Roshni
January - March 2021
Climate Change >Gender Justice By Smt. Kalyani Raj, MIC-Environment & Climate Change
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Because in reality, climate change is a matter of justice.
hen we talk about climate change harming our planet, we do not really state the underlying truth of it. The real casualties of climate change will be us - the human race and all the other species that we share this world with.
Women, as we know particularly in the south Asian countries, face intersecting discrimination and inequality due to patriarchy and socially structured gender roles. In India gender disparity manifests itself in multiple ways – by Race, by culture, in politics, social or economic situations and few more. If we look at some of the gender linked statistics, particularly the parameters of secondary education, maternal health, economic participation, political or even labour force participation, India probably scores much below even neighbouring countries. Crises like climate change or COVID, worsen the situation and widen the gap of existing inequality.
Climate change is not new – ice ages, floods and other catastrophes have been reshaping our planet for millennia now…but over great periods of time, it’s the human age that has unnaturally expedited this process. The eventual outcome of this unabated climate change therefore, isn’t the destruction of the planet, it is the extinction of life from it! After all, the earth has survived for billions of years and will survive for billions more – we may not. That’s why we call today’s climate change anthropogenic, or man-made. Which gives rise to the question of who is responsible for it and who suffers the most from it?
Yet even as we push our governments for climate justice, women around the world are still fighting to endure everything from storms to starvation. While we are advocating gender equality, we are hearing horrific stories of domestic abuse and violence. How can we achieve any equitable society when half the world’s population is struggling to overcome gendered obstacles, just to reach equal footing with her fellow ‘man’?
While we have acknowledged that everyone has contributed to the crisis at different levels, we are also coming to the slow realisation that in the end, we’re all in the same boat, and we need to work together to avert global disaster. That said, it has also been well documented that women are the lesser contributors to climate change, but are the greater victims of it - another imbalance that needs to be corrected for our climate efforts to meet with success.
Reasons for this inequality are multiple - insecure land and tenure rights, obstructed access to natural resource assets, limited access to basic education, lack of access to markets, capital, training, technologies and few more. We cannot forget the
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