Harness gender empowerment to achieve climate justice, sustainability, and equity

Abstract

In this Perspective, we argue that ending discrimination against girls and women is vital for climate action and inclusive sustainable development. Grave gender inequality persists across almost every society in the world, embedded in socio-cultural norms, practices, and policies that discriminate against females. These intersect with other demographic attributes such as age, ethnicity, and economic status and interweave deeply with patterns of unsustainability and environmental issues such as fishing, climate change, agriculture and forestry, energy access, and water and sanitation. Women and girls are 14 times more likely to die in a climate change-related disaster than men or boys, and females represent 80 % of people displaced by extreme weather events. Women and girls contribute to more than half of the agricultural labor force in low to middle income countries, but struggle with poverty given they are not the owners of land which they harvest and cultivate, with 90 % of them prohibited from access to resources and services. In fact, less than 1 percent of women and girls live in countries with high women's empowerment—although it is an indispensable and a catalytic mechanism of achieving sustainability outcomes. We call on energy and climate planners, practitioners, policymakers and scholars to better value and prioritize gender empowerment, particularly girls, compensate them for contributions, count them in their data collection, be accountable to them when implementing reforms, and encourage greater roles for them positions of political and civic leadership.