Climate Change

and the Impact on Women

Kim Lovell
Sierra Club Global Population
& Environment Program

UU-UNO Spring Seminar

Empower Women for a Better World
Sierra Club’s Global Population &
Environment Program
Work with domestic & international partners to foster
healthy communities by advancing sustainable
development solutions.

Access to Family Planning

Women’s Rights

Resource Consumption

Youth Leadership
 “Unitarian Universalism offers us a faith that
challenges our energy usage and confronts us
with hunger and injustice around the world,
without giving inadequate simplistic answers. It
offers the harder path of respect for all beings
and for the Earth, and calls us to be
accountable for our actions.”
- UU minister Bob Klein
 Women bear the brunt
of the impacts of climate change

Women are also essential to climate

change mitigation and adaptation
 How do we combat
climate change?
                   Adaptation                    Mitigation
 
“An adjustment in natural or human
“An anthropogenic intervention to
systems in response to actual or
reduce the sources or enhance the
expected climatic stimuli or their
sinks of greenhouse gases.”
effects, which moderates harm or
exploits beneficial opportunities”
 Adaptation

Voluntary family planning combined with

women’s empowerment and sustainable
development
 Mitigation

Voluntary family planning combined with

women’s empowerment and sustainable
development
 Stabilization Wedges

Source: Socolow & Pacala, 2006.

Slower population
growth could reduce
emissions
1.4 – 2.5 billion tons
carbon per year by 2050,
16-29% of the reduction
needed to stabilize
emissions.

About half of that

reduction would come
from current high-fertility
regions, achievable
through expanded
access to family planning
services.

Source: B. O’Neill et al, “Global Demographic Trends and Future Carbon Emissions,”
Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Oct. 2010.
What is PHE?
G
P
S
D
O
India’s Self Employed Women’s Association
March for Women’s
Lives
April 25, 2004
 PowerShift
April 16, 2011
Harnessing the energy of
the youth climate
movement to incorporate
women’s empowerment
and reproductive health
& rights
“I am only one, but I am
one. I cannot do
everything, but I can do
something. And
because I cannot do
everything, I will not
refuse to do the
something that I can
do.”

-Edward Everett Hale

American Author, Historian, &
Unitarian Clergyman