10/03/2020

Reporter’s Toolbox: New Resources Help Improve Climate Coverage

Society of Environmental Journalists - Susan Joy Hassol

Jeremy Hoffman, chief scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, shows journalists sea surface temperature data at an October 2019 climate workshop hosted by Climate Matters in the Newsroom, the Science Museum of Virginia and three Virginia universities. Photo: Courtesy Science Museum of Virginia.
Susan Joy Hassol
Susan Joy Hassol is the director of Climate Communication and has led the training of 400 journalists on climate issues.
She was the writer of the first three U.S. National Climate Assessments and an HBO documentary, “Too Hot Not To Handle.”
Susan has testified before the U.S. Senate, and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Climate change, once considered a problem for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present. Its impacts are affecting us here and now.
Americans are increasingly concerned and want to hear more about it in their news. A Yale and George Mason University survey reveals that 69 percent of Americans are worried about global warming, a dramatic 16 percent increase over the past five years.
But while they are increasingly concerned about it, two-thirds of Americans say they only hear about it in the media once a month or less.
Equally problematic to the paucity of climate reporting is how most climate stories are framed — as a political, scientific or environmental issue, rather than as a threat to our health, safety, security, food, water, energy and more.
Nor is there much coverage of solutions — of what people are doing about climate change. There is also a general failure among network television and local news outlets to connect extreme weather events to human-caused climate change, according to analyses by Media Matters for America and Public Citizen.
While heatwaves, wildfires and hurricanes receive a great deal of coverage, very little of that coverage makes the linkages to climate change clear.

 Climate reporting picks up steam
But a new day is dawning in climate journalism.
TV networks and newspapers are establishing more regular coverage and some are building their climate teams. An initiative led by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation called Covering Climate Now includes hundreds of media outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of more than a billion people.
As climate reporting is picking up steam, excellent new resources are available to journalists who are tackling the greatest story of our time.
 As climate reporting is picking up steam, excellent new resources are available to journalists who are tackling the greatest story of our time. 
Climate Matters in the Newsroom, supported by the National Science Foundation, for instance, provides free, weekly, localized climate reporting resources in English and Spanish, delivered directly to your inbox. These include broadcast-ready graphics and story ideas you can make your own by adding local context.
You can also search the media library of past story packages and graphics by topics and keywords for your media market and sign up to receive them weekly.
The Climate Matters in the Newsroom team also offers workshops for journalists at professional society meetings — including at Society of Environmental Journalists’ conferences in 2018 and 2019 — as well as with university partners in the Southeast United States. The workshops feature experts in climate science and solutions as well as journalists doing exemplary local climate reporting.

Avoid scientific jargon
A popular session in these workshops involves language tips for those covering climate, based on my three decades of experience in this arena.
David Boraks of WFAE in Charlotte, N.C., at center, talks with fellow journalists as they practice using new resources to tell local climate stories at a September 2019 climate reporting workshop. Photo: Courtesy Climate Matters
For example, I remind journalists to avoid adopting scientists’ jargon in their reporting. For instance, don’t say “anthropogenic,” say “human-caused.” Avoid “spatial” and “temporal;” instead use “space” and “time.”
I also stress that some words mean different things to scientists than they do to the public. For example, “aerosol” means “spray can” to the public, while scientists use it to refer to tiny atmospheric particles. Scientists use the term “enhance” to mean “increase,” while to the public, it means to improve (so the “enhanced greenhouse effect” sounds like a good thing).
And when scientists describe a vicious cycle in the climate system, whereby warming causes more warming, they use the term “positive feedback,” which to the public sounds like a good thing, as does anything associated with the word “positive.”
For more on the language of climate change, see my TEDx talk, articles in Eos and Physics Today, and my piece on communicating the linkages between extreme weather events called (Un)Natural Disasters, in the World Meteorological Organization Bulletin.

Connect the dots
Another great new resource helps journalists connect the dots between extreme weather events and climate change. These “Quick Facts for Any Story,” created by Climate Communication and SciLine, summarize the latest science on the linkages between climate change and heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires, and torrential rain and flooding.
Each “Quick Facts” begins with a top-line message that can be used in any story to make a scientifically supported connection between extreme weather events and global warming. Each also includes a list of key facts on the linkages with references to peer-reviewed studies, pitfalls to avoid and experts you can contact for quotes.
More of these are coming soon. And SciLine connects journalists with credible, articulate scientific experts on any topic, on deadline, for free.
Reporters are also commonly faced with oft-repeated myths about climate change, and Skeptical Science is a great resource for debunking them. The website provides both basic and intermediate rebuttals to all the most common talking points of those who reject the science of global warming.
And finally, my Climate Communication website offers a highly selective collection of resources including other websites, articles, reports and videos. Some of my favorites include Energy Innovation, Project Drawdown, Climate Interactive and the Yale Climate Opinion Maps.
Journalists have a great opportunity to report creatively on climate change. The public is particularly hungry to hear more about solutions to the climate crisis, including the policies and technologies that work to reduce climate-warming emissions and draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Reporters can find timely and accessible information at the resources above to enhance their ability to tell personal, local climate stories that matter to their audiences.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: ,

Morrison Government Cuts Funds To Australian-German Energy Transition Hub

RenewEconomy - 



The Morrison government will strip funding from an Australian-German research collaboration charged with mapping a pathway for the countries to transition to a zero emissions energy system.

The unexpected move undermines recent announcements from the Morrison government that it will focus on the development of a ‘technology roadmap’ as an alternative to increasing national greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, cutting funding to research that would inform what such a roadmap could look like.

As reported by the Guardian, the Morrison government will renege on the commitment to fund the research, originally instigated by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, ceasing government funding of the collaboration two years early.

The Energy Transition Hub was launched by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and Angela Merkel in 2017, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, and was supposed to run until 2022. The axing of funding is expected to deprive the research collaboration of approximately $2 million in funding.

The federal government was to provide $4 million over a five-year period, contributing to the $20 million overall budget of the Hub.

To date, the Hub has published a range of research papers exploring the impact of different policy mechanisms on the electricity sector, provided substantial submissions to the design of the National Energy Guarantee and supported the development of the popular OpenNEM platform, that provides an accessible portal for real-time data from the National Electricity Market.

The funding cut follows a speech by federal energy minister Angus Taylor during which the he outlined further details of the government’s proposed ‘technology roadmap’ for new energy technologies.

Taylor used the speech to detail how the Morrison government would shift its focus to emerging technologies, saying that support for new technologies like hydrogen fuels and carbon capture and storage were more important than providing additional support for already commercially viable technologies like wind and solar generation.

But a week later, the Morrison government has undermined its own messaging by cutting funding that sought to directly answer the question of which types of technologies and how regulatory systems should be reformed to support a transition to a new low emissions energy system.

The reasons for the funding cuts remain uncertain, but a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said that there was the potential for the funds to be redirected to other collaborations between Australia and Germany in clean energy technology development.

“The objectives of the Australian-German Energy Transition Hub were to strengthen Australia’s bilateral relationship with Germany and to better coordinate investments in research into energy transition,” a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said.

“Funding was sourced from DFAT’s bilateral program for cooperation with Germany. Remaining funding will be reallocated to support our strategic priorities with Germany and other European partners more effectively, including potential collaboration with Germany on hydrogen.”

The Energy Transition Hub is a collaboration between Australian universities The University of Melbourne and The Australian National University, and German research institutions that included the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Münster University’s Centre of Applied Economic Research, and the Mercator Research Institute of Global Commons and Climate Change.

The Hub had also established a number of collaborative partnerships with other research institutions and universities in both Australia and Germany, including the University of Technology Sydney, RMIT University, Murdoch University, Monash University and the University of Tasmania.

The Hub focused on four areas key to a transition to a low carbon economy, including the design of energy market reforms and regulations, the technical challenges of transitioning to a high-renewables electricity supply, the deployment of negative emissions technologies and identifying export opportunities.

The most recent published work by the Energy Transition Hub examined how Australia could co-operate with Indonesia on the regional development of new renewable energy projects and how the Australian economy could benefit by capturing some of this emerging market.

Germany is significantly more progressed in the transition to renewables and reducing emissions across its economy compared to Australia. By 2019, Germany’s electricity grid was supplied by more than 40 per cent from renewable energy sources, predominantly from wind and solar projects.

Germany had also cut its national greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30 per cent since 1990, albeit short of its goal of reducing emissions by 40 per cent by 2020.

By comparison, Australia was expected to reach 27 per cent renewable electricity in 2020 and has succeeded in reducing its national emissions by just 12 per cent from 1990 levels.

Australian greenhouse gas emissions have flatlined under successive Coalition governments, and are just 1 per cent below 2013 levels when the Abbott government was first elected.

The chair of the research hub is Australian economist professor Ross Garnaut, with the Hub’s co-directors being Associate Professor Malte Meinshausen of the University of Melbourne and professor Frank Jotzo of the Australian National University.

The directors of the Energy Transition Hub are currently reviewing the next steps for the collaboration and will provide further comment when a way forward is known.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , ,

Knitters Chronicle Climate Change One Stitch At A Time

New York Times - Laura M. Holson

Volunteers use different colors of yarn to make “temperature scarves” that serve as fashionable records of a warming world.
Rolls of yarn at the Yarnery in Saint Paul, Minn. Credit...Michael Spear for The New York Times
In January 2017, days after President Trump moved into the White House, Justin Connelly was at his home in Anacortes, Wash., bemoaning the fate of scientists.
In speeches, the president called global warning a hoax. He vowed to disband the Environmental Protection Agency and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Worse, Mr. Connelly feared the Trump administration would purge climate information from government databases.
He wondered: Would scientists resort to using chisels and stone to preserve their findings? Or, perhaps, stitch them into tapestries?
Mr. Connelly’s friend, Emily McNeill, worked in a knitting store. The two decided (along with Mr. Connelly’s then wife, Marissa) to assemble a kit of colored yarns that knitters could use to create scarves that documented local temperature changes all year.
They would access data reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which knitters would represent in colors from sunny yellow to fiery red and icy blue. Mr. Connelly and his colleagues called the endeavor the Tempestry Project and, since then, they have sold more than 1,500 kits worldwide.
“We didn’t want this data lost forever,” he said.
Temperature scarves, as they are commonly called, have more than fashion appeal. Laura Guertin, a professor of earth science at Penn State Brandywine in Media, Pa., uses hers as a teaching aid in the classroom. Last year, Erika Zambello, who works for Audubon Florida, a conservation group, began organizing volunteers to record temperature changes at U.S. National Parks.
People knitting temperature scarves and other items at The Yarnery. Credit...Michael Spear for The New York Times
So far, scarves have been knitted on behalf of 30 national parks, she said, including Glacier Bay and the Grand Canyon. More are on the way. Even Larry Fink, the chief executive of the investment firm BlackRock, recently wore a temperature scarf at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to call attention to the climate crisis.
“It’s a way to start a conversation about climate change that is different,” Ms. Zambello said. “Charts and graphs are fine, but they appeal to an analytic mind-set. This way you can talk about what the colors mean.”
No one can pinpoint exactly when the first temperature scarf emerged but many knitters point to the popularity of the “sky scarf” in the early 2010s.
Lea Redmond, a conceptual artist from Oakland, Calif., began knitting scarves in 2011 that reflected the weather. She did not intend it as a political statement on global warming but a reminder to appreciate nature. “It was about falling in love with the world you live in,” she said. “And if you love it, you will take care of it.”
Knitters stitch one row per day, matching the color to the daily temperature calculated by NOAA.
Credit...Michael Spear for The New York Times		 A reference card matches yarn colors with temperatures.
Credit...Michael Spear for The New York Times
Scientists, though, had other ideas. Quilts and blankets that track rainfall, air pollution and temperature have been around for awhile.
Ed Hawkins, a British climate scientist, came up with “warming stripes” in 2018, a series of lines of red, orange, white and blue, which he printed on ties, leggings and flip-flops as a visual reminder of long-term warming trends. In 2017, Dr. Guertin was inspired to crochet temperature tapestries to share with her students after seeing a quilt on Twitter.
She brought her tapestries to a class she teaches for nonscience majors. “It was a new way of looking at climate data,” she said.
Her students seemed to relate. One student recalled playing baseball outside in winter. Dr. Guertin said the student’s memory was triggered by the unusually warm colors in the February portion of the tapestry. “I don’t even have to say anything,” she said. “They just understand.”
Dr. Guertin now crochets baby blankets for friends, chronicling the daily temperature of a newborn’s first three months. “They show them to their friends and talk about it,” she said. “I’m turning them into science educators and they don’t even know it.”
The scarves can have different patterns, colors and textures. But there are a few basic concepts. Knitters knit one row per day, matching the color to the daily temperature calculated by NOAA. Some of them use beads to depict rain. Others add a strand of silver yarn for snow.
Scott Rohr is an owner of The Yarnery in St. Paul, Minn. He is concerned about the market for American wool, which, he said, is affected by climate change related to issues of water consumption and land use. The Yarnery offers kits for knitters, with prices ranging from $55 to $125. So far, it has sold about 400, he said.
Ms. Zambello was given a Tempestry kit in 2018. “It excited me in a way no other thing had in the craft space,” she said. “I immediately wanted to set up a Tempestry for the national park system, to show what we knew was changing.”
Whenever a scarf is finished, it is taken to a park and photographed there. Then they are posted on a website Ms. Zambello maintains. She said she hoped to turn the project into a book, with the proceeds donated to preserving national parks. “I want to work together to tell a bigger story,” she said.
Mr. Connelly said there was another byproduct to knitting a warming world that can’t be measured: calm.
“Clearly climate change is a concern and part of the zeitgeist of anxieties today,” he said. “Knitting is a comforting and meditative way to channel all those anxieties.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , ,

09/03/2020

(AU) Climate Change Made Australia's Devastating Bushfires More Likely, Scientists Confirm

TIME - Amy Gunia



Human-caused climate change made the bushfires that ravaged Australia during the most recent fire season more likely, according to a study published Wednesday.
Researchers at the World Weather Attribution consortium say that climate change increased the risk of the weather conditions that drove the fires by at least 30%.
The full influence of climate change was likely even greater, the study says, since models tend to underestimate trends in extreme heat.
The coalition of scientists from around the world looked at bushfire conditions in southeastern Australia using a measurement called the Fire Weather Index, which takes into account temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind to determine fire risk.
The group also analyzed extreme temperatures and drought, and found that human activity doubled the chances of heatwaves. They did not find significant trends related to drought conditions.
The study “nails down the linkage of the bushfires to climate change,” says David Bowman, director of the Fire Centre Research Hub at the University of Tasmania, who was not involved in the analysis.
“Probably the study is conservative,” he tells TIME via email.
Bushfires are an annual occurrence in Australia, but the most recent fire season, which was intensified by drought conditions and unprecedented heat, was one of the worst in the country’s history. Last year was the hottest and driest on record in Australia, according to a report released in January by the country’s Bureau of Meteorology.
The fires, which ripped across large parts of the country in 2019 and early 2020, scorched more than 44 million acres and killed more than two dozen people. Over a billion animals may have died in the blaze, according to an estimate by an ecologist at the University of Sydney.
The bushfire crisis reignited debate over climate change in the country, with some Australians calling for their government to take a tougher stance on the issue.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has acknowledged that climate change may be impacting the bushfires, but he has rejected the link between his country’s emissions and the fires.
“To suggest that with just 1.3% of global emissions, that Australia doing something differently, more or less, would have changed the fire outcome this season…I don’t think that stands up to any credible scientific evidence at all,” he said in a radio interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Links

Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , ,

(AU) Climate Change Affected Australia’s Wildfires, Scientists Confirm

New York Times - Henry Fountain

The Dunn Road fire burned in southeastern Australia in January. Credit...Sam Mooy/Getty Images


Confirming what had been widely suspected, researchers have found that human-caused climate change had an impact on Australia’s recent devastating wildfires, making the extremely high-risk conditions that led to widespread burning at least 30 percent more likely than in a world without global warming.The researchers said the full influence of climate change on the fires was probably much greater, but that climate simulations, which form the basis of this type of study, underestimate trends in extreme heat in Australia compared with real-world observational data.
“We’re very sure that is a definite number we can scientifically defend,” said the lead author of the study, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, referring to the 30 percent figure.
But the real influence of climate change on the recent fire season in Australia is greater, he added. “We think it is much larger than that, but we can’t prove that until we find out why there is this discrepancy between the observations and the climate models.”
The research is the latest in a growing subfield of climate science: attribution studies that look for links, or the lack of them, between climate change and specific weather-related events, often within weeks of an event. The studies usually compare models of current conditions to those of the world around 1900, before large-scale emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases began.The Australian study was conducted, like many others, by an international group of scientists called World Weather Attribution. It was made public on Wednesday before being peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal, but scientists with the group said it followed what are now well-established practices for such studies.
Record warmth and dryness last year led to a severe wildfire outbreak in Australia, with an estimated 50 million acres burned, including more than 16 million acres in the southeastern part of the country, which was most affected. All told, at least 34 people were killed and nearly 6,000 homes and other structures were destroyed.
Dr. van Oldenborgh said the study was the most complicated the group had ever conducted because wildfires are a complex phenomenon affected not only by heat and precipitation but also by wind, humidity and other factors.
The researchers looked at the influence of climate change using a measurement standard called the Fire Weather Index, which takes all those factors into account to determine the risk of wildfire in a specific area at a specific time. They calculated the index values across southeastern Australia during the peak burning period of December and January.
Those values were extremely high, and were 30 percent more likely to be that high now than before 1900. Put another way, the researchers said, such high values are about four times more likely now than they were before.
The study also separately analyzed the influence of climate change on the extreme heat that Australia experienced during the fire season, and on the lack of rainfall during the same period. It found that extremely hot weeks like the fourth week of December, the country’s hottest on record, were at least twice as likely now than before 1900. The analysis of lack of rainfall found no significant trend related to climate change.
Benjamin M. Sanderson, a researcher at the European Center for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computing in Toulouse, France, who was not involved in the study, said the findings were reasonable.
“You can quite solidly say that extreme high temperatures play a role in fire risk,” he said. “And anthropogenic influences are easily detectable in terms of extreme temperatures.”
But he agreed with the researchers that wildfire is complex, and said the Australian disaster exposed the weaknesses of today’s climate models: they have difficulty drawing the connections between climate and fire.
“There are some events on the ground that have huge human and ecological impacts,” he said. “This was one of them. You look at what came out of the models and realize they were not very good at representing the severity of this process.”
Dr. Sanderson, together with a colleague, Rosie A. Fisher, wrote a commentary in Nature last month arguing that improvements in modeling are needed to better capture the severity of wildfires as they evolve in a changing climate.
“This is really a case where the real world is beginning to throw events at us before science is realized,” he added. “Which is a scary place to be.”
Credit...Pamela Schramm, via Reuters


Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , ,

(AU) Climate Change Made Australia’s Devastating Fire Season 30% More Likely

Nature - Nicky Phillips

A fire engine surrounded by bush-fire smoke in February near the town of Bumbalong, south of Canberra, Australia. Credit: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty
The extreme fires that razed more than 18 million hectares of bush in Australia late last year were significantly more likely because of human-induced climate change, say an international group of climate scientists who have analysed the disaster.
The researchers’ results, released today, suggest that human-induced climate change increased the risk of the weather conditions that drove the fires by at least 30%.
Australia experiences bush fires almost every summer, but the latest event was unprecedented in its severity and scale. The World Weather Attribution (WWA) project sought to measure global warming’s contribution to the dangerous bush-fire conditions experienced in southeast Australia over several months. Fires in the region were particularly severe, and killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes.
“This is a highly conservative assessment,” says David Karoly, a climate scientist based in Melbourne at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation who was not involved in the analysis.

Future concerns
The group assessed bush-fire conditions with a index that tracks ‘fire weather’. This calculates the chance of fire in a location based on variables such as temperature, humidity, wind and rainfall. The analysis did not consider non-weather factors, such as how a fire started.
The researchers also say the result is conservative. Models have mostly underestimated the rise in temperatures that has been observed since the Industrial Revolution, says Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, and co-author of the WWA analysis.
Even accounting for model uncertainties, Karoly says that the fire conditions experienced in Australia this summer are a baseline for what is possible in the world’s current climate, which has warmed by around 1ºC compared with pre-industrial levels. But conditions are going to get a lot worse as the planet warms by another degree or two, as is expected, he says.
The team also examined whether climate change influenced two of the components that are used to measure fire-weather: extreme temperatures and drought. The results, which have not been peer reviewed, suggest that while human activity doubled the chance of heatwave conditions during the fires, the models did not show that climate change contributed to the extremely dry conditions that Australia experienced.

Observed trend
In a second analysis that used real-world observations, rather than models, the WWA project looked at changes in observed fire risk since 1979. The researchers found that the likelihood of the extreme fire risk experienced in 2019–20 has increased fourfold — and possibly by more than ninefold — between 1900 and today. The reason that the observed trend is higher than the modelled trend is because factors other than climate change, such as changes in land use, might have also contributed to increased fire risk, say the authors.
Climate change definitely played a part in the catastrophic fires, says Andy Pittman, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. But he questions whether the modelling results are accurate and meaningful given that models have a limited ability to simulate fire events. For instance, models can’t simulate the drought that much of Australia has experienced over the past two and a half years or the huge amount of fuel that fed the fires — probably two major influencing factors of the event, says Pittman.
“I’ve used climate models for 30 years and I think they are hugely valuable, but this sort of study uses them in ways that I think are beyond their capability,” he says. He also thinks that fire indices, such as the fire-weather index, overemphasize temperature’s effect on fire-weather.
Friederike Otto, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author of the WWA analysis, acknowledges that models struggle to simulate temperature extremes or droughts at a regional and local scale, but the results are conservative compared with those based on observations. “If we wait until we have perfect models, we will have a 4 ºC [warmer] world or more until we start saying anything about the real-world impacts of climate change today,” she says.
Otto also notes that such analyses help to identify problems with the models, which allows the science to evolve. “If we would continue to just do projections but never test the models against real-world events we would make slower progress. That, in my view, is the true power of event attribution,” she says.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: ,

08/03/2020

Why The Climate Crisis Is Harming Women More Than Men

British Telegraph - Helen Pankhurst

This weekend's International Women's Day is an opportunity for women to take a stance against arguably their biggest man-made challenge
A portrait of Greta Thunberg, painted by schoolchildren and artists in Yorkshire to celebrate International Women's Day. Credit: Ben Lack
Helen Pankhurst
Dr Helen Pankhurst CBE is an international development and women's rights activist and writer.
She is currently CARE International's senior advisor working in the UK and Ethiopia.
Dr Pankhurst is the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, who were both leaders in the British Suffragette movement.
Every year, on 8th March, International Women’s Day brings an opportunity for feminists to celebrate how far we have come in terms of women’s rights, to speak out about the most pressing issues rising to the top of the social change agenda – and to work out ways to tackle these together.

Last year, sexual harassment in the workplace was high on the news agenda. That’s why the women’s movement around the world joined together to demand a global law addressing sexual harassment and violence in the workplace. And we succeeded: a new global convention to end violence, harassment and abuse in the world of work was agreed. Work continues in every country to ensure the convention is ratified, to ensure that from now on, there will be nowhere to hide for the Harvey Weinsteins of this world: their time is up.

We achieved this massive victory because thousands, even millions, of women and girls – a global force – spoke up and demanded significant change. It shows that solidarity really does matter, and can achieve great things. And right now, it is this belief that is bringing together people all over the world to speak up and demand action on the biggest challenge facing the world: the climate crisis. In 2020, this is the dominant agenda, the issue emerging as the greatest concern to women and girls worldwide.

No-one can fail to have been inspired by the courage and determination of climate change activists. Their youthful ambition, their clear focus, the magnitude of their reach. They are shaking things up, they are winning hearts and changing minds. Youngsters, right around the world, are teaching adults what matters. Their movement is fresh, their tactics innovative.

And who are the leading voices of this movement? Young people, particularly young girls. Many activists, motivated by the crisis facing our planet, have felt connected to and drawn inspiration from the women’s movement, including from the Suffragettes. They are speaking up on what matters to them, making sure their voices are heard, and making their voices count.
On International Women's Day, Dr Helen Pankhurst is calling for women to work together in the face of the climate crisis
On International Women’s day 2020, #March4Women – the global movement for gender equality – will be bringing the links between feminism and environmentalism to the fore. This is partly because of similarities between the two in terms of activism resulting from frustration with the status quo and lessons around tactics linked to direct action. It is also because women and girls are disproportionately affected by the devastating impacts of climate change.

Women and girls are the ones who trudge further and further, mile after back-breaking mile, to fetch water when their community is ravaged by drought. They are the ones who take responsibility for looking after the young, the old, the disabled.

When pressures increase on a family, it is the girls who miss out on school in order to help out in the home and on the land. Daughters are dispatched to early marriage when there are too many mouths to feed.

When regions are flattened by cyclones and deluged with floods, when families lose their homes and their livelihoods – when all is lost, women and girls are sometimes forced to turn to ‘transactional sex’ to feed their families. It is they who are exposed to the risk of rape and sexual exploitation in the refugee and displaced people’s camps. It is they that human traffickers prey on – their vulnerability increased at times of crisis.

We can argue about the extent to which the climate emergency is man-made or not. And I mean man-made in its literal sense of ‘made by men’ – because we could look at who is making the decisions at a national and international level in the structures of economic, political and social power. However, whether ‘man made’ or not, there is no disputing that the climate crisis magnifies each and every brutal facet of gender inequality. We cannot achieve climate justice without gender justice.

If there is hope for the future, it lies in the voices of those who stand up to say 'this is not good enough and we can do better'. We need to reach a tipping point where those in power move from empty words to deeds. And that exactly is what we must create, and what we are creating, right now.

This International Women’s day – in advance of the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow – we are highlighting that there will be no climate justice without gender justice. We are calling for both climate justice and gender justice – the two go hand in hand. Join us.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: ,
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative