How Pakistan’s climate crisis is fueling violence against women
The 2022 floods in Pakistan amplified pre-existing gender inequalities, leaving women — who are least responsible for the global climate crisis — with a disproportionate burden of survival.
Published December 23, 2024
PRISM/DAWN
Zainab saw her world turn upside down in 2022, when catastrophic floods wreaked havoc across Pakistan. She was among the hundreds and thousands of people who lost their homes, land, and even loved ones due to the deluge.
Two years on, the water may have receded, but the havoc they wreaked continues to haunt the 50-year-old and her family.
The floods forced Zainab and her family, hailing from Dadu district’s Ahmed Khan Babar village in Sindh, out of their mud house and into a makeshift thatched shelter in the same village, where they continue to live to this day.
To top it all off, her co-wife Zarina died during childbirth shortly after the displacement, leaving Zainab to care for the newborn girl, two of Zarina’s other children, and her ailing husband, who is no longer able to work.
“As poverty and isolation took their toll, my husband became physically and verbally abusive towards me, and our financial condition forced us to give away the newborn baby to a childless couple,” she told Dawn.com via a video call from her village, with the assistance of a local schoolteacher.
Today, Zainab survives on handouts from villagers, constantly battling against the impact of climate change, domestic violence, and the guilt of losing Zarina’s newborn daughter.
The 2022 floods, the most horrific in the country’s history, killed 1,700 people, displaced over 33 million, swept away swathes of agricultural land, and incurred losses worth $30 billion, according to the government’s estimates.
While the Sindh government has started the reconstruction of 2.1 million houses to rehabilitate more than 12.6m flood-affected people, for women like Zainab, the impact of climate change goes beyond the loss of homes and financial constraints.
The floods amplified pre-existing gender inequalities, leaving Zainab and hundreds of thousands of women with a disproportionate burden of survival and a heightened risk of gender-based violence (GBV), further exacerbated by displacement and resource scarcity.
Climate change and gender-based violence
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) described GBV as “harmful acts directed at an individual based on their gender, rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms”.
Examples of gender-based violence include domestic and intimate partner violence, sexual assault, early and forced marriages, economic violence, human trafficking, and femicide, among others.
Displacement, global food insecurity and socio-economic instability — all compelled by climate change — exacerbate these acts of violence against women, particularly in conflict and poverty-stricken contexts, making them the most pressing issues of our time.
Women comprise 80 per cent of those displaced by climate change and are 14 times more likely to die in a climate disaster as compared to their male counterparts, according to data by the UN.
A 2023 study covering India, Pakistan, and Nepal, tracked nearly 195,000 girls and women aged 15-49 and found that a 1°C rise in average annual temperature correlated with more than a 6pc increase in incidents of physical and sexual violence.
Similarly, a 2021 study from Kenya found that women were 60pc more likely to report intimate partner violence in regions hit by extreme weather events. Likewise, a 2018 study from Spain showed a 40pc increase in the risk of intimate partner femicide following heatwaves, together with a surge in police reports and helpline calls.
Explaining the relationship between the impact of climate change and increased vulnerabilities witnessed by marginalised communities, Sohail Maqbool Malik, technical team leader at the Climate Resourcing Coordination Centre (CRCC), said, “Climate change is not limited to economic impacts but also intersects with national security, displacement, and conflict, acting as a threat multiplier. Regions experiencing local conflicts and effects of climate change combined — such as Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia — are prime examples of this intersection.”
He referenced Article 7.1 of the Paris Agreement, which focuses on three critical aspects: building adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience, and reducing vulnerabilities to climate change.
“When we use the term vulnerability, it is important to understand that it exists at macro levels (countries and regions) to meso levels (sectors like agriculture and food security), down to the individual level, where women and children are disproportionately affected,” he told Dawn.com.
“Events like floods or droughts exacerbate vulnerabilities, especially among those with fewer resources.”
Struggles of displacement
Kaveeta Kolhi, 45, a peasant woman from the Masood Abad village near Bodar Farm in Taluka Umerkot of Sindh, recalled the devastation of the 2022 floods, which destroyed her home and crops and killed her family’s livestock.
Speaking to Dawn.com from her village, she explained how the displacement left her family, including her young daughters, vulnerable to sexual harassment.
“Men used to stare at our girls and would inappropriately touch them at times when we sought shelter,” she said, adding that many families faced similar ordeals but chose not to speak about it due to the stigma of “dishonour”.
Experts point out how systemic vulnerabilities worsen gender-based violence during climate crises. “When climate disasters occur, the priority is to move the victims to safer locations, so naturally, the idea of gender segregation is not a priority,” said Malik. “Since displacement camps lack secure spaces for women and girls, it heightens their exposure to sexual exploitation — a reality documented globally in every camp and post-disaster situation.”
For widows like Jaiti, from Walidad Palli village, the struggles extend beyond physical safety. Left without support after the floods, she has had to balance finding work while protecting her daughters.
“Two of my elder daughters stay at home to care for the younger ones while I try to earn money,” she said. “But landlords no longer hire me due to their own losses from the floods. I’m too scared to leave my daughters alone, and I have no one else to rely on.”
According to Reem Alsalem, UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, such individual accounts reflect a broader global pattern.
“When disasters strike and threaten livelihoods, communities may resort to negative coping mechanisms, such as trafficking, sexual exploitation, and harmful practices like early and child marriage or school dropouts — all of which force women and girls to choose between risk-imbued options for survival,” she said.
‘Climate brides’
The consequences of climate change, poverty, and displacement often force families to make desperate decisions, resulting in increased incidents of GBV, such as marrying girls off at an early age.
Panchoo Khetu, 52, from Khan Sahib Rasti village in Umerkot, Sindh, watched her mud house swept away by the floods. A mother to several teenage daughters, she recounted how it became difficult to feed so many mouths under the circumstances.
“Like many other families, we had to have our daughters engaged or married off after the displacement to reduce the family’s expenses,” she told Dawn.com.
According to Girls Not Brides, a non-profit organisation, child marriage is a recognised form of GBV and a violation of human rights. It exposes girls to severe risks, including physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, often leading to unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions, and mental health issues. Data shows that girls married before the age of 15 are nearly 50pc more likely to experience intimate partner violence.
Early marriages are already common in Pakistan, with figures from Unicef showing that the country has nearly 19 million child brides, with one in six young women married in childhood.
Neha Mankani, a health practitioner and founder of the Mama Baby Fund, has extensively worked with vulnerable communities in post-disaster situations. Extreme weather and climate disasters aggravate such practices, she noted.
“[In the context of displacements] early age marriage is a really big thing — we call these girls ‘climate brides’,” she told Dawn.com. “When families don’t have anything and they have lost resources, there is an increase in child and forced marriages, because there is a price that the families get for selling their daughters. And it also means that they have to spend less money on one person in the household.”
Malik concurred, adding that families in flood-hit regions have been forced into desperate measures, such as giving daughters in marriage in exchange for cows and goats.
“Gender-based violence is a pervasive outcome of both climate change and conflict, driven by resource scarcity.”
A lost future
The floods that devastated Pakistan in 2022 not only displaced families but also crushed the educational dreams of many young girls, who were forced out of schools and could never resume their studies.
Twelve-year-old Geeni from the Masood Abad village lamented the loss of her future due to the unfortunate displacement.
“Before the floods, I used to go to school, but once we left our home, I could not return,” she said. Though unfortunate, her story was not unique, as many other children had to face a similar fate in the aftermath of natural disasters.
According to the Unicef, over 2m children in Pakistan were unable to access education after the country’s worst flooding in history damaged or destroyed nearly 27,000 schools, exposing more than 600,000 adolescent girls to higher risks of school dropout, gender-based violence, and child marriage.
Image showing a house destroyed by the floods of 2022 in Masood Abad village near Bodar Farm in Taluka Umerkot of Sindh. — Allah Bux ArisarDr Sadia Khalid, founder of Climate Education Warriors, an NGO working on climate action awareness, shared her experience of working with young girls from Chitral and Kailash Valley in northern Pakistan.
“During my conversation with the girls, I noticed they had limited knowledge about their geographical landscape and the impact of climate change on their lives,” Dr Khalid said, adding that what struck her the most was the vulnerability of girls in these regions to environmental issues, particularly in the context of migration, water, and food scarcity.
She described how the harsh climate, lack of infrastructure, and patriarchal society were increasing the severity of issues, as many girls are forced to drop out of school due to poverty, lack of schools, or early marriage.
“On my way to Garam Chashma, I met a 16-year-old girl named Gulnaz, who shared how floods destroyed her family’s crops, forcing her to leave school. She once dreamed of becoming a doctor, but now her future feels uncertain,” Dr Khalid shared.
“Despite these hardships, I can still see the determination in their eyes — their unwavering desire to overcome all barriers and build better futures for themselves.”
Climate change, mental health, and violence
The psychological impact of displacement is often overlooked, yet it is one of the most pervasive consequences of climate-induced disasters, as seen in the case of Panchoo, who said, “The stress of survival has led to daily arguments and even violence within families.”
These emotional and mental health problems were likely to get worse, especially when there was no access to therapy or support. As highlighted by the World Economic Forum, climate change, particularly extreme temperatures and natural disasters can significantly affect mental health.
Meanwhile, a study showed that between 20pc to 50pc of people who experience extreme weather events can develop immediate symptoms like anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), sleep disruption, and suicidal thoughts. Around 10pc to 20pc may experience PTSD in the years following the disaster.
Experts pointed out that anxiety, depression, and stress due to the loss of income and displacement not only affect the mental health of women and girls but also affect the mental health of men which, in turn, leads to an increase in GBV.
“At a secondary level, you see the mental health of women being affected by climate-induced migrations,” Farahnaz Zahidi, environmental journalist and Pakistan editor of Third Pole, told Dawn.com
“For example, in areas of Sindh with extreme heat, men have to move to [to other places] because their crops are being affected by climate-induced events and there is not enough harvest. So when the women are alone, in a deeply rural environment, they get depressed.”
The journalist recounted a story she reported in which women in Tharparkar were driven to take their own lives due to depression and loneliness caused by the ongoing drought.
Speaking about the broader reasons for GBV, Zahidi said that while not a justification, intimate partner violence committed by men is also a result of the climate crisis.
“It is true that if the crop is less and there’s not enough money and the cattle are dying or they are displaced, that impacts the mental health of men as well, which means they have more bouts of anger. They have anger issues, and, then that is taken out on the wife, unfortunately,” she said.
Mankani also highlighted the same issue, saying that displacement caused both men and women to suffer from various mental health problems, which ultimately led to an increase in intimate partner violence.
Speaking about her experience of working with families of the climate-affected coastal community of Baba Island, she said witnessed an increase in cases of GBV.
“When families are displaced, there is a lot of frustration because of the loss of resources but climate change also generally leads to an increase in GBV incidents,” she said, adding that she runs clinics in Baba Island, which is a community entirely comprising fisherfolk and they’re completely dependent on fish for survival.
The impact of climate change has significantly disrupted the fishing industry, with warmer waters, overfishing, environmental degradation, and rising sea levels leading to a severe reduction in fish stocks, she added.
“As a result, many people in affected communities, particularly those dependent on fishing for income, are facing financial hardship. This change has led to more men remaining in the community rather than going out to sea, which has contributed to an increase in intimate partner violence. Moreover, the economic strain and stress have led to a rise in addiction issues, which are also linked to a surge in gender-based violence.”
Pathways to resilience, social protection for women
Even though there are immense challenges faced by women and girls displaced by climate-induced events, efforts are underway to build resilience, especially through governmental and private gender-sensitive interventions, healthcare programmes, cash assistance, shelter, food security, and education for women and their families.
International organisations like the UN, the World Bank, and various NGOs have recognised the urgency of addressing both climate change and GBV in disaster-stricken areas. However, the response often falls short due to a lack of coordination, funding, and long-term sustainable solutions.
Despite these efforts, however, the story of Zainab remains a grim reminder of the long road ahead. Like many other women and girls displaced by climate-induced events, she faces a future shaped by uncertainty and vulnerability.
Image showing a makeshift house occupied by people displaced by the 2022 floods in the Masood Abad village of Umerkot, Sindh. — Allah Bux Arisar
Independent climate expert Fatima Yamin says there is a need for broader societal efforts to address the intersectionality of climate change and GBV.
“The cause [of GBV] is not climate change itself, but the inability and failure of society, state, and the government to reduce the vulnerability of these groups by offering them social protections, welfare, and economic relief,” she said.
“The private and public sectors need to target men and women both for training in gender sensitivity and inequality.”
The expert added that social protections such as entitlements in the education and health sectors need to be catered to women, with consultations for men on reproductive health, the impact of early marriages on young girls, and sensitivity to gender-equitable needs.
“Protections for elderly women and women with disabilities must also be provided. These policies, when implemented, can somewhat reduce the pressures of climate change on women and girls.”
Additional reporting by Allah Bux Arisar from Umerkot.
Independent climate expert Fatima Yamin says there is a need for broader societal efforts to address the intersectionality of climate change and GBV.
“The cause [of GBV] is not climate change itself, but the inability and failure of society, state, and the government to reduce the vulnerability of these groups by offering them social protections, welfare, and economic relief,” she said.
“The private and public sectors need to target men and women both for training in gender sensitivity and inequality.”
The expert added that social protections such as entitlements in the education and health sectors need to be catered to women, with consultations for men on reproductive health, the impact of early marriages on young girls, and sensitivity to gender-equitable needs.
“Protections for elderly women and women with disabilities must also be provided. These policies, when implemented, can somewhat reduce the pressures of climate change on women and girls.”
Additional reporting by Allah Bux Arisar from Umerkot.
How the World Hides Liability for Climate Deaths
Ashley Berke | 23 Dec 2024
Unfair family planning regimes have stalled progress in the climate fight and prevent children from having a fair start in life.
Nearly half the world’s children “live in countries where risks to their health and safety due to the effects of climate change are extremely high,” according to UNICEF. By 2050, almost all children globally will be “exposed to heat waves,” resulting in the rise of specific health issues, especially for smaller children, adds the agency.
Rich nations’ inability or unwillingness to curb their emissions has exacerbated the climate crisis, which, if left unchecked, may unfold apocalyptic scenarios. Those most responsible for the climate crisis spent decades funding denialism while robbing children and animals of the future they deserve. They exploited the world’s people and resources while hoarding wealth for themselves.
The outcome of the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, is a shining example of how rich countries are reluctant to take remedial steps to secure the children’s and the planet’s future. The COP29 was widely criticised for the rich world’s failure to adequately address developing nations’ critical climate-related financing needs.
“The latest NCQG [New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance] decision at COP29 starkly highlights the unwillingness of developed and oil-rich nations to take responsibility for their historical and substantial emissions,” said Pegah Moulana, the secretary general of Youth and Environment Europe, the largest independent platform of environmental youth organizations in Europe. “By failing to provide concrete support to the most affected states and neglecting to establish a robust protocol to ensure these nations remain debt-free during implementation, the decision exacerbates climate injustice.”
According to a 2024 analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development, the poorest countries and those most vulnerable to climate change spend “more than twice as much to service their debts as they receive to fight the climate crisis.”
Sri Lanka Struggling to Fight Climate Change
A 2020 World Bank report points out how climate change is a threat to poverty reduction and is expected to drive between 68 million and 135 million people into poverty by 2030. “Climate change is a particularly grave threat for countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—the regions where most of the global poor are concentrated,” the report states.
Island nations like Sri Lanka are especially more susceptible to the effects of climate change. In June 2024, Hafsa Jamel from the Lanka Environment Fund told Climate Champions, “With 33 percent of our population living along vulnerable coastlines and facing risks from rising sea levels, ocean acidification, and frequent natural disasters, the challenges are immense. … and a distressing 81.2 of our population lacks the capacity to adapt to these changes.”
The Global Climate Risk Index has placed Sri Lanka among the top ten countries likely to experience extreme weather events. Climate change has already severely affected the country’s poorest and most vulnerable regions.
According to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), an independent, global database of anthropogenic emissions, Sri Lanka’s 2023 greenhouse gas emissions represent a mere 0.07 percent of the global total.
Amita Arudpragasam, a policy analyst from Colombo, Sri Lanka, wrote for the Pulitzer Center in September 2024 that “[B]y some projections, by the end of the century, [Sri Lanka] will experience mean temperatures approaching 35 degrees Celsius (considered the upper limit of human survivability or the wet-bulb temperature).”
Reshaping Climate Policy: Birth Equity
We can reshape climate policy by shifting the focus to children’s rights and ensuring birth equity as a fundamental aspect of policy evaluation. These rights include a healthy environment and a fair start in life and should not just guarantee mere survival; they need to ensure circumstances where each child has the right to thrive. Each child should be entitled to the same social, cultural, political, and economic conditions and be treated as an equal member of society with a voice and meaningful influence in shaping their future.
A child born in New York City has basic access to welfare resources, health care, and a safe environment. But a child born in rural Uganda does not. In these circumstances, where survival is uncertain, thriving is a distant dream. No child can discover their innate talent or pursue their life goals if they are battling polio or malaria. The lives of these children are filled with struggles and suffering or are cut short tragically.
Every person must ask: Why do we tolerate this initial inequity?
“Above all, we’re talking about how all these—and many other events and policies and cultural practices—have worked together to keep wealth and well-being disproportionately concentrated in white communities,” writes Edgar Villanueva in Decolonizing Wealth (2021), which focuses on how philanthropy nonprofits need to engage in reparative justice.
“The fact that… communities of color and low-income communities face more pollution is not a coincidence or an accident. It is the direct, if at times unintended, consequence of white supremacy and racist public policies,” states Climate Nexus.
The power relations that develop when we are created, between each other and with the nonhuman environment, are the basis of our positionality (i.e., our socioeconomic position relative to others) and impact all we do.
White supremacy might seem like an anomaly to many whites until they consider the massive financial and political inequity that continues to define the future of children at birth.
The climate crisis is embedded in the exploitation of natural resources by a few, leading to the exploitation of the majority population already facing inequity. To take remedial action, we need to address intergenerational justice.
An essential step in this direction would be to update the Convention on the Rights of the Child—necessitated by the climate crisis—which modifies existing reproductive rights regimes to focus on child share equity over reproductive autonomy or the inclusive and measurable empowerment of each child as they enter the world.
A Deadly Idea: Endless Growth
So, what does the right to a healthy environment mean? Access to unpolluted air and clean water is now a universal human right. To uphold this right, recommendations include holding companies accountable, urging governments to implement climate-protecting laws, promoting recycling, and more. Every small step, every action we take, matters.
However, the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution 48/13 overlooks one crucial aspect: the right to a fair start in life. This right should be considered the most fundamental human right. It should not be predetermined at birth based on circumstances a child is born into, such as being born in a small village in Kenya to a mother forced into a marriage merely for survival or to a wealthy New York family.
The threat to securing this right is more than political. Nonprofits and advocacy groups also play a role when they fail to include birth equity in their values and mission.
We urgently need to align with this principle of ensuring birth equity before we exhaust the finite resources on earth. Infinite growth is a fallacy and a dangerous belief that drives all economies. It cannot be remedied by continuing with neoliberal and technocratic solutions spearheaded by primarily white men invested in maintaining their wealth and power.
It is often touted that energy efficiency has increased since 1990, and carbon dioxide emissions have reduced. However, the facts ignore that the effects of population growth have reversed much of the progress made on the climate front.
The United States government, as well as governments around the world, are urging women to have more children with little or no safeguards and resources in response to falling fertility rates, especially in rich countries. Reduced fertility rates threaten the economic growth that created the climate crisis in the first place.
Hungary is another example of encouraging population growth without ensuring a fair start in life. It offers tax incentives to mothers of four or more children. The question remains: Who benefits from this growth? Not the children.
Bad Family Policies Cancel Out Progress
Animal rights and welfare involve protecting species and biodiversity and protecting and accounting for each nonhuman life. Humans must play their role in ensuring the liberation of animals and restoring balance in nature.
In the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world,” preserve the status quo, and obscure their role in creating the problems in the first place.
Many animal and environmental nonprofit organizations contribute to this issue and perpetuate the problems they claim to resolve. Instead of preserving the creation of relations between humans and nonhumans as an integral part of animal law and animal rights, they are causing damage by not emphasizing sustainable family planning and birth equity in their policies. This is pushing more animals into factory farming and worsening the climate crisis.
The demand for factory farming grows with every child entering the world, and industrial agriculture is responsible for 11 percent of global emissions, not to mention the unimaginable suffering of innocent animals.
The family policies many organizations support are harmful—undoing climate mitigation efforts that have led to the deaths of 4 million people between 2000 and 2024—and counter any good other policies might do. This dynamic can be labeled “impact fraud.”
Abstract academic debates about population ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to worsen the results of the climate crisis by forestalling the necessary law and policy reforms from being implemented. Many of the debates against these reforms emerge from the same Eurocentric vestige of colonialism—the historic entitlement of wealthy families exploiting birth positionality—nesting in the current human rights regime.
This threatens minimum thresholds of personal welfare, equal access to opportunities, participation in and adhering to political/legal systems purported to represent the governed, and the enjoyment of an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health.
Academicians, foundations, and nonprofit organizations must rectify these issues by pushing for human rights systems that include child welfare and birth equity in instruments like the Convention on the Rights of the Child and ethics, law, and family planning policies.
Understanding misleading terms and supporting family policies that ensure minimum levels of well-being, equity, democracy, nature, and a sustainable right to have children for all through birth equity entitlements are important steps in that direction. These will ensure parental delay and readiness, equal opportunities for all children, and smaller or more sustainable families.
The False Promise of Growth
Emphasizing sustainable practices, such as switching to vegan brands and eating a plant-based diet, is essential for protecting the environment and ensuring animal welfare. Still, these practices cannot alone resolve the climate crisis.
In many cases, food tech startups that support the move to plant-based meat are often fueled, in part, by greenwashing.
The climate crisis is not just an imbalance of emissions and responsibility among nations. Some of the blame for climate inequity also falls on deceptive tactics like greenwashing, growthwashing, and humanewashing.
A more holistic approach is needed to prevent global warming and create a more just and equitable world for children and nonhuman animals. It is important to look beyond the fantasy world of value and progress built by nonprofits, media, foundations, companies, etc., all driven by growth-based funding. This funding hides the need for true reform, forestalls effective family law changes, and has led to the deadly climate crisis. That growth is setting us all toward a future of ecocide and extinction.
“You cannot have it both ways and complain that global warming will harm GDP,” writes Terry Cannon, emeritus senior research fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, in a May 2024 letter to the Guardian. “A drop in global GDP is one of the best things that can happen to reduce global warming if it reduces consumption of carbon-intensive products and services. GDP is a very poor way to measure the negative impacts of global warming.”
The Inequity of Opportunity Begins at Birth
The wealth gap between Black and white families has only worsened over time. “The growing disparity means that in 2022, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households held only $15,” states a 2024 Brookings Institution article.
This gap is a result of colonization, slavery, and other structural forms of racism. This is the genesis of inequity of opportunity and should be the basis for treating the legal system that allows it as illegitimate.
“Policies that privilege whiteness are reflected in higher levels of wealth for the average white family, which can be leveraged across generations to generate greater wealth and advantages,” adds the Brookings article.
This disparity means that Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities absorb the most significant risks and harms in the climate crisis—both socially and ecologically. Black children were more than twice as likely to face hunger compared to white children in 2023.
These disparities can be resolved with universal birth equity-based planning—and significant baby bond distributions—but policymakers and wealthy white families that benefit from policies supporting this racial wealth gap prefer to exploit the difference.
Similarly, most rich countries have made their wealth by exploiting poorer nations and continue to profit by maintaining this inequality. This is true even though many developing countries have the answers to some of today’s global problems.
For instance, Sudan has the potential to “address the global food crisis” but can only achieve this with “the cooperation of its African and Middle Eastern neighbors, along with the international community, to move on from its war-torn history and play a vital part in global trade,” points out a 2024 World Economic Forum report.
While globally sustainable areas like the Congo Basin rainforest sustain a portion of the world’s oxygen supply, businesses and corporations use deceptive practices to hide the deforestation of these forests. This further contributes to more significant gaps in wealth for non-white communities.
Explosive Growth Has Destroyed Functional Democracy
The current situation is not ecologically sustainable, does not ensure the safety of unborn children, and has destroyed functional democracy. Democracy starts with “one person, one vote,” which implies that each vote is influential. Today, this is not the case.
We need to redistribute resources to ensure birth equity and a fair start in life instead of letting governments decide on these matters if we have to secure the future of our children.
This poverty and inequity cannot be challenged through democracy because family planning policies have ensured that the average citizen is disenfranchised, with little or no influence over the laws they are forced to live under.
Because growth is enabled by removing even minimum levels of welfare or equity, our elected officials simply do not represent their constituents. Growth has diluted votes.
The idea of representation is an illusion when, in reality, one must have access to significant wealth or other forms of influence to influence political outcomes. Also, the fact that the federal minimum wage is “poverty-level wages” is sufficient evidence that the law hardly reflects the people’s will.
Why Reparations to Young Disenfranchised Women Are Important
We can reverse the abovementioned injustices by backing young women’s right to self-determination and reparation.
“Society, as reflected in our government and the policy implemented by our democratically elected representatives, must do what’s best for children, regardless of economic impact, which must include social safety programs designed to give each child a fair start in life and climate reparations for the crisis we have caused and are leaving to them as our legacy,” argues Jessica Blome, a public interest attorney who frequently represents the Fair Start Movement, a nonprofit that promotes the convergence of social, eco, and reproductive justice (affiliated with two of this article’s authors, Carter Dillard and Beatrix Homler).
“That we are even debating the value of women’s autonomy as an economic driver—as opposed to an inalienable human right—is exactly why our culture needs to think differently about women and children,” Blome says.
Mwesigye Robert, a co-founder of Rejoice Africa Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes climate restoration and family policy, argues that political leaders often promote climate responses that are ultimately unrealistic because they are top-down solutions. “They have come up with well-meaning centralized climate responses in their speeches and proposals, but none of these are implemented effectively,” he says.
His organization advocates the care group model, which promotes social and behavioral changes through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Primarily deployed in international development contexts, care groups are often led by mothers sharing insights. “Effective climate restoration must be decentralized to the affected communities at the grassroots level,” says Robert.
All Children Deserve a Fair Start in Life
The climate and the related crises we face today were driven mainly, and certainly exacerbated, by the absence of child equity standards being included in reproductive rights dating back to 1948. This seeded racist inequity and unsustainable growth and created a fake version of social justice, one hiding the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and inequity. It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth—at a deadly cost to generations of BIPOC communities.
This is a fundamental entitlement or constitutive fraud: Obligating others to follow laws while not measurably empowering them to be in a position to influence those laws.
Wealthy families in nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding a fantasy world to continue this farce and evade climate reparations they owe for the harm they have caused. Environmental sustainability and social justice are vastly undone as children enter the world without the necessary resources.
If the world’s children are not given a fair start in life, it won’t be possible to form organizations capable of representative governance through the measurable self-determination of their constituents.
We must give each family equal opportunities and future generations the resources they need to fight climate change. This means giving each child the same rights, opportunities, and ability to shape the future.
Ashley Berke is co-executive director at Fair Start Movement.
This article was produced by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Ashley Berke | 23 Dec 2024
Unfair family planning regimes have stalled progress in the climate fight and prevent children from having a fair start in life.
Nearly half the world’s children “live in countries where risks to their health and safety due to the effects of climate change are extremely high,” according to UNICEF. By 2050, almost all children globally will be “exposed to heat waves,” resulting in the rise of specific health issues, especially for smaller children, adds the agency.
Rich nations’ inability or unwillingness to curb their emissions has exacerbated the climate crisis, which, if left unchecked, may unfold apocalyptic scenarios. Those most responsible for the climate crisis spent decades funding denialism while robbing children and animals of the future they deserve. They exploited the world’s people and resources while hoarding wealth for themselves.
The outcome of the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, is a shining example of how rich countries are reluctant to take remedial steps to secure the children’s and the planet’s future. The COP29 was widely criticised for the rich world’s failure to adequately address developing nations’ critical climate-related financing needs.
“The latest NCQG [New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance] decision at COP29 starkly highlights the unwillingness of developed and oil-rich nations to take responsibility for their historical and substantial emissions,” said Pegah Moulana, the secretary general of Youth and Environment Europe, the largest independent platform of environmental youth organizations in Europe. “By failing to provide concrete support to the most affected states and neglecting to establish a robust protocol to ensure these nations remain debt-free during implementation, the decision exacerbates climate injustice.”
According to a 2024 analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development, the poorest countries and those most vulnerable to climate change spend “more than twice as much to service their debts as they receive to fight the climate crisis.”
Sri Lanka Struggling to Fight Climate Change
A 2020 World Bank report points out how climate change is a threat to poverty reduction and is expected to drive between 68 million and 135 million people into poverty by 2030. “Climate change is a particularly grave threat for countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—the regions where most of the global poor are concentrated,” the report states.
Island nations like Sri Lanka are especially more susceptible to the effects of climate change. In June 2024, Hafsa Jamel from the Lanka Environment Fund told Climate Champions, “With 33 percent of our population living along vulnerable coastlines and facing risks from rising sea levels, ocean acidification, and frequent natural disasters, the challenges are immense. … and a distressing 81.2 of our population lacks the capacity to adapt to these changes.”
The Global Climate Risk Index has placed Sri Lanka among the top ten countries likely to experience extreme weather events. Climate change has already severely affected the country’s poorest and most vulnerable regions.
According to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR), an independent, global database of anthropogenic emissions, Sri Lanka’s 2023 greenhouse gas emissions represent a mere 0.07 percent of the global total.
Amita Arudpragasam, a policy analyst from Colombo, Sri Lanka, wrote for the Pulitzer Center in September 2024 that “[B]y some projections, by the end of the century, [Sri Lanka] will experience mean temperatures approaching 35 degrees Celsius (considered the upper limit of human survivability or the wet-bulb temperature).”
Reshaping Climate Policy: Birth Equity
We can reshape climate policy by shifting the focus to children’s rights and ensuring birth equity as a fundamental aspect of policy evaluation. These rights include a healthy environment and a fair start in life and should not just guarantee mere survival; they need to ensure circumstances where each child has the right to thrive. Each child should be entitled to the same social, cultural, political, and economic conditions and be treated as an equal member of society with a voice and meaningful influence in shaping their future.
A child born in New York City has basic access to welfare resources, health care, and a safe environment. But a child born in rural Uganda does not. In these circumstances, where survival is uncertain, thriving is a distant dream. No child can discover their innate talent or pursue their life goals if they are battling polio or malaria. The lives of these children are filled with struggles and suffering or are cut short tragically.
Every person must ask: Why do we tolerate this initial inequity?
“Above all, we’re talking about how all these—and many other events and policies and cultural practices—have worked together to keep wealth and well-being disproportionately concentrated in white communities,” writes Edgar Villanueva in Decolonizing Wealth (2021), which focuses on how philanthropy nonprofits need to engage in reparative justice.
“The fact that… communities of color and low-income communities face more pollution is not a coincidence or an accident. It is the direct, if at times unintended, consequence of white supremacy and racist public policies,” states Climate Nexus.
The power relations that develop when we are created, between each other and with the nonhuman environment, are the basis of our positionality (i.e., our socioeconomic position relative to others) and impact all we do.
White supremacy might seem like an anomaly to many whites until they consider the massive financial and political inequity that continues to define the future of children at birth.
The climate crisis is embedded in the exploitation of natural resources by a few, leading to the exploitation of the majority population already facing inequity. To take remedial action, we need to address intergenerational justice.
An essential step in this direction would be to update the Convention on the Rights of the Child—necessitated by the climate crisis—which modifies existing reproductive rights regimes to focus on child share equity over reproductive autonomy or the inclusive and measurable empowerment of each child as they enter the world.
A Deadly Idea: Endless Growth
So, what does the right to a healthy environment mean? Access to unpolluted air and clean water is now a universal human right. To uphold this right, recommendations include holding companies accountable, urging governments to implement climate-protecting laws, promoting recycling, and more. Every small step, every action we take, matters.
However, the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution 48/13 overlooks one crucial aspect: the right to a fair start in life. This right should be considered the most fundamental human right. It should not be predetermined at birth based on circumstances a child is born into, such as being born in a small village in Kenya to a mother forced into a marriage merely for survival or to a wealthy New York family.
The threat to securing this right is more than political. Nonprofits and advocacy groups also play a role when they fail to include birth equity in their values and mission.
We urgently need to align with this principle of ensuring birth equity before we exhaust the finite resources on earth. Infinite growth is a fallacy and a dangerous belief that drives all economies. It cannot be remedied by continuing with neoliberal and technocratic solutions spearheaded by primarily white men invested in maintaining their wealth and power.
It is often touted that energy efficiency has increased since 1990, and carbon dioxide emissions have reduced. However, the facts ignore that the effects of population growth have reversed much of the progress made on the climate front.
The United States government, as well as governments around the world, are urging women to have more children with little or no safeguards and resources in response to falling fertility rates, especially in rich countries. Reduced fertility rates threaten the economic growth that created the climate crisis in the first place.
Hungary is another example of encouraging population growth without ensuring a fair start in life. It offers tax incentives to mothers of four or more children. The question remains: Who benefits from this growth? Not the children.
Bad Family Policies Cancel Out Progress
Animal rights and welfare involve protecting species and biodiversity and protecting and accounting for each nonhuman life. Humans must play their role in ensuring the liberation of animals and restoring balance in nature.
In the book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas presents a groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world,” preserve the status quo, and obscure their role in creating the problems in the first place.
Many animal and environmental nonprofit organizations contribute to this issue and perpetuate the problems they claim to resolve. Instead of preserving the creation of relations between humans and nonhumans as an integral part of animal law and animal rights, they are causing damage by not emphasizing sustainable family planning and birth equity in their policies. This is pushing more animals into factory farming and worsening the climate crisis.
The demand for factory farming grows with every child entering the world, and industrial agriculture is responsible for 11 percent of global emissions, not to mention the unimaginable suffering of innocent animals.
The family policies many organizations support are harmful—undoing climate mitigation efforts that have led to the deaths of 4 million people between 2000 and 2024—and counter any good other policies might do. This dynamic can be labeled “impact fraud.”
Abstract academic debates about population ethics, often funded by concentrations of wealth and power reliant on inequity and growth, threaten to worsen the results of the climate crisis by forestalling the necessary law and policy reforms from being implemented. Many of the debates against these reforms emerge from the same Eurocentric vestige of colonialism—the historic entitlement of wealthy families exploiting birth positionality—nesting in the current human rights regime.
This threatens minimum thresholds of personal welfare, equal access to opportunities, participation in and adhering to political/legal systems purported to represent the governed, and the enjoyment of an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health.
Academicians, foundations, and nonprofit organizations must rectify these issues by pushing for human rights systems that include child welfare and birth equity in instruments like the Convention on the Rights of the Child and ethics, law, and family planning policies.
Understanding misleading terms and supporting family policies that ensure minimum levels of well-being, equity, democracy, nature, and a sustainable right to have children for all through birth equity entitlements are important steps in that direction. These will ensure parental delay and readiness, equal opportunities for all children, and smaller or more sustainable families.
The False Promise of Growth
Emphasizing sustainable practices, such as switching to vegan brands and eating a plant-based diet, is essential for protecting the environment and ensuring animal welfare. Still, these practices cannot alone resolve the climate crisis.
In many cases, food tech startups that support the move to plant-based meat are often fueled, in part, by greenwashing.
The climate crisis is not just an imbalance of emissions and responsibility among nations. Some of the blame for climate inequity also falls on deceptive tactics like greenwashing, growthwashing, and humanewashing.
A more holistic approach is needed to prevent global warming and create a more just and equitable world for children and nonhuman animals. It is important to look beyond the fantasy world of value and progress built by nonprofits, media, foundations, companies, etc., all driven by growth-based funding. This funding hides the need for true reform, forestalls effective family law changes, and has led to the deadly climate crisis. That growth is setting us all toward a future of ecocide and extinction.
“You cannot have it both ways and complain that global warming will harm GDP,” writes Terry Cannon, emeritus senior research fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, in a May 2024 letter to the Guardian. “A drop in global GDP is one of the best things that can happen to reduce global warming if it reduces consumption of carbon-intensive products and services. GDP is a very poor way to measure the negative impacts of global warming.”
The Inequity of Opportunity Begins at Birth
The wealth gap between Black and white families has only worsened over time. “The growing disparity means that in 2022, for every $100 in wealth held by white households, Black households held only $15,” states a 2024 Brookings Institution article.
This gap is a result of colonization, slavery, and other structural forms of racism. This is the genesis of inequity of opportunity and should be the basis for treating the legal system that allows it as illegitimate.
“Policies that privilege whiteness are reflected in higher levels of wealth for the average white family, which can be leveraged across generations to generate greater wealth and advantages,” adds the Brookings article.
This disparity means that Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities absorb the most significant risks and harms in the climate crisis—both socially and ecologically. Black children were more than twice as likely to face hunger compared to white children in 2023.
These disparities can be resolved with universal birth equity-based planning—and significant baby bond distributions—but policymakers and wealthy white families that benefit from policies supporting this racial wealth gap prefer to exploit the difference.
Similarly, most rich countries have made their wealth by exploiting poorer nations and continue to profit by maintaining this inequality. This is true even though many developing countries have the answers to some of today’s global problems.
For instance, Sudan has the potential to “address the global food crisis” but can only achieve this with “the cooperation of its African and Middle Eastern neighbors, along with the international community, to move on from its war-torn history and play a vital part in global trade,” points out a 2024 World Economic Forum report.
While globally sustainable areas like the Congo Basin rainforest sustain a portion of the world’s oxygen supply, businesses and corporations use deceptive practices to hide the deforestation of these forests. This further contributes to more significant gaps in wealth for non-white communities.
Explosive Growth Has Destroyed Functional Democracy
The current situation is not ecologically sustainable, does not ensure the safety of unborn children, and has destroyed functional democracy. Democracy starts with “one person, one vote,” which implies that each vote is influential. Today, this is not the case.
We need to redistribute resources to ensure birth equity and a fair start in life instead of letting governments decide on these matters if we have to secure the future of our children.
This poverty and inequity cannot be challenged through democracy because family planning policies have ensured that the average citizen is disenfranchised, with little or no influence over the laws they are forced to live under.
Because growth is enabled by removing even minimum levels of welfare or equity, our elected officials simply do not represent their constituents. Growth has diluted votes.
The idea of representation is an illusion when, in reality, one must have access to significant wealth or other forms of influence to influence political outcomes. Also, the fact that the federal minimum wage is “poverty-level wages” is sufficient evidence that the law hardly reflects the people’s will.
Why Reparations to Young Disenfranchised Women Are Important
We can reverse the abovementioned injustices by backing young women’s right to self-determination and reparation.
“Society, as reflected in our government and the policy implemented by our democratically elected representatives, must do what’s best for children, regardless of economic impact, which must include social safety programs designed to give each child a fair start in life and climate reparations for the crisis we have caused and are leaving to them as our legacy,” argues Jessica Blome, a public interest attorney who frequently represents the Fair Start Movement, a nonprofit that promotes the convergence of social, eco, and reproductive justice (affiliated with two of this article’s authors, Carter Dillard and Beatrix Homler).
“That we are even debating the value of women’s autonomy as an economic driver—as opposed to an inalienable human right—is exactly why our culture needs to think differently about women and children,” Blome says.
Mwesigye Robert, a co-founder of Rejoice Africa Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes climate restoration and family policy, argues that political leaders often promote climate responses that are ultimately unrealistic because they are top-down solutions. “They have come up with well-meaning centralized climate responses in their speeches and proposals, but none of these are implemented effectively,” he says.
His organization advocates the care group model, which promotes social and behavioral changes through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Primarily deployed in international development contexts, care groups are often led by mothers sharing insights. “Effective climate restoration must be decentralized to the affected communities at the grassroots level,” says Robert.
All Children Deserve a Fair Start in Life
The climate and the related crises we face today were driven mainly, and certainly exacerbated, by the absence of child equity standards being included in reproductive rights dating back to 1948. This seeded racist inequity and unsustainable growth and created a fake version of social justice, one hiding the actual creation of power relations in birth, development, and inequity. It allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth—at a deadly cost to generations of BIPOC communities.
This is a fundamental entitlement or constitutive fraud: Obligating others to follow laws while not measurably empowering them to be in a position to influence those laws.
Wealthy families in nations most responsible for the climate crisis are now funding a fantasy world to continue this farce and evade climate reparations they owe for the harm they have caused. Environmental sustainability and social justice are vastly undone as children enter the world without the necessary resources.
If the world’s children are not given a fair start in life, it won’t be possible to form organizations capable of representative governance through the measurable self-determination of their constituents.
We must give each family equal opportunities and future generations the resources they need to fight climate change. This means giving each child the same rights, opportunities, and ability to shape the future.
Ashley Berke is co-executive director at Fair Start Movement.
This article was produced by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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