CSW 57: Gender and climate change

New York, 8 March: As women across the world celebrate women’ s day, a good number of them in the Global South are going to be spending it at a queue for water at a borehole 15 kilometres away from their home or scavenging for food to feed their families. Halfway across the world another woman from Kazakhstan will be walking from one village to another trying to find food that is not contaminated by radiation. In Madagascar or Mozambique, another mother will spend the day trying to rebuild her house recently destroyed by floods.

These are the realities of women from across the world as presented by non-governmental organisations specialising in climate change and who are participating at the Commission of the Status of Women (CSW). According to Norma Maldonado from NGO Tierra Verde, “Indigenous women in Guatemala have to walk for two to four hours each day to get drinking water, and there is no time to think about education or participate in any public processes.”

Another activist from Colombia noted that the large-scale agro-fuel production in Colombia negatively affects the livelihoods of rural and indigenous women in the country. “Impacts due to land use change are displacing entire communities with detrimental effects on women as they are confronted with direct and indirect violence of companies that try to grab their land. This ‘green land grabbing’ is a major cause of violations of their social, environmental and human rights”.

Elina Doszhanova, a Kazakh woman working for Social-Eco Fund NGO, observed that there is lacking awareness within the international community regarding issues related to radiation and uranium mining. She reminded the audience on the dangers of nuclear energy saying, “There is nothing green about nuclear energy. With each ton produced, a multiple tonnage of waste is also produced”.

Doszhanova added that the processes tackling global economic development have not yet improved the lives of Kazakh indigenous women and there is little hope that the decisions that come out of CSW57 will bring much improvement in the lives of impoverished Kazakh women struggling to survive in the poorest parts of the country.

She added, “We are proud to be a nation with much wealth underground, but we’d rather have it stay untouched and undeveloped… We need to recognise that the issues of gender equity and economic sustainability closely relate to environmental issues, and thus we have to ensure sustainable development that is based on principles of human rights and environmental justice for present and future generations”.

However the NGO deliberations are coming at a time when women in Southern Africa have just managed to secure the consideration of further high level discussions around a potential climate change addendum to the SADC Gender Protocol.

“We meet in Maputo today in the aftermath of furious floods that have also just hit Mauritius. Climate change is no longer a theory. We are witnessing its devastating consequences on all our citizens, especially women and children. We commend the draft SADC position paper for making the link between climate and gender justice”, reads a statement by Alliance think tank member Emma Kaliya at the region’s gender and women ministers meeting held in Mozambique in February.

“We take this opportunity to remind our ministers of their commitment on 18th November 2011, in the SADC Engendered Position Paper on Climate Change for COP17, to develop an addendum to the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development to address issues related to Sustainable Development. Now that the SADC Gender Protocol is in force, we urge our ministers to seize this opportunity to place issues of gender and climate change squarely on the agenda through an addendum”, added Kaliya.

So as another women’s day passes by, many women across the world are left with very little to celebrate as they are all wrapped up in their daily struggles for a better world. Let’s hope that more addendums like these will bring reasons to celebrate in the near future.

Lucia Makamure is Alliance and Partnership officer at Gender Links. This article is part of GL’s special coverage of CSW 57.