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UN Agencies Say: This Is About People

By Barbara Crossette

Nov. 18 - Two leading United Nations agencies are warning governments worldwide that unless women are factored into climate change policies and solutions, the long-term hopes of the coming environment conferences beginning in Copenhagen in December will be undermined.

Women produce about half the world’s food, and in many poor countries the majority of the farmers are women living on the frontlines of the droughts and severe weather that threaten cropland. They are also the wood-gatherers, roaming ever farther afield in dwindling forests for cooking and heating fuel. They are largely responsible for feeding families overburdened by more children than they want because they have no access or right to family planning, according to a report published today by the UN Population Fund.

“This report shows that women have the power to mobilize against climate change, but this potential can be realized only through policies that empower them,” the Population Fund’s executive director, Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, wrote in the introduction to “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate,” the 2009 edition of the annual State of World Population surveys.

The report follows one from Unicef, which found that 200 million children under age five in the developing world -- where almost all this century’s population growth and much degradation of farmland will take place – suffer from chronic undernutrition. The Unicef report, “Tracking Progress on Child and Maternal Nutrition,” links the condition of dangerously undernourished children to the status of women.

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Women who have rallied themselves through nongovernmental organizations to save or replant forests, which absorb carbon dioxide, the most lethal of greenhouse gases, have proved on a small scale that these programs benefit families, communities and countries. The UN Population Fund refers to a study done by three American universities – SUNY Stony Brook, Brown and Clark – that demonstrated that where large or numerous women’s environmental organizations existed there were much lower levels of forest loss.

Managing Family Size

When women obtained the family planning tools they needed, they chose smaller families, and strains on food supplies were reduced while health and educational levels improved. Indeed, there is a huge unmet need for family planning services. As Obaid said, there is no investment in development “that costs so little and brings benefits that are so far-reaching and enormous.”

Family planning, in particular the use of condoms, also stops the spread of disease. Last week, the World Health Organization reported that the leading cause of death in girls and women from ages 15 to 44 globally is HIV-AIDS, a reflection of the powerlessness of women to resist unwanted or unprotected sex.

Yet the scientists and other advocates of urgent action to mitigate and reverse climate change have consistently treated the role of women as marginal to environmental policies, and are either oblivious to or squeamish about the need for contraception. During the same period that concerns about global warming, the depletion of resources and larger migration flows were rising, family planning funds were plummeting, the Population Fund report says.

Richer countries providing help to poorer regions backed off inexplicably even as the world population raced toward 7 billion. Perhaps blinded by all the publicity given to shrinking populations in industrial nations (except for the US, where population is still rising) international donor assistance for family planning services in developing countries fell to $338 million in 2007 from $723 million in 1995.

Women Parked on the Sidelines

Institutionally, women have been relegated to the outer edges, too. In thousands of pages of reports from the globally significant Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, only one-half of a page mentioned differing impacts on men and women and acknowledged that women were disproportionately involved in activities such as agriculture.

The word “gender” – implying that men and women may have separate if complementary roles -- was nonexistent in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992 as the blueprint for tackling global warming. It was not until late 2008 that the convention’s permanent bureaucracy, based in Bonn, recognized that “the gender dimension of climate change and its impacts are likely to affect men and women differently.”

Both the Population Fund and Unicef are in effect joining many nongovernmental organizations worldwide in asking governments that are meeting in Copenhagen to broaden discussion beyond the statistics about emissions and arguments over who is to blame, what to do about it and how much it will cost. Humanizing the debate, apart from recognizing the role and potential of women, could also make the scientific issue of climate change more easily understood if not compelling to millions everywhere.

Keep your eye on the ball, the Population Fund says in its report: “Climate change is about people. People cause climate change. People are affected by it. People need to adapt to it. And only people have the power to stop it.”

To respond to this article, send your comments to publications@unausa.org.

Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and a former New York Times UN bureau chief.

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