Women and Environment: Enhance Green Human Rights

Compiled from United Nation On-Line Women Networking, Discussions on Environment Issues

Women organisations have been mobilized to redress their society and environment. Women are organising groups to pursue projects on preservation of environment: home, factories, societies in cities as well as villages. Mass mobilization are gradualy taking shape among women from diverse social classes to raise awareness and rectify people's living habits. When hope for wider meaningful international response to the environment seems fading, women organisations proclaim, "We must motivate everyone at all times."

To strategize for the future, various institutions, organizations, government and society need to step in, to advocate the environmental problems and make it popular and issue of concern for everyone. Environment, like gender, is a cross-cutting issue (e.g. agriculture, mining, tourism, manufacturing, energy sectors) while policies are in place; we need implementation - NOW. Support of international and specialized organizations is essential for scientific information and for dealing with institutionally complex problems and to advocate the issues world wide.

Civil society groups should act as catalysts in this area; the role of gender-environment civil society groups needs to be recognized and enhanced with particular stress on monitoring systems and evaluation on gender in environment is essential. Integrate environmental and social issues in school curricula as well as in various media should be on top agenda while raising public awareness on importance of women’s involvement in environmental protection and participation in decision making.

Universities and Research Institutions should integrate in their programme of work the issues related to women and environment particularly in rural areas. This could lead to the creation of a synergy in the development programmes at national, intermediate and local levels.

The national reports of Millennium Development Goal 7 (to ensuring environmental sustainability) make no references to gender dimensions. Wider gender issues, for example gender differences in vulnerability and exposure, transport, energy and rural development, have not been anybody's concern so far. This insight is crucial to identifying barriers to economic development and prosperity, especially in the developing world.

Hard Facts:

1)Chemical production and consumption in the North has increased tenfold over the last ten years. In industrialised regions there is an alarming increase of vulnerable groups: up to 25% of the children ! born today develop asthma or allergies.

2)Recent research is evidence that brain and behavior are likely to be the most sensitive endpoints vulnerable to endocrine disruption. Many synthesized compounds in commercial use today, moreover, can derail neurological development. Studies prove (1)that environment pollution is damaging our brain and our social behaviour.

3)Research conducted on the range of exposures regularly encountered in human drinking water in mid-West agricultural regions of the United States showed significant increase aggressive behaviour after exposures.

4)C.Williams 1997, presents data and analyses indicating that millions of people around the world have experienced declines in intelligence and increases in dysfunctional behavior because of two interacting factors: exposure (especially in the womb and early in life) to contaminants and dietary deficiencies in critical micronutrients like iodine.

5)Joseph and Sandra Jacobson began a study looking at whether a mother's consumption of Lake Michigan fish, which contain significant levels of PCBs and other man-made contaminants, had any effect on her children. The result was short term memory, and verbal skills as they tracked the development of the children born to women who had eaten two or three fish meals a month in the 6 years prior to pregnancy.

6)In the past four decades, an extra 20,000 cubic kilometres of glacial ice had flowed into the sea, changing salinity levels and threatening to alter ocean flow patterns, with unpredictable consequences.

7)The climate change arena has opened up a number of new funding mechanisms internationally for developing countries to access. These include Carbon Trading and the Clean Development Mechanism but also mechanisms such as the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) which has been dispensing billions of dollars in funds of environmental issues including climate change.

8)Population is growing faster than food supplies in 64 of 105 developing countries. Overcultivation, primarily due to population pressures, has degraded some 2 billion hectares of arable land --- an area the size of Canada and the United States combined.


9)By 2025, when world population is projected to reach 8 billion, 48 countries with a total population of 3 billion will face chronic water shortages. In 25 years, humankind could be using over 90 percent of all available freshwater, leaving just 10 percent for the rest of the world's plants and animals.


10)Over the past 50 years nearly half of the world's original forest cover has been lost. Current demand for forest products may exceed the limits of sustainable consumption by 25 percent.

11) Globally, the demand for fresh water exceeds the supply by 17 percent already. Two-thirds of the world's population will experience some form of a severe water shortage in the next 25 years.

12)Today, developed nations consume nearly three quarters of all commercial energy; however, much of the additional energy demand in the next few decades will come from developing nations. Indeed, developing nations are expected to increase their share of world energy use to almost 40 percent by 2010, reflecting rapid economic expansion, high population growth, and the substitution of fossil fuels for traditional biomass fuels. Growth will be particularly dramatic in East and South Asia (exclusive of Japan).

13)Global paper use has grown more than six-fold since 1950. One fifth of all wood harvested in the world ends up in paper. It takes 2 to 3.5 tons of trees to make one ton of paper. Pulp and paper is the 5th largest industrial consumer of energy in the world, using as much power to produce a ton of product as the iron and steel industry. In some countries, including the United States, paper accounts for nearly 40 percent of all municipal solid waste.


Participation and involvement:

- Promote the participation of women in environmental policymaking re. environment, natural resources, disaster management , promoting SD etc;
- Use quota system techniques;
- Train communities – in particular women - to assess their potential to benefit from environmental investments.

Research and information needs:
- Explore the link between gender equality and sustainable development.
- Undertake research and publish findings on women’s roles, experiences and challenges and expectations.
- Collect data on women’s roles in environmental and NRM decision-making nationally and internationally.
- Data obtained in qualitative terms should provide strong measures of how inclusion of women in NRM is progressing and what can be done to further increase the inclusion of women.

Practical needs:
- Make funding available for women-environment interests
- Access to cleaner forms of energy by all vulnerable groups, esp. women, should be guaranteed.
- Promote renewable energy source programmes, aimed at environmental conservation, combating green house gasses, gaining carbon credits and eradicating poverty.
- Women should be encouraged to create new business opportunities and create new jobs in sustainable growth, moving to a low-carbon economy.

Human rights, peace and security:
- States have to recognize and enshrine the right to water as a human right that entitles everyone to safe, adequate and physically accessible water for personal and domestic uses.
- Link the issue of women and environment, cq. sustainable environmental management to CEDAW. (Andjelka Rudic, Croatia)
- Advocate for environment and democracy together – enhance green human rights (= the right to a healthy environment under democratic governance) (Nasrin Azadeh)
- Strengthen the involvement of women in human security matters using food and water security matters as an example (we need: a new definition of peace).

Conservation/environment vs. women:

- access the impact of policies and programs of environmental and conservation organizations on women and people living in poverty;
- stop policies and projects that impact negatively on women/the poor;
- advocate for national policy changes and institutional capacity building to use the potential of natural resources for the benefit of disadvantaged people and for poverty alleviation;
- donors, INGOs and UN agencies should change their existing aid policy and technology from onsite biomass stock increase for global environmental conservation to social justice based sustainable development.

- Gender aspects of water management – strategizing in a sector: ENERGIA, the international network on gender and sustainable energy, has developed specific action ideas and suggestions for several UN [conferences]; (www.energia.org)
- local communities should own, control and manage their (water) resources, in which women’s participation should be at least 50%;
- all water policies and programmes should be examined from a gender perspective and provisions should be made to address gender differentiation and social inequalities among different communities; create institutional space for women to own, control and manage water;
- ensure representation of women and women’s (user) groups at all levels of decision-making, implementation and management of water; and wherever women’s (user) groups are successful the state should develop long term partnerships and not an annual contract or tender system;
- there should be a holistic approach to water resource management + coordination different departments; and a multi-source approach should be adopted for domestic and drinking water supply;
- local communities should be built and strengthened by creating new catchments and using the existing ones;
- allocate adequate financial resources for capacity building, gender sensitization, community management, awareness raising, building local water source structures and distributive systems;
- establish National Water Resource Centres, easily accessible to all stakeholders and liaise with existing networks (e.g. Cap-net India, Gender and Water Alliance).

Issues for follow-up:

- How can the voices of ‘the commons’ best be reflected in UN CSW?
- Women’s involvement in policymaking and technology development and dissemination re. energy-related issues should be much higher on the agenda.
- Join existing networks and organizations;
- In upcoming conferences and policymaking events, such as CSD13 (water/sanitation/human settlements), CSD14+15 (energy, climate change) a gender perspective should be ensured.


(1) Terminus Brain: The environmental threats to human intelligence. Cassell, London and Herndon VA. ISBN 0-304-33857-5. 261pp. Endocrine, immune and behavioral effects of aldicarb, Porter, WP, JW Jaeger and IH Carlson. 1999, Toxicology and Industrial Health 15: 133- 150 www.ourstolenfuture.org