Women have been engaged in the climate change debate since it began, and an increasing level of attention has focused on the intersection between gender equality and a changing climate.
There has been a clear interest for the topic in the sessions this month at the NGO Committee on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York City. Yesterday, representatives from various organizations discussed the vital role women's rights movements must play in global climate control.
Shocking data shows that women are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change: 61% of deaths by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar were women; 70-80% of deaths by the Indian Ocean Tsunami were women; 91% if deaths were women in the 1991 Cyclone in Bangladesh.
In her lecture on Climate Change and Gender Responsieveness in Korea, Dr. Junhi Joo explained that as so many mothers died, there have been other major consequences such as infant mortality, early marriage of girls, neglect of girls' education, sexual assault, trafficking of women and prostitution. Furthermore, post disaster women are usually at higher risk of being placed in unsafe, overcrowded shelters, due to lack of assets such as savings, property or land. In the context of cyclones, floods and other disasters that require mobility, cultural constraints on women's movements may hinder their timely escape, access to shelter or access to health care.
The panelists at yesterday's CSW conference on Gender and Climate Change all spoke of the need for women to be at the forefront of the decision making process when the international community gathers to produce policies on the subject. Not only has it been proven that climate change affects women and their causes the most, but women activists must be extremely aware of the policies that will come out of discussing global warming in order to ensure that they will not conflict with other vital human rights priorities crucial to the movement.
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