As the world grapples with the ever-growing challenges of the crisis, women-led youth groups in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Latin America are fighting for climate justice for all, including the most vulnerable communities.
These young trailblazers are painfully aware that the crisis isn’t gender-neutral; it has a woman’s face. Women and girls pay the highest price for the impacts of extreme weather events, which amplify existing gender inequalities and pose unique threats to their livelihoods, health, and safety; they are 14 times more likely to die in climate disasters than men and boys and make up 80% of climate refugees.
To Build Resilience is To Prevail
This is why climate change resilience and gender equality are intrinsically linked, according to Iqra Bellani of the Pakistan-based Madat Balochistan – an Indigenous and women-led organization seeking to build climate change resilience in the northeastern province of Balochistan.
Today, this arid, mineral-rich region, often overshadowed by political unrest and insurgency, grapples with extreme heat waves, water scarcity, and climate-driven livelihood losses. As the scorched land fails to produce crops for Balochistan's mostly farming population, women and girls face increasing social and economic hardships.
While resilience against climate impacts won’t be built overnight, investing in it will make an immense difference. “But to build resilience you need to understand the vulnerabilities and varying impacts of the climate crisis,” Iqra says. Accordingly, Madat Balochistan has been offering informal climate change education – including how to grow climate-resistant crops – to hundreds of women and girls at an academy that’s in the process of becoming solar-powered, while also financially supporting a handful of students.
“We’re empowering them (women and girls) to understand what this “buzzword” – climate crisis – means because we want them to be able to speak up about how climate impacts affect their lives and further support them to develop practical solutions for their communities,” Iqra says. “Because they know what’s best for them”.
Making Their Voices Heard
Women challenging the status quo is also top on the list of priorities of 30-year-old Gozde Ones, of RAWSA Alliance for African and Arab States. This regional women-led organization aims to empower young women to participate in the climate change response agenda, as well as economic reforms and political transformations in their regions.
The MENA region still predominantly depends on agriculture for income and sustenance, and women and girls face hurdles accessing food, employment, and land ownership due to caregiving responsibilities and patriarchal, gender-entrenched norms, says Gozde. “The largest gender inequalities in access to land are found in North Africa and the Near East, where only around 5 percent of all landholders are women,” she notes. “They are paid less, and girls often cannot access education because they need to fetch water for their households.”
In Egypt, where drought and food scarcity are projected to increase tenfold by 2050 due to extreme temperatures and water stresses, more girls are set to drop out of school to make the perilous trek to collect water. “And during this journey, they become victims of gender-based violence,” Gozde stresses. Every 1°C rise in global temperature is associated with a 4.7 percent increase in intimate partner violence, a recent UN study has found.
Education on gender equality and climate justice literacy is key to radical change, according to Gozde. During a recent two-day event in Egypt, the group trained women environmental advocates on the impacts of the climate crisis on women; how droughts affect water scarcity and food security, and how women and girls bear the brunt as they travel to collect water, all the while being exposed to gender-based violence.
The advocates were then deployed into their communities to explain the gendered impacts of the climate crisis on women's lives.
“Without this knowledge, women would think that this is their fate. With this knowledge, women start to question the status quo and they realize there are some solutions to these impacts of gender-based violence and climate crisis,” says Gozde.
Going Global
Women-led climate justice groups are also making waves around the world, connecting people and challenging old narratives about climate change policies that have been shaped by countries from the so-called Global North – which is responsible for most of the harmful emissions feeding the crisis. “We see the climate crisis as the crisis of perception and connection,” says Amanda Rossini from Latinas for Climate, a regional network of feminist climate justice activists in Latin America.
Women in vulnerable communities across South America, including Indigenous women and women with disabilities, are reeling from the same adverse impacts of the climate crisis, says Amanda. Be it climate-change-induced displacement or homelessness. Yet, their voices have been largely absent from the mainstream, and they had little to no opportunity to connect with counterparts from other countries.
That changed when Latinas for Climate began organizing and attending in-person ecofeminist gatherings, allowing young leaders from Chile through Colombia to Peru to compare notes, exchange experiences, and sometimes shed a tear or two together.
Thanks to this exchange of knowledge, Latinas for Climate prepared an impactful social media campaign explaining the many shared experiences of women grappling with the climate crisis in the region.
They also took their message to COP, the international climate change summit, says Amanda, and it was loud and clear: “We are victims but we are also change makers. We are connecting and pulling resources together to resist and bring about change in our communities”.
No Climate Justice Without Women
In every corner of the world hardest hit by the climate crisis, young women are spearheading climate movements and shedding light on one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity today. From the arid fields of Balochistan in South Asia to the water-stressed villages of Egypt in the MENA region, and the storm-battered coastlines of Brazil in Latin America, these women are turning their lived experiences into leadership and solutions for their communities.
Because they’ve been at the frontlines of the climate crisis, women are uniquely positioned to help find ways to mitigate the causes of global warming and adapt to its impacts on the ground, the UN says. Madat Balochistan, RAWSA Alliance MENA, and Latinas for Climate are living proof that this is the case. They’re not just survivors. They‘re agents of change, working to address the gendered impacts of the climate crisis from the ground up through resilience, innovation, and solidarity.
To see more of the incredible work these youth leaders are doing, follow them on social media and check out their websites:
Madat Balochistan
RAWSA Alliance for African and Arab States
Latinas for Climate