September, 23 2014, 02:00pm EDT
Paper Released Calling for Climate Justice - With Gender Justice
Today, world leaders will attend a United Nations climate summit to present proposals to reduce emissions. This comes just days after the largest climate march ever and as reports show that harmful emissions reached new peaks in 2013.
NEW YORK
Today, world leaders will attend a United Nations climate summit to present proposals to reduce emissions. This comes just days after the largest climate march ever and as reports show that harmful emissions reached new peaks in 2013.
In preparation, MADRE, an international women's human rights organization, has released a new paper (PDF available here) addressing political leaders, funders and activists. It calls for these key players to recognize the ways that women worldwide are differently impacted by climate change.
Yifat Susskind, MADRE Executive Director, said today, "This paper is the product of decades of dialogue with our grassroots partners, women who live on the frontlines of climate change. And worldwide, women are creating the local, sustainable solutions that must be a centerpiece of climate policy. That's why we have charted specific mechanisms for grassroots women's voices to be integrated into the global climate justice movement and into climate policy at all levels."Click here to read the MADRE paper, titled "Climate Justice Calls for Gender Justice: Putting Principles into Action" (PDF).
- Embedded within the threat of climate change is the opportunity to reimagine our economies and societies in keeping with the balance of nature and in support of human rights. Realizing that opportunity requires a gender analysis.
- The voices of women, particularly rural women, are seen as peripheral and routinely excluded from policymaking--despite the visionary solutions they offer. The result is climate programs and policies that further marginalize women, undermine human rights generally and reinforce assumptions that created the climate crisis in the first place.
- Climate justice activists need support from funders and government allies to contest the shrinking space available for civil society within the UN system, the key site of global policymaking. Reclaiming this space would allow for the gridlock of global climate policies to be re-envisioned--not as a cause for retreat, but as a strategic opening to press for better, rights-based policies.
Available for interview:
Yifat Susskind, MADRE Executive Director, works with women's human rights activists from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, creating programs to address violence against women, economic development, armed conflict, climate change and more.
MADRE is an international women's human rights organization that partners with community-based women's groups to advance women's human rights, challenge injustice and create social change in contexts of war, conflict, disaster and their aftermath. MADRE advocates for a world in which all people enjoy individual and collective human rights; natural resources are shared equitably and sustainably; women participate effectively in all aspects of society; and all people have a meaningful say in policies that affect their lives. For more information about MADRE, visit www.madre.org.
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