BY HAFTU GEBREZGABIHER
In any given country, legislators must understand how social issues are linked to environmental impacts. Climate change does not affect people equitably, and policymakers need to understand how to account for these inequities with climate legislation that spurs fair socio-economic growth while tackling the climate crisis.
As the interdependence between women and environmental impact mounts in this globalized world especially in countries of sub-Saharan African such as Ethiopia, unleashing the capacity of women in the environmental policymaking and implementation process is found imperative measure.
This is because as a result of the impacts of global warming, women in the developing world are most likely hardest hit by challenges induced from the recurrently occurred droughts.
Women have often been found to be more invested in social issues, including education, healthcare and environmental impacts. Research also indicates that women who hold an elected office tend to prioritise resolving tangible issues that directly affect other women, families and children.
Given that women and children are disproportionately affected by climate change, women in politics have shown themselves to be more aware of environmental impacts, and integrate relevant solutions into their policy agendas.
Environmental policy researchers say that as in many political and decision-making spheres, women are alarmingly underrepresented in global environmental policymaking.
Women hold only 12 per cent of top national ministerial positions in environmental sectors worldwide. Combined with a lack of decision-making responsibilities granted to women in local communities, the voice of environmental policymaking has always been disproportionately male.
Elevating and empowering women should not stop at ensuring access to education and healthcare. Women should have their voices heard at all levels and actively participate in environmental policymaking. Permitting women to do so tends to lead to more effective environmental policy outcomes.
Women in decision-making roles have also shown more proclivities toward protecting natural resources. A 2015 policy brief catalogued women’s participation in local and national environmental policymaking in El Salvador, Chile and Vietnam.
The report found that women are often in better positions to apply local knowledge to climate responses, and tend to prioritise preserving natural resources.
In addition to a predisposition towards strong domestic climate action, women decision-makers have also proven to be better negotiators and more likely to cooperate in international environmental pacts. A 2005 study found that controlling for other factors, countries with a higher proportion of women in government were more likely to ratify international environmental treaties than other nations. The study also found that women in politics were significantly less likely to impose environmental and health risks on others.
There are a growing number of studies and reports worldwide that indicate how women tend to prioritise environmental protection and strong climate action. A 2014 Australian study found that women tend to consider environmentalism a stronger part of their identity than men. A study of US homeowners affirmed that women are often more conscious about the environmental footprint of the products they consume.
A review of research done between 1988 and 1998 concluded that women have stronger environmental attitudes and behaviours than men, regardless of age or country of origin.
A study published in February 2021, analysed the demographics of current environmental activists by surveying 367 respondents across 66 countries. The study concluded that the newest generation of climate activists skews female. Of the study’s respondents who were over 65, only one quarter were women. Of respondents under 25, two-thirds were female. This trend reflects a demographic shift in climate activism.
The newest generation of climate activists tends to be young, female and highly educated. Developed and developing countries alike need to harness these trends and elevate today’s female youth to become political leaders in the climate movement.
Revisiting Ecofeminism
Ecofeminism first emerged in North American and European academic circles in the 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and specifically linked the subjugation of women to humanity’s oppressive relationship with nature. It was employed as a theoretical framework to better understand how hierarchical and dualist definitions of gender could explain humanity’s dominating role in its relationship with the environment.
Beginning in the 1980s, ecofeminism began to inform feminist and environmental activist and artistic movements. Heroes of the ecofeminist movement included several major intellectual and political figures. Françoise d’Eaubonne, a French author considered a leader in her country’s feminist movement, coined the name “ecofeminism” in 1974.
Petra Kelly, a proclaimed ecofeminism, was a German politician who co-founded the German Green Party, the first political party with a predominately environmental platform to achieve national prominence.
By the end of the 1990s, ecofeminism began to come under fire from critics, who dismissed the framework as essentialist, in that it could not fully address either feminist or environmentalist concerns. Ecofeminism’s exclusive focus on the relationship between gender and nature left no room for considerations of other crucial factors, such as race or class.
Janet Biehl, an American social ecologist, notably criticized the ecofeminist framework as an oversimplification of complex hierarchical structures and forms of domination.
Today, the relevance and use-value of ecofeminism have largely faded from activist and intellectual circles. However, the concepts behind the framework can still be applied to understand why elevating women can intersect with achieving equitable sustainability targets, and have such a measurable effect on mitigating environmental impacts.
Ecofeminism seeks to reexamine both the feminist and environmentalist movements and augment each of their arguments. The framework examines how gender and nature intersect, specifically how binary definitions falsely categorize opposing groups, assigning disproportionate value to one grouping and encouraging hierarchical thinking.
An ecofeminist framework cites hierarchical thinking and oppositional definitions as reasoning’s behind the subjugation of both women and nature.
These constructs can often justify masculinized acts of violence and domination towards women, animals and the natural world. These acts are often expressed through masculine cultural norms, such as hunting, domesticity and exploitation.
While ecofeminism can function on a theoretical level, it has proven difficult to apply empirically. One of the main criticisms levied against ecofeminism is that, by only considering the connection between women and nature, it fails to account for the differences between individual women that can only be understood through more comprehensive frameworks analysing race or class.
Other schools of ecofeminism have developed over the years that expand their scope beyond gender. Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmentalist and author, developed a framework of ecofeminism that incorporates a postcolonial analysis, describing race-based and imperialist acts of domination as developments of historical oppositional dualisms.
Shiva also describes women as ‘safeguards’ of natural resources, a role that leaves women especially vulnerable to natural disasters and environmental degradation perpetuated through capitalist markets.
Ecofeminism began to fall out of favour during the 1990s, around the time environmental justice emerged as a framework employed by both scholars and activists alike. Environmental justice refers to the fair treatment of all people, regardless of identity, in the development and implementation of environmental laws. Environmental justice seeks to ensure equitable treatment of all people with regards to environmental impacts.
Intersections between the environment and social issues are ubiquitous, although often overlooked. Resolving issues in one area can have a cascading effect on improving conditions in the other. For instance, decades of racist housing policies in Richmond VA, USA, limited investments towards improving living standards in neighbourhoods that were primarily home to communities of colour.
Today, these neighbourhoods can be up to 8°C warmer than predominantly white neighbourhoods during summer, severely affecting health standards, especially for children. Understanding the structural reasons behind these inequities can shed light on how these issues can be resolved.
For instance, more investments into creating urban green spaces and more expansive tree cover would improve environmental quality and health standards in these neighbourhoods, while also addressing inequities rooted in racist attitudes of governance.
Failure to recognise the intersections between climate change and social issues damages the prospects of finding solutions to either. In the case of gender equality, elevating women through social initiatives, specifically improved access to healthcare and education, has a direct impact on reducing emissions by reducing a country’s total fertility rate.
Currently, the world’s population is estimated to be around 7.8 billion. By 2050, the UN estimates that this will balloon to between 9.4 and 10.1 billion. Climate change solutions are tied to population; when a population increases, more food and energy need to be produced.
Additionally, as populations in developing countries grow, so does their economic capacity, as more and more people can escape poverty and accumulate wealth.
Population growth accompanying economic expansion in developing countries is neither unnatural nor undesirable, although it will inevitably lead to higher individual carbon footprints and rises in nations’ overall emissions.
To mitigate the environmental impact of population growth, states can pursue social initiatives that promise equal access to healthcare and education opportunities regardless of gender.
The Ethiopian Herald March 14/2021
