– population report
A binding international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is what is expected from the climate talks which kicked off in Copenhagen last week, but just last month the State of the World Population report called on leaders to factor in the human and gender dimensions of every aspect of the problem.
The 2009 report, ‘Facing a changing world: women, population and climate’, concluded that climate change agreements and national policies are more likely to succeed in the long run if they take into account population dynamics, the relations between the sexes, and women’s well-being and access to services and opportunities. It said that slower population growth, for example, would help build social resilience to climate change’s impacts and would contribute to a reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in the future.
According to the report, which is published by the United Nations Population Fund, most of the debate about climate change today has revolved around countries’ relative responsibilities for limiting the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and for funding efforts to shift to low-carbon energy and other technologies. In the forward to the report, UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid points to critical questions being raised such as what is the best approach for reducing carbon emissions and who should shoulder the financial responsibility for addressing current and future climate change.
Obaid said such questions are critically important, adding, “But also important are fundamental questions about how climate change will affect women, men, boys and girls differently around the world, and indeed within nations, and how individual behaviour can undermine or contribute to the global effort to cool our warming world.” She said too that any treaty emerging out of the December 2009 Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change “that helps people adapt to climate change and that harnesses women’s and men’s power to reverse the warming of the earth’s atmosphere would launch a genuinely effective long-term global strategy to deal with climate change.”
Generally, the 2009 report found that family planning, reproductive health care and gender relations could influence the future course of climate change and affect how humanity adapts to rising seas, worsening storms and severe droughts. It pointed out that the role of population growth in the increase of greenhouse-gas emissions is far from the only demographic linkage salient to climate change, adding that household composition is one such variable that affects the amount of greenhouse gases thrust into the atmosphere.
“Some evidence suggests that changes in age structure and geographic distribution—the trend toward living in cities, for example—may affect emissions growth. Population dynamics are likely to influence greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run. In the immediate future population dynamics will affect countries’ capacities to adapt to the impacts of climate change,” the report stated. It observed that women—particularly those in poor countries—will be affected differently than men by climate change. According to the report, women are among the most vulnerable to climate change, “partly because in many countries they make up a larger share of the agricultural work force and partly because they tend to have access to fewer income-earning opportunities”.
UNFPA said that given women’s significant engagement in food production in developing countries, the close connection between gender, farming and climate change deserves far more analysis than it currently receives. The report continued that because of greater poverty, less power over their own lives, less recognition of their economic productivity and their disproportionate burden in reproduction and child-raising, women face additional challenges as climate changes.
The report also suggested three areas of action to tackle the problem. Firstly, it stated that since global temperatures are already climbing, countries have to adapt to the changes and to anticipate those expected in the future. “Adaptation, however, is not something that donor countries, banks or corporations can somehow bequeath to developing countries,” the report said. It observed that while financing and the transfer of technology and knowledge are essential to the effort, successful and lasting adaptation must arise from the lives, experience and wisdom of those who are themselves adapting.
Secondly, the report said that immediate mitigation is required. It said that the push to build resilience to climate change cannot distract from the need to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible, starting now. Lastly, it noted that a long-term plan is needed, adding that even the critically needed early successes in reducing emissions will be a prelude to a task likely to preoccupy people for decades, even centuries.
