Remembering All Mothers on Mother's Day

By Naomi Brodkey, Program Assistant, Global Population and Environment Program

While moms in America are celebrated this Mother’s Day weekend, we should take time to recognize how climate disruption is making mothers' jobs much harder everywhere.

In many parts of the world, women continue to fill traditional roles as mothers and caregivers. They are often the first to rise to collect water and firewood, prepare food, and care for young children, but these already strenuous tasks are becoming ever more daunting due to unanticipated and continued climate disruption. In the 2009 United Nation’s Population Fund (UNFPA) “State of the World Population” publication, Leucadia, a rural Bolivian woman, tells of the dried streams from the Huayna Potosi glacier and the hours she now spends collecting water to prepare food and irrigate crops. For many, securing these resources is not just a struggle, but a fight. At a presentation about his newest book this week in Washington, D.C., author and doctor Paul Farmer quoted a Haitian woman who spoke of her daily struggle for survival as a fight to collect food, wood and water – for her 5 children.

The realities of climate disruption are well documented, as are the disproportionate effects that it has on women. United Nations WomenWatch’s “Women, Gender Equality and Climate Change” states, “The effects of climate change, including drought, uncertain rainfall and deforestation, make it harder to secure … resources. By comparison with men in poor countries, women face historical disadvantages, which include limited access to decision-making and economic assets that compound the challenges of climate change.” The unreliability of resources forces women like Leucadia to wake up even earlier and walk even further from home, spending more time collecting water and fuel – tasks which already comprise about 26 percent of their waking hours – rather than spending time with their children at home.

The Key to Sustainable Development in 2015 and Beyond

A health extension worker outside Delhi, India teaches a group of villagers about the benefits of birth spacing. (Photo: Kim Lovell, Sierra Club)

By Kim Lovell, Program Director, Sierra Club Global Population & the Environment Program

As Earth Month comes to a close and we send off the last few packets of activist swag, it’s fitting that our stack of factsheets on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is rapidly dwindling. We are fast approaching the 2015 deadline to achieve these eight indicators of global poverty reduction and development gains, and the D.C. and international communities are looking back to gauge our success.

It's encouraging to see enormous progress in meeting some of these goals: we've halved the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day, bolstered enrollment in primary education in the developing world, and increased access to lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide. Yet the goal of achieving universal access to reproductive health (MDG 5a) has seen the smallest amount of progress.

An Investment in Women

Global Population Program Director Kim Lovell (third from left) with Sierra Club volunteers Virginia Phelps, Karen Gaia Pitts, and Chuck Knutson at the Chico Sustainability Conference

By Kim Lovell, Sierra Club Global Population & the Environment Program Director

As the world celebrates International Women's Day today with tweet-a-thons, film screenings, and high-profile speaking events, I am celebrating at the Chico Sustainability Conference at California State University, Chico, with a small group of committed Sierra Club volunteers. Nestled between panels on clean energy, green gardening, water pollution, and composting, we are making the case for an investment with profound impacts on the sustainability of communities, environments, and the people who depend on them—an investment in women.

In most parts of the world, women serve as a family's primary resource manager, responsible for the procurement of food, water, and other resources to keep a household running and ensure that children are healthy and fed. Given this responsibility, women contribute to the health of the land and community around them; thus, risks to the environment, like those stemming from climate disruption, affect women disproportionately. Investing in the health, education, and livelihoods of women not only helps them to thrive in a changing environment, it empowers women to help solve global crises like resource stress and climate disruption.

One investment we're highlighting at the conference today is voluntary family planning. There are 222 million women in the world who want to plan their family size but are not currently using a modern method of contraception, either because these forms of contraception are inaccessible or too expensive. Eliminating the barriers to this important health intervention by making contraception more accessible and affordable has far-reaching benefits. Women who are able to make their own decisions about family size have an easier time acquiring what's needed for a healthy, thriving family, and are better able to help manage a community's resources. And when aggregated, the broader effect of increased availability of resources for family planning decreases carbon pollution and helps slow the worsening climate crisis that affects women and their families.

The Sierra Club volunteers I'm speaking with today have unlocked the secret to a more sustainable world, and they're working tirelessly to spread that message wherever possible. The health of our families, communities, and planet are intricately tied, and investing in women is a critical step to ensuring the sustainability of all three. This International Women's Day, I'm proud to be putting women at the center of discussions regarding health, the environment, and the future of our planet. It's a spot they've certainly earned.