Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Founder of the Green Belt Movement

“When the environment is destroyed, plundered, or mismanaged, it is [women’s] quality of life, and that of their children and families, that is ultimately undermined.”

Fuelwood and Water

Women and girls in many developing countries collect 90 percent of their families’ firewood and water.  As forests are destroyed and water grows scarce, they must travel farther, limiting time for education, childcare, and economic, community, and political activities. Gathering scare resources also puts women and girls at greater risk of violence. In Sudan, 82 percent of rapes occur when women and girls leave their villages in search of firewood, water, and other necessities.

Food

In many impoverished rural areas, women provide as much as 80 percent of the agricultural labor. But agricultural productivity in many developing regions is threatened by rapidly encroaching deserts from the loss of soils and the reduction of water tables. Nearly one-third of the world’s cropland has been abandoned in the past 40 years because erosion and desertification have made it unproductive. Deforestation can also exacerbate malnutrition as fuel wood shortages lead to fewer cooked meals.

Income and Health

Millions of rural women in developing countries cannot own land, and depend on products from natural areas, such as fruits, nuts, and plant fibers as sources of income. Women also depend on native plants and natural products for traditional medicine. Nearly 80 percent of women and children in the developing world rely on traditional medicine for their primary health care. But about 15,000 species of traditional medicinal plants are threatened with extinction due to habitat loss.

Natural Disasters

A study of 141 countries found that women are more likely than men to die in natural disasters. After the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, two-thirds of those reported dead or missing— in some villages nearly 80 percent of the dead—were women. Intact forests, wetlands and coral reefs protect against floods, mudslides, and droughts. In one Sri Lankan village hit by the 2004 tsunami  but surrounded by intact mangroves and forests, only two people died, while 6,000 people died in another Sri Lankan village where mangroves and forests had been destroyed.

Legal Rights

In many regions of the world with the worst environmental degradation, women often lack legal rights and land rights. Worldwide, women own less than two percent of all property. Consequently, women often have no legal recourse to prevent environmental destruction of the lands they depend on for food and income. Women are also routinely forced off of or given only restricted access to fertile land.

Local Women Lead: Protecting nature and communities

Throughout the developing world, women are leading efforts to protect natural resources and improve the lives of women and girls in their communities.  Read about women heroes of global conservation.  Research shows that forests are better protected when women are involved in their conservation.  These efforts have demonstrated that in the process of working to protect their natural resources, women increasingly participate in political and community life, becoming powerful advocates for their rights as well as for good governance, democracy, and openness.

• When higher numbers of women joined community forest decision-making bodies, forest conditions in Gujarat, India improved significantly.
• Women’s forest protection committees in the middle hills of Nepal have initiated effective forest management efforts that resulted in increased tree regeneration and better protection against excessive tree cutting.
• In the southern Yucatan region of Mexico, local women have brought improved agricultural techniques and environmental management to ecologically important lands.
• In Yunnan Province, one of China’s most impoverished regions, ethnic Mosuo women have voluntarily taken on 80 percent of local tree-planting efforts after deforestation exacerbated flooding in their communities.
• Since 1977, Kenya’s women-led Green Belt Movement has planted over 40 million trees and employed 80,000 people in nurseries to develop sustainable tree stocks for reforestation and to promote livelihoods for women.Other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have launched similar programs patterned on this success.

Mary Mavanza, Manager of the TACARE program of the Jane Goodall Institute, Tanzania “Natural resource degradation has the potential to undermine many of the gains women have made. What good is increased access to education, for example, if women and girls don’t have the time to go to school?”

The U.S. and the International Community Need to Help

The United States, other wealthy nations, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations provide vital financial and technical assistance to support conservation efforts that benefit or are led by women. But given rapidly accelerating environmental destruction around the world, this assistance must intensify to ensure that natural resource degradation does not undermine the health, educational, and economic gains many women have made around the world.

A strategic focus is key. Currently, the U.S. government has at least six federal agencies engaged in international conservation work around the globe. But there is no overarching vision for how the U.S., together with other nations, can help reverse the most serious environmental degradation trends facing women and their communities. We must dramatically raise the visibility of the environmental threat to women and develop a much more strategic approach to 1) arrest natural resource destruction that harms women and 2) ensure women are able to lead such efforts around the globe. Congressional leaders have taken the first step by introducing the Global Conservation Act of 2010. The bill would mandate a comprehensive global conservation strategy for the U.S. government, specifically recognizing the disproportionate impacts of environmental destruction on women and girls.  Take action to support the Global Conservation Act!