthier children, has greater earning potential and reinvests up to 90% of her income back into her family.
“Researchers cite girls’ education as the sixth most effective measure against carbon pollution, ranking it above well-known and understood solutions like solar energy (10th) and electric vehicles (26th).”
Quality education can also support and foster girls’ skills and opportunities for leadership and decision-making, both of which correlate with pro-environmental and sustainable outcomes. Including green skills in school curricula can encourage environmental stewardship among girls and position them to play a leading role in creating a gender-just, green economy in both the private sector and global climate policymaking.
But despite the evidence of the benefits of girls’ education in addressing the climate crisis, just one out of 160 country-level climate strategies and 13 National Adaptation Plans make reference to girls’ education (Zambia) and just two additional countries (Venezuela and Malawi) make reference to girls. This needs to change.
As leaders enter into the latest round of negotiations at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) next year, it is essential they:
Recognise the connection between gender, education and climate justice;
Give girls’ education greater prominence in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other processes;
Ensure equal representation of girls and women at climate action events; and
Move towards enacting education reforms that will lead to green, gender-transformative learning.
In the fight against climate change, girls and women are our best bet. It’s time we built a climate movement with them at the centre — and in charge.
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