Women and Climate Change: Winners of the European Greens Essay Contest

Table of Contents

Jury Members

Forewords

Prize Winners

Meike Werner (1st place)
Klimawandel und Powerfrauen in Nicaragua – wie ökologische Landwirtschaft und Empowerment zur Anpassung beitragen können

Climate change and ‘power women’ in Nicaragua – how organic farming and empowerment can contribute to adaptation

Claudia Gimena Roa (2nd place)

Impactos de la crisis climática en la vida de las mujeres de la región de Santander, Colombia

Impact of the climate crisis on the lives of women in the region of Santander, Colombia

Irina Tasias i Compte (3rd place)

Mujer en lucha, naturaleza en paz

Women at war, nature at peace

Finalists

Fouad Khan

Nani, Khidr and the aesthetic bias of the universe – why gender inclusion matters

Krishma Sharma

Women and climate change – most affected yet least heard

Sabrina Regmi

Rural Nepalese women’s issues in climate change

Yeeshu Shukla

Enhancing community resilience through engaging women in the

climate sensitive Sunderbans delta of West Bengal, India 

Foreword

Nicole Kiil-Nielsen and Marije Cornelissen

Members of the European Parliament

Women: masters of adaptation

This inspiring essay collection not only appeals to your mind, it
also appeals to all your senses. It invokes images of chickens, geese
and pigs roaming between banana trees and colourful clothes lines in
Nicaragua, and of women stretching their hands up in despair, wishing
their palms could stop the acid rain from destroying their crops in
Nigeria. They invoke smells of beans simmering in large cooking pots and
banana chips frying in seething oil. They invoke the feeling of the
dangerously slippery hills of Nepal, across which women have to trek to
get water for their families. And they invoke the sound of a grandmother
whispering stories to her granddaughter about the wisdom of women in a
rural village in India, and of a father telling his daughter about the
struggle of fishermen against poverty and destruction of nature in
Colombia.

To our call for essays on women and climate change, many
contributions from all around the world were sent in. They make it
obvious that the level of awareness of this topic in developing
countries is much greater than in Europe. Across Africa, Asia and South
America, women are coping with the effects of climate change on an
everyday basis. And they do so in an admirable way.

Climate change basically requires two different courses of action;
mitigationto reduce emissions and stop further climate change on the one
hand, and adaptation to the effects of climate change that are already
felt on the other hand. In Europe and other developed parts of the
world, attention is mostly paid to the first. At all political levels
and at international conferences, mainly male politicians discuss
political policies to stop climate change. Hardly bothered by the
effects of climate change themselves, their discussion revolves around
percentages and technologies. Though essential, this discussion is only
half the story.

In the developing world, people are dealing with the effects of
climate change on an everyday basis. Mud slides, draughts, floods, acid
rain, lack of clean water, desertification, tropical storms and other
drastic changes to the weather pattern of the centuries before make
agriculture and fishery increasingly difficult. This makes life that
much harder for the poorest people in the world. And among them, women
are worst off. They are often the ones working the land and getting
water to feed their families, while they do not have control over the
land they work on or the major decisions about where and how to live.
Many of the essays show that women in developing countries have become
masters of adaptation, finding ways in which to toil the land under
changing conditions while also working on their own empowerment and
emancipation.

While mitigation of climate change seems a western, male-dominated
realm, adaptation to climate change seems the realm of women in
developing countries. It is high time that more attention is paid to
their hardships as well as their inspiring solutions. Gender, as often,
is the blind spot of the academic and political debate on climate
change, while gender has an impact on every policy related to climate
change and these policies impact the gender balance in their turn. It is
simply illogical to consider them separately.

You will find in this book the essays that made it to the final round
of the selection. They are very diverse, but they all concur on one
thing: gender equality and the fight against climate change are two
challenges that have to be tackled simultaneously, and urgently.

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