The UN has been warning for many years that women are the first victims of climate change... And in the process, to call for them to be considered as the first actors of political change in the direction of better preservation of ecosystems and resources.
What exactly is the vulnerability of the female population to the effects of the environmental crisis? What is the status of their participation in decisions about building a more sustainable future? How can we envisage the challenges of protecting the planet in a mixed environment ? The editorial staff of the EVE web magazine takes stock.
An edifying record on a global scale
An increase in poverty, of which women are the first victims
At each World Climate Conference, the figures are repeated to show the importance of reading the effects of the climate crisis through the prism of gender. First of all, it is recalled that women are over-represented in the poorest populations dependent on natural resources (70% of the poorest 1.3 billion people on the planet are women).
The effects of climate change on food scarcity have direct consequences on hunger but also produce an upsurge in early marriages, as families look for every solution to have one less mouth to feed.
Direct effects on the education and training of girls and women
This extreme poverty of women is also to be compared with the illiteracy rates that mark the growing gender gap in developing countries: increasingly mobilized to ensure their daily subsistence and that of their children, the poorest women are giving up on training more than ever.
This deterioration in the level of education of girls and women exposes them even more to the impacts of climate change: not knowing how to read deprives them of information on the risks and makes them terribly precarious in terms of care ; not knowing how to swim puts them in direct danger in the event of a flood or tsunami ; The lack of knowledge, in general, reduces their mobility and their ability to react in the event of extreme climatic events...
Reduced mobility overexposing women to violence
However, mobility is vital for those who have to flee an area of immediate danger such as a land in the process of desertification or an area threatened by rising waters. However, climate migration is conducive to violence against women : sexual assault and rape, domestic violence, forced prostitution are multiplying during population displacements.
A decline in rights
The report by the NGO GBV Aor Helpdesk on the links between climate change and gender-based violence sounds the alarm : the decline in women's rights can be observed in the context of an acute crisis (during a disaster, a pandemic, a migratory movement, etc.) but also in the political aftermath of these crises. Objectifying Simone de Beauvoir's famous saying that " all it will take is a crisis [...] so that women's rights are called into question ", the NGO highlights the phenomena of conservative withdrawal of societies as tensions over resources grow at the same time as a de facto eviction of women from decision-making bodies over the future of populations.
What about women's participation in decision-making?
A place at the table, a voice
This question of the presence of women at the table of discussions on the future of the planet is key. Since 2012, the UN has established the principle of parity in international discussions concerning climate and the environment.
On the occasion of COP26, the truth of the figures is revealed : women represent 33% of the delegates present in the UN constituted bodies on climate ; 27% of heads and deputy heads of delegation at world conferences are women ; At these conferences, the speaking time in plenary for men is twice as long as that for women.
Who holds the purse strings?
But it is not necessarily at the level of the bodies most immediately identified as standard-bearers of environmental transformation that women's participation is most strategic. We should also see a sufficient number of them in the organizations in charge of financing this transformation.
However, they are in a large minority among the World Bank's governors, they are exceptions at the head of central banks and extremely rare at the top of the companies and organizations that are members of the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance , which brings together private actors in climate finance.
Actors in the field
There is also the issue of women's participation in decision-making at the community level. A whole section of the UN strategy on climate justice is based on the empowerment of women at the local level. Relying on data highlighting a greater concern for the common good among women than men, as well as a better involvement in concrete actions to improve the lives of communities, international organizations intend to rely on them to take socially innovative initiatives, work to transform daily uses, Deploy alternative production and consumption models.
From micro-change to scaling up women's action
Champions of micro-change ?
The approach based on the support of women in the field is not absurd when it is noted that, all over the world, women are at the helm of micro-change : more economical in their daily practices (less meat-based food, less polluting travel, more energy-efficient leisure activities, etc.), they are also more assiduous in their actions for the planet (waste sorting, recycling, rationalization of the energy consumption of messages, etc.) and more open to alternative solutions in terms of consumption and lifestyle (more receptive to green marketing, but also less receptive to marketing in general ; more readily willing to give up elements of comfort, they are, for example, less attached to the renewal of hich-tech equipment, less demanding air conditioning of spaces, etc.).
The risks of essentialist " ecodisparity "
This vision of women as the first actors of small gestures that are good for the planet is not without embarrassment... Because it readily overlaps stereotypes (of an " essential " femininity focused on attention and care, concern for the collective and the future, proximity to the state of nature, etc.) and gendered assignments (women do laundry and household with eco-friendly products while men make speeches in the public space on the global issue of climate change). We must be wary, says the Mintel report on the ecogender gap , of interpretations of ecodisparity : by sending the daily "environmental burden" (a cousin of the mental load) back to women, conservatism is anchored at the heart of the need for change.
For a well-understood ecofeminism
A formidable misinterpretation denounced by an ecofeminism that makes the link between viril-centric social organization and the predation of the living. Therefore, if we want to succeed in the environmental transition, we should start by engaging in a social transformation involving the deconstruction of models of toxic masculinity.
Research by Scandinavian socio-economists Annika Carlsson-Kanyama and Riita Räty shows that if men pollute on average more than women, it is not because they are men but because they are more numerous in social positions that induce polluting activities. By social positions, we must understand here jobs and functions (calling for more travel, consumption of resources, production of waste, etc.) but also a socialization that values masculinity through the conquest, possession and exploitation of land, resources, goods and animate beings...
In other words, no ecological revolution is possible without questioning a social order which, even before being gendered, privileges possession and domination over sharing and participation.
