Women activists and Climate Week
September 23rd, 2009
Here is an article by Suzanne Hoeksema about women leaders, climate justice, and New York Climate Week. The full article can be found here.
NEW YORK, Sep 23 (IPS) – Women’s voices remain highly underrepresented in the climate change debate, say international civil society leaders attending events taking place around the United Nations Climate Summit Tuesday.
The summit was attended by 146 national delegations, of which only seven were headed by women. On the eve of the meet, the head of Oxfam in Britain, Barbara Stocking, noted that “once again, women find themselves left out of the negotiations on issues that affect them most”.
Oxfam is one of the main contributors of the “tck tck tck” campaign to “stop the clock on the climate change”.
Climate Week, Sep. 20-26, was launched Sunday by a “Human Countdown” in New York’s Central Park. Over a thousand volunteers came together to call on world leaders attending Tuesday’s U.N. Climate Summit to take swift action to curb greenhouse gases.
The crowd of New Yorkers, dressed in green sweaters and blue ponchos, formed a human sculpture “the shape of the earth trapped inside of an hourglass with the earth dissolving like sand”.
Among the climate activists here are four women from the “frontlines of climate change”: Uganda, the Cook Islands, Biloxi, Mississippi and the Carteret Islands, whose lives have been directly affected by flood, drought, hurricanes and rising sea levels.
So why do we need a focus on women in the climate change debate? And what can women’s organisations do for climate change mitigation?
Stocking argued that women are most deeply affected by climate change. “They are the ones responsible for the most basic needs: fetching the water, feeding the family and till the soil and clean the dirt. They work with water in a very direct way,” she told IPS.
In a statement, Finnish President Tarja Halonen said that “climate change hits most seriously the poorest regions and the weakest groups of people. Since about 70 percent of the world’s poor are women, they will suffer most.”
Sharon Hanshaw, director of Coastal Women for Change in the city of Biloxi, Mississippi in the southern U.S. and a mother of three daughters, added that “women have a different perspective on the future. They think of their children’s future, their children’s children’s future and the community’s survival.”
In a compelling story on the effects of globalisation and climate change on the lives on the Inuit people, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian Inuit herself and holding the International Chair for the Inuit Circumpolar Council, connects climate change to human rights.
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