Climate Change and Climate Essay

Mother Earth

Is Climate Change an Issue of Women's Rights?

For the most of the world, climate change is one of the most pressing issues on the radar. It has become increasingly clear that anthropogenic activities are influencing the Earth's precious energy balance for quite some time; since industrialization primarily. While the evidence has been mounting and the science has become increasingly sophisticated, it has also become clear that the impacts of climate change are not going to be equitably distributed throughout the entire world's population -- everyone will feel the impacts of climate change, but some groups will feel them significantly more than others. For example, the third-world countries are expected to feel the deepest impacts through drought and increased water issues, but we are also seeing water problems in advanced nations evident by any of the news related to Flint, MI. This analysis will look specifically at the problem of climate change and how it will impact women's rights from a feminist perspective. While it is clear that no one is completely immune from the effects of climate change, many have argued that women will be more subjected to some of the worst effects that are predicted to result from our negligence to effectively deal with one of humanities greatest challenges.

Climate Change Background

In the last couple of decades, the reporting on the climate change phenomenon has become increasingly alarming as time has passed. as the science has narrowed in on a more accurate picture of what the consequences of anthropogenic warming will entail; a bleak picture emerges that goes far beyond the original predictions as the eminent crisis which is predicted to emerge hits much closer to home -- in the backyards of coast urban dwellers in some of the greatest cities on the planet:

" . . . glaciers in the western Antarctic, undermined by the warmer seas of a hotter world, were collapsing, and their disappearance "now appears to be unstoppable." The melting of these great ice sheets would make seas rise by at least four feet -- ultimately, possibly 12 -- more than enough to flood cities from New York to Tokyo to Mumbai (Mann, 2014)."

Earth's climate has always changed, but the alarming rate at which it is happening has caused concern among the scientific community.

Since the industrial revolution, the fossil fuels bestowed upon the earth millions of years ago have been broken down in mere hours on the cosmic calendar. This is due to the drastically increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, caused by powering our technological civilization. On record, the amount of CO2 jumped from 280 ppm to around 405 ppm, with an annual increase of three gigatons. As this concentration amplifies, so does the temperature of our planet -- 6 years within the past decade being the hottest in history.For those in the know, climate change is even a scarier prospect given our current representatives have pledged their disagreement with the trends very existence and have dismissed it as a "Chinese hoax".

Climate Change Impacts by Gender

Gender roles are still largely prevalent in nearly all societies on the planet; especially in the developing nations. One example can be provided by the residents of Nwadjahane, a village in southern Mozambique, have already seen some of the changes that are expected to come with global warming. Since the 1980s, droughts and floods have hit the village harder and more frequently than before. But the villagers adapted, forming farming associations that placed collective responsibility on finding potential solutions to climate disasters, such as planting new, drought-resistant species of rice, corn, and cassava (Diep, 2015). In fact, there have been four ways the consequences of climate change differ by gender:

• Farmers with small holdings in Africa will be among those most severely affected by global warming; and most of those farmers happen to be women: Women make up 45% to 80% of the food-producing workforce in developing countries

• Around the world, women and girls are the most likely to be responsible for gathering water and fuel for fires…