Feminist Frontiers In Climate Justice

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Feminist Frontiers in Climate Justice provides a compelling demonstration of the deeply gendered and unequal effects of the climate emergency, alongside the urgent need for a feminist perspective to expose and address these structural political, social and economic inequalities. Taking a nuanced, multidisciplinary approach, this book explores new ways of thinking about how climate change interacts with gender inequalities and feminist concerns with rights and law, and how the human world is bound up with the non-human, natural world.

This book explains how gender, as a power relationship, influences climate change related strategies, and explores the additional pressures that climate change brings to uneven gender relations. It considers the ways in which men and women experience the impacts of these in different economic contexts. The chapters dismantle gender inequality and injustice through a critical appraisal of vulnerability and relative privilege within genders. Part I addresses conceptual frameworks and international themes concerning climate change and gender, and explores emerging ideas concerning the reification of gender relations in climate change policy. Part II offers a wide range of case studies from the Global North and the Global South to illustrate and explain the limitations to gender-blind climate change strategies. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, practitioners and policymakers interested in climate change, environmental science, geography, politics and gender studies.

The climate crisis is the most pressing issue of our times, one that is threatening progress on gender equality and human rights and hindering the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Against this backdrop of rising global temperatures and unfulfilled national pledges, women, girls and gender-diverse people are mobilizing to demand that their voices be heard in decision-making on climate policy. To answer their demands, this paper describes how to achieve feminist climate justice through four interlinked dimensions (recognition, redistribution, representation and reparation) and the principles of interdependence and intersectionality. It provides practical guidance on what countries need to do to transition to low-emission economies that are resilient to a changing climate, while advancing gender equality and recognising the leadership of women, girls and gender-diverse people in driving the change that is so urgently needed. In doing so, it zooms in on the global food system as just one illustration of how this framework can be applied, as well as provides analysis of the major barriers to accountability for gender-responsive climate action and how they can be overcome. The vision for feminist climate justice is of a world in which everyone can enjoy the full range of human rights, free from discrimination, and flourish on a planet that is healthy and sustainable. With this conceptual framework, UN-Women aims to open up space for discussion of feminist alternatives to the status quo and to inform the next edition of its flagship report, Progress of the World's Women, on gender equality in the age of climate crisis.

Women make up the vast majority of activists and organizers of grassroots movements fighting against environmental ills that threaten poor and people of color communities. New Perspectives on Environmental Justice is the first collection of essays that pays tribute to the enormous contributions women have made in these endeavors. The writers offer varied examples of environmental justice issues such as children's environmental health campaigns, cancer research, AIDS/HIV activism, the Environmental Genome Project, and popular culture, among many others. Each one focuses on gender and sexuality as crucial factors in women's or gay men's activism and applies environmental justice principles to related struggles for sexual justice. The contributors represent a wide variety of activist and scholarly perspectives including law, environmental studies, sociology, political science, history, medical anthropology, American studies, English, African and African American studies, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies, offering multiple vantage points on gender, sexuality, and activism. Feminist/womanist impulses shape and sustain environmental justice movements around the world, making an understanding of gender roles and differences crucial for the success of these efforts.

Australian feminist philosopher Val Plumwood coined the term “critical ecofeminism” to “situate humans in ecological terms and non-humans in ethical terms,” for “the two tasks are interconnected, and cannot be addressed properly in isolation from each other.” Variously using the terms “critical ecological feminism,” “critical anti-dualist ecological feminism,” and “critical ecofeminism,” Plumwood’s work developed amid a range of perspectives describing feminist intersections with ecopolitical issues—i.e., toxic production and toxic wastes, indigenous sovereignty, global economic justice, species justice, colonialism and dominant masculinity. Well over a decade before the emergence of posthumanist theory and the new materialisms, Plumwood’s critical ecofeminist framework articulates an implicit posthumanism and respect for the animacy of all earthothers, exposing the linkages among diverse forms of oppression, and providing a theoretical basis for further activist coalitions and interdisciplinary scholarship. Had Plumwood lived another ten years, she might have described her work as “Anthropocene Ecofeminism,” “Critical Material Ecofeminism,” “Posthumanist Anticolonial Ecofeminism”—all of these inflections are present in her work. Here, Critical Ecofeminism advances upon Plumwood’s intellectual, activist, and scholarly work by exploring its implications for a range of contemporary perspectives and issues--critical animal studies, plant studies, sustainability studies, environmental justice, climate change and climate justice, masculinities and sexualities. With the insights available through a critical ecofeminism, these diverse eco-justice perspectives become more robust.

Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change presents the voices of women from every continent, women who face vastly different climate events and challenges. The book heralds a new way of understanding climate change that incorporates gender justice and human rights for all.

A powerful argument that greater inclusion of women in conservation and climate science is key to the future of the planet Women are disproportionately impacted by climate change—floods, droughts, and extreme temperatures overwhelmingly affect women in the short and long term. In some cases, women make up almost 90 percent of casualties during dangerous climate events, and the majority of those displaced in the aftermath are women. Despite this disparity, women are underrepresented at every level of decision-making about the future of our planet: only 24 percent of CEOs in nonprofit conservation and around one-third of the representatives in national and global climate negotiating bodies have been women. In Intertwined, writer and wildlife biologist Rebecca Kormos elevates the voices of women working to prevent the climate crisis, weaving together their stories to make a powerful case for why women are essential to changing our current trajectory toward catastrophic global warming and environmental degradation. Kormos argues that empowering women is one of the most important solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss: women’s leadership and equal representation is linked to lower CO2 emissions, better forest management, better land protection, less land grabbing, and fewer conflicts over resources. For readers of All We Can Save and Braiding Sweetgrass, Kormos joins the ranks of recent breakthrough efforts to showcase women’s voices in the movement to combat climate change. Kormos takes this endeavor one step further with a global, intersectional narrative of how women and gender nonconforming individuals are doing the crucial work at the local and national levels to reframe how we think about environmental activism. Ultimately, Intertwined proves that climate justice is inextricable from gender equality.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. Reimagining intersectional research, this book addresses the urgent need to develop gender-just solutions that empower those who are experiencing environmental degradation in their communities.

_______________ 'As an advocate for the hungry and the hunted, the forgotten and the ignored, Mary Robinson has not only shone a light on human suffering, but illuminated a better future for our world' BARACK OBAMA SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2018 Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people – people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal. Mary Robinson's mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change. Powerful and deeply humane, Climate Justice is a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative, and well-argued case for hope.