The time for debate has long passed: global warming is happening, and we know it will affect the next generation most severely. We’re all well aware of the disastrous effects it will have on plant life, polar bears, ice caps and infrastructure. There’s increased awareness of the ramifications for those in poverty, and of the fact that its impact will be racialised (despite poorer countries contributing the least to greenhouse gas emissions, they will be most seriously affected). But another intersection is continually overlooked in the conversation of who suffers most at the hands of climate change: gender. We’re lagging behind in the discourse generally, but the gender-climate link remains particularly sidelined, with many not realising there’s a connection at all. “It’s not obvious – climate change and gender, what does that mean?” says Verona Collantes, an Intergovernmental Specialist with UN Women who works with governments to ensure a gender perspective is included when addressing environmental issues. “(People think), ‘We all pollute the the same air, we will all die the same way or we will all be impacted the same way’. In technical areas, they don’t see the connection, they don’t understand what it means – that there are differentiated impacts, that there are gender dimensions to those issues.”
The “gender dimensions” to global warming are multi-layered and complex, but glaring. Across the world, women are disproportionately affected – they are 14 times more likely to die during natural disasters than men globally. UN figures show that 80 per cent of people displaced by climate change are women and following climate disasters, it is generally harder for poor women to recover their economic positions than poor men. In the wake of a disaster, rape, trafficking and maternal mortality rates all increase. There are even links to climate change and increased domestic violence. Mary Robinson, seventh President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the connection is something she only became aware of later in her career. To view the full article visit Dazed Digital.