NEW YORK, 28 September 2009: Women are on the frontlines of climate change — often the first to face its impacts on their livelihoods and very lives.
Women’s everyday activities as managers of household resources — such as water, fuel and food — become increasingly burdensome. As small-scale farmers, they endure environmental stress more often, with far fewer resources than men to cope.
As migrants and refugees pushed from areas of climatic stress, they are at higher risk of disease and violence. And during natural disasters like floods and hurricanes, they count higher among the dead.
Conversely, as farmers, entrepreneurs, managers of households, scientists and politicians, women are poised to drive positive change and contribute to the vast portfolio of strategies needed to address this threat.
Women’s empowerment reaps benefits across the climate-related terrain: in ecological health, food security, disaster preparedness and increased community resiliency to natural disasters, as well as reduction in the carbon footprints of households, communities and countries.
The stakes are higher than ever to empower women and ensure they are equal actors and benefactors in order to truly mitigate and cope with climate change.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in force since 1994, sets an overall framework for intergovernmental efforts to tackle the challenges posed by climate change.
With the Kyoto Protocol to the Convention, state Parties committed to binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the five-year period 2008-2012. Critical negotiations are now underway on an effective international response to climate change that will extend until 2050, expected to culminate in an agreement at the Conference of Parties (COP-15) in Copenhagen in December 2009.
UNIFEM has partnered with the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA) to support the inclusion of gender dimensions in the new agreement, working closely with other UN agencies and an advocacy team, co-lead by the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and Energia.
UNIFEM and its partners have stressed the importance of the agreement’s adaptation measures being consistent with the principles of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW); of the participation of women as stakeholders; of gender equity being an integral part of its effective implementation; and of the use of sex-disaggregated data for policy design, implementation, monitoring and reporting.
At present, the text under negotiation in the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) includes multiple references to gender dimensions. Their inclusion into the final agreement, still uncertain, will have profound implications for generations of women as they cope with the impacts of global warming and as the international community strives for truly sustainable development.
Kilde: www.unifem.org
