Women from around the world are mobilising today to call for action on climate change as international leaders meet in New York at the United Nations General Assembly.

"There is no climate justice without gender justice," the movement argues. Solutions and policy demands will be presented in New York City as part of the Global Women’s Climate Justice Day of Action in an effort to highlight the reality that while women are among those most severely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, women are also the "key to creating climate solutions."

The aim is to get political officials to agree “equitable, immediate, and bold action on climate change" as we enter the final two months before the COP21 climate change negotiations in Paris in December. At this time, the Women’s Climate Declaration will be presented to world governments.

Connecting Women

“Women around the world are facing the impacts of the climate crisis every day,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, co-founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, which helped organise the event. “We are issuing a wake-up call to the world that the time has come for bold action to address the roots of the climate crisis, with women’s leadership at the forefront.”

Among the women speaking at the event in New York are Mary Robinson, the UN special envoy on climate change, and May Boeve, head of climate campaign group 350.org. Other leading international women speaking include Jacqui Patterson, director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, First Nations and anti-tar sands activist, Jody Williams, American political activist and Nobel Prize laureate, and Patricia Gualinga, international relations director for the indigenous community of Sarayaku in Ecuador.

As Orielle Lake explained, the day of action is “about connecting women working on vital climate projects around the globe. It is about bringing our passion and determination to the surface and manifesting our vulnerabilities and fierce strengths.”

According to the UN, women form a disproportionately large share of the poor. In rural areas and developing countries women are typically the ones responsible for securing water, food and energy for cooking and heating – this dependence on local natural resources makes them highly vulnerable to climate impacts, including drought, uncertain rainfall and deforestation.

And, compared to men in poor countries, women face historical disadvantages such as limited access to decision-making and economic assets, and this further increases the challenges of climate change.

Global Action

This is why it is not just in New York City that women are mobilising. Throughout September, women in over 30 countries have been holding events calling for change.

For example, in the Niger Delta region of West Africa, women held a summit on gender and oil. Meanwhile, in the Amazon Rainforest indigenous women protested fossil fuel extraction in their territories. And, in Canada documentary photography depicts women from across the country seeking to protect water from pollution.

As the UN argues, it is “imperative that a gender analysis be applied to all actions on climate change and that gender experts are consulted in climate change processes at all levels, so that women's and men’s specific needs and priorities are identified and addressed.”

Melissa S. United States

Hala Alhaffar. Damascus, Syria

In addition to asking for a transition away from fossil fuels, protection of our forests and oceans, and increased funding for adaptation, the Women’s Climate Declaration lays out a series of gender-conscious demands. These include: a gender-responsive climate change policy and programme; recognising that gender-sensitive climate policy benefits men, women, children and the planet; and respecting and learning from the traditional ecological knowledge, wisdom and experience of the world’s indigenous peoples.

It argues: “Unsustainable consumption and production reverses development gains in the global North and the global South: Women and men of industrialized nations have a responsibility to educate themselves, examine their worldviews, commit to action, and lead by example.

“No one person, organization, community, province, region, or nation is capable of solving the challenge of climate change alone. This is a time for collaboration at a global level as never before required.”

Photo: 350.org via Flickr / Omnia Abdallah, Khartoum Sudan

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An astonishing 720 million people around the world face falling back into extreme poverty unless we tackle climate change immediately, warns a new report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

The report was published as world leaders gathered this week at the United Nations General Assembly and agreed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), among which is the eradication of extreme poverty by 2030.

This goal is achievable, according to the ODI, but not without a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions peak in 2030, and a fall to near zero by 2100. “Climate change increases the probability that those who emerge from extreme poverty will be at risk of falling back into it,” it concludes.

Beyond 2030

Sustaining poverty reduction therefore relies on curbing climate change the report argues.“If the global community is serious about eradicating extreme poverty for good, it needs to think beyond 2030. Eradicating poverty by 2030 will be no great accomplishment if we are incapable of sustaining that achievement from 2030 onwards.”

It continues: “It is policy incoherent for big GHG emitting countries, especially industrialised ones, to support poverty eradication as a development priority, whether through domestic policy or international assistance, while failing to shift their own economy toward a zero net emissions pathway.”

As the report notes, progress on poverty eradication over the past two decades has reduced the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day in the developing world – defined as the extreme poor – from 43 percent in 1990 to about 17 percent as of 2011.

"In order to stop poverty, we must stop climate change." – Jay Winter Nightwolf, Echota Cherokee nation. #ActOnClimate

— Sierra Club (@sierraclub) September 24, 2015

Analysing data on the impact of climate change on food prices, the effects of childhood malnutrition and stunting, the productivity of primary sectors (such as agriculture or mining), and increased droughts, the ODI estimates that up to 720 million people are at risk of facing extreme poverty from 2030 to 2050 under a business-as-usual scenario. As the report starkly points out, this is roughly the same number of people that exited extreme poverty over the last two decades.

However, this number is likely to be much higher if the effects of sea-level rise, an increase in airborne diseases, and conflict – among other climate impacts – are factored into calculations.

Ecomodernist Manifesto

The ODI report comes at the same time as a group of individuals calling themselves the ‘Ecomodernists’ launched their manifesto in London yesterday – among those promoting it include self-styled ‘climate lukewarmist’ Matt Ridley, and former environment secretary and climate denier Owen Paterson.

As the manifesto explains, ecomodernism believes in human rights and freedoms – chief among these, the alleviation of global poverty.

However, in contrast to the ODI’s report, their manifesto goes on to argue that “climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world’s people. Nor should they be.”

Instead, technology should be the main driver in helping developing countries to achieve modern living standards and end material poverty it says. This includes intensive agriculture, nuclear energy, reforestation and urbanisation. Furthermore it argues that renewable energy is inadequate for meeting global energy demands and that there need not be a limit to economic growth.

Economic Growth

But as the ODI argues: “While [economic] growth is unquestionably part of reaching zero extreme poverty, relying on high growth rates alone to achieve this goal would be unwise. First, recent high growth rates may not be sustained. Projecting them decades into the future paints an overly optimistic view of extreme poverty in 2030.

“In reality, economic growth has become increasingly less effective at reducing poverty because of the increasing inequality of that growth. Since 2005, inequalities have widened even further in developing countries, leading to lower rates of poverty reduction than would have been the case if inequality had remained constant.”

Achieving a zero-emissions future, with peak emissions within 15 years, requires all countries to “transform” their economies, the ODI explains. Deep domestic GHG cuts are part of developed countries’ obligation it says, with middle and low-income countries also ensuring their current investment choices reduce their forecast emissions.

“This presents a global challenge that some argue conflicts with the goal of eradicating extreme poverty,” ODI acknowledges, “However, early evidence suggests low-emission economic development, although radically different from historic experience, is consistent with the combination of moderate, sustained and pro-poor growth and reductions in inequality needed to eradicate poverty.”

Therefore addressing growth and inequality together is “far more likely to reduce poverty than a strategy reliant on attempts to maximise growth alone, based on unrealistic projections.”

Agriculture and Cities

Pointing out that industrialised agriculture is a significant contributor to GHG emissions, the ODI looks to the World Bank which argues that “improving the productivity, profitability and sustainability of smallholder farming is the main pathway out of poverty in using agriculture in development.”

Doing so presents a “major synergy”, says the ODI, for reducing poverty and emissions “where there is the institutional capacity and political will to limit the land-use conversion of forests and other natural stores of GHGs.”

And on urbanisation, the ODI agrees it can drive positive change but only if city planners and policymakers tackle poverty and climate change together rather than “entrench and perpetuate old problems for new people”.

“The impact of unchecked climate change creates an insurmountable challenge for the zero poverty target,” it argues, “but climate change mitigation need not.”

Photo: Asian Development Bank via Flickr

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Pope Francis has released his long awaited encyclical, or teaching document, on climate justice and the environment, and it flies in the face of everything climate deniers stand for.

The encyclical is officially called “Laudato Si (Be Praised), On the Care of Our Common Home,” and it makes a compelling case for humanity’s moral responsibility to “protect our common home” by tackling the root causes of two of the greatest interlinked global crises of our time: climate change and poverty.

“[T]he earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor,” Pope Francis writes. Echoing his earlier critique of capitalism and inequality, the Pope links the pollution and waste degrading our environment directly to our “throwaway culture” that, unlike nature, does not seek to reuse and recycle every resource as a valuable constituent of the circle of life.

“We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations,” the Pope writes. He faults this mode of consumption for creating global warming, and concludes: “Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.”

The Pope unequivocally embraces the science showing mankind is responsible for global warming:

"A number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity."

He specifically calls for policies to change the way we power human society:

“There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy.”

It is the poor who suffer most from the impacts of climate change and humanity's failure to act, the Pope argues.

"Many of the poor live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to warming, and their means of subsistence are largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry. They have no other financial activities or resources which can enable them to adapt to climate change or to face natural disasters, and their access to social services and protection is very limited."

No role for fossil fuels in solving global poverty

Unlike Peabody Energy, which has touted coal as a solution to global energy poverty, the Pope sees no place for fossil fuels in helping to raise the standard of living around the world in a sustainable manner:

“We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels — especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas — needs to be progressively replaced without delay.”

While the ultimate goal of climate action, according to the Pope, must be to increase prosperity and justice for all of Earth’s inhabitants, he does not ignore political realities in developing countries even while he calls on developed countries to shoulder a proportion of the burden equal to their culpability in creating the climate crisis in the first place:

For poor countries, the priorities must be to eliminate extreme poverty and to promote the social development of their people. At the same time, they need to acknowledge the scandalous level of consumption in some privileged sectors of their population and to combat corruption more effectively. They are likewise bound to develop less polluting forms of energy production, but to do so they require the help of countries which have experienced great growth at the cost of the ongoing pollution of the planet.

Only collective action by all of the countries of the world can adequately address the climate crisis, the Pope says:

Enforceable international agreements are urgently needed, since local authorities are not always capable of effective intervention. Relations between states must be respectful of each other’s sovereignty, but must also lay down mutually agreed means of averting regional disasters which would eventually affect everyone. Global regulatory norms are needed to impose obligations and prevent unacceptable actions, for example, when powerful companies dump contaminated waste or offshore polluting industries in other countries.

These assertions form the basis of the Pope’s call for mankind to take collective action in defense of our shared planet.

So it’s little wonder climate deniers lined up to try and discredit the Pope ahead of the release of the encyclical. But Pope Francis appears to speak directly to the issue of climate denial in calling for "a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet."

"The worldwide ecological movement has already made considerable progress and led to the establishment of numerous organizations committed to raising awareness of these challenges. Regrettably, many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest. Obstructionist attitudes, even on the part of believers, can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation or blind confidence in technical solutions. We require a new and universal solidarity."

Environmentalists welcomed the Pope’s call for "universal solidarity" in climate action.

“The pope’s message applies to all of us, regardless of our faith,” Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement. “He is imploring people of good will everywhere to honor our moral obligation to protect future generations from the dangers of further climate chaos by embracing our ethical duty to act.”

Mike Brune, Sierra Club executive director, released a statement saying, “The vision laid out in these teachings serves as inspiration to everyone across the world who seeks a more just, compassionate, and healthy future.”

The Pope's encyclical comes at a critical juncture for the global response to climate change. Momentum is building for a meaningful agreement to halt global warming, to be negotiated this December at UNFCCC talks in Paris. The Pope’s decision to weigh in and call for a healthy and more equitable clean energy economy is widely expected to help build on that momentum.

Image Credit: giulio napolitano / Shutterstock.com

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