Empower women, save the world

To celebrate International Women's day, I'm going to explore women's empowerment, and its integral role in creating a sustainable future.

Using the World Bank definition "Empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes." To different extents, and in different ways, women around the globe do not have this freedom. From child brides to misogynistic attitudes in parliament, there is a lot of improvement needed.

Thankfully, the world is at least aware of this gross inequality. Combined with the dawning realisation that adjusting the gender balance will have huge benefits on the environment and development, positive action is starting to happen. For example, target number five of the sustainable development goals is gender equality (see the short video below for the rest of the targets), and in the words of Kofi Annan, 7th UN Secretary General "there is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women".   

So how exactly is women's empowerment linked to the environment?

Firstly, environmental degradation is a huge problem, and we need as many brains as possible trying to solve it. Give women equal access to education, and equal opportunities to work, and you double the number of people who can work out a solution.

Secondly, in many parts of the world women are more likely to bear the brunt of environmental degradation, as they are more directly reliant on natural resources (e.g. collecting food, water and fire wood). This all means that not only will you have more people trying to come up with solutions, but these extra people are more likely to be motivated to fix the problems, as it they and their families who are suffering from them.

Thirdly, you empower women, and the birth rate goes down. If you let us women choose what we want to do with our bodies, it's very unlikely that we will have large numbers of children, whilst still almost children ourselves. Access to contraception and sex education can change everything; how can there be gender equality if men can enjoy sex without consequences, whilst women take the risk of pregnancy, dangerous abortions and social stigmatisation?

As spoken about before, human over-population is driving climate change, pollution, habitat loss and biodiversity collapse. Empower women, Total Fertility Rate (TFR) drops, the population stabilises and eventually begins to go down. The pressure we are exerting on the planet decreases (if consumption also decreases..) and hopefully this ecological crisis that we are on the brink of subsides.

So all in all I hope that gives a glimpse into how women's empowerment really can save the world.

Wangari Maathai is one example of an amazing woman who empowered other women - she paid them to plant trees, and helped them invest their income. The result was improved environment from the trees, and empowered, financially independent women.

On a final note, Population Matters are doing their best to spread this message, in order to influence policy making and individual choices, to help bring about a sustainable population size. In turn, I'm doing my best to support this amazing charity, through running the London Marathon to raise £1000 (check out my previous blog Running for the planet to find out more about why I am running and what this money will be used to do). I'm almost 70% of the way there thanks to so so many wonderfully generous people. If this sounds like a cause you can get on board with, even your loose pennies will make all the difference - you can find my fundraising page here.

Thank you for reading!