Fionna Smyth, Head of Global Advocacy and Policy for Christian Aid, explains “the fight against climate change is inextricably intertwined with poverty and inequality. ...transformative policies are required to support women's initiative and leadership.”
The report, Women on the Front Line: Healing the Earth, seeking justice, warns the climate response needs to shift power and resources from the Global North to the Global South. It calls for 70% of climate financing to be targeted at locally led responses, including matching funds for loss and damage to adaptation and mitigation.
Climate finance has been a contentious issue at COP26 with richer countries, responsible for the bulk of carbon emissions, failing to deliver on their pledge to provide $100 billion by 2020 to help poorer countries. Christian Aid has called for $500 billion of new funding for the period 2020–2024.
Kenya was one of the countries examined in the report. Sadia Isacko, an activist who encourages women’s groups in Marsabit to attend public forums to discuss the issues affecting them, explains: “Marsabit County was not always like this; yes, it was dry, but not this bad. For women especially, the resources we need have moved further away. Basic resources like water, pasture for our livestock and firewood have diminished further; yet women need these things for their everyday life.”
Sadia added: “Every other responsibility is left for women. They don’t have access to milk, because the herds are away; they have to take care of children; they have to look for food, as their husbands are hundreds of kilometres away herding livestock…”
The report, which also recommends redirecting subsidies for fossil fuels to measures for gender equity and sustainability, coincides with a statement launched at COP26. Jointly sponsored by the Scottish Government and UN Women, the statement calls for the role of women and girls to be advanced in addressing climate change.
Nushrat Chowdhury, Climate Justice Policy Advisor for Christian Aid and co-author of the report, said:
“From the local to the global, the fight against climate change is inextricably intertwined with poverty and inequality. By examining the lived experience of women across the Global South, we know climate changes are disproportionately impacting women and girls.
“Despite being on the frontline of understanding the impacts on the climate emergency, the impact of old colonial and economic systems mean women are rarely consulted or decide policy or practical approaches.”
Fionna Smyth, Head of Global Advocacy and Policy for Christian Aid, added:
“To save the planet, we need a dramatic overhaul of the old structures. Transformative policies are required to support women’s initiative and leadership and to put them at the heart of a gender just climate response.
“Afterall, people who are vulnerable to climate change know best what is needed in their specific contexts. Christian Aid is therefore calling for 70% of climate financing to be targeted at locally led responses.”
ENDS.
Notes to editors:
The report, Women on the Front Line: Healing the Earth, seeking justice, can be found here. A video featuring Kenyan activist, Sadia Isacko, can be found here.
Policy priorities to achieve co-benefits for gender, climate and environmental justice:
- Put women at the forefront of climate change decision making at all levels, and support women-led responses.
- Meet women’s strategic and practical adaptation needs, including by challenging norms that constrain their voice, agency and access to resources.
- Provide adequate and long term finance for locally led adaptation through decentralised and flexible mechanisms.
- Support solutions championed by women and marginalised communities.
- Prioritise marginalised communities and household needs in a just transition to renewable energy. Avoid adverse environmental impacts and respect land rights.
- Embed ecosystem protection and restoration, in partnership with local communities, in all climate responses.
- Support agroecological approaches for climate-resilient food systems.
- Redirect subsidies for fossil fuels and industrial agriculture to measures for gender equity and sustainability, such as decentralised renewable energy, public services, sustainable agriculture and social protection.
- Fulfil existing climate finance commitments and make additional resources available, including to address the impacts of loss and damage on people living in poverty.
- Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, General Secretary (CEO) of the ACT Alliance, a coalition of 135 churches and faith-based organizations working together in humanitarian, development and advocacy work in over 120 countries.
- Kavita Naidu, international human rights lawyer and activist from Fiji-Australia specialising in feminist climate justice for grassroots women in all their diversity in Asia and the Pacific. Kavita is recognised as a leading voice on feminist climate demands, decolonial global green new deal, feminist foreign policy and feminist participatory action research.
- Ikal Ang’elei, scholar and political activist from an indigenous pastoralist community, who is campaigning against destructive large dams. She is founder of Friends of Lake Turkana which supports community action, and winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2012. Her work focuses on climate and energy justice, land, water and environmental rights.
