WUNRN
WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE
MEANS FOR INDIGENOUS WOMEN, INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
By Ms. Alina Saba - September 26, 2014
When I was born
in an Indigenous Limbu
I am the first
person from my village to obtain a university degree. With this enormous
privilege I decided to focus on the rights and development of Indigenous
peoples and quickly realized two things. First, threats to our lands threaten
our livelihoods, our culture, and our very existence. Second, Indigenous women
across the world, particularly in least developed countries like Nepal, are the
least audible, most excluded and seemingly the most expendable when the world
is focused on maximizing profits and consumption.
I'm now working
as a community researcher in remote, mountainous areas of
Landslides
resulting from melting glaciers and changing monsoonal rains, for example, have
destroyed crops in the Mangri village prior to harvest for the past five years.
These landslides were not even reported due to their isolation and lack of
services. When Indigenous people lose their crops and land they have few
survival options. Women, already working 14 hour days, now have to climb
further up the mountain to collect local medicinal herbs for sale. Increasing
temperatures, unpredictable rain patterns and increased competition have made
the herbs rarer. Often the only options for survival are debt and migration.
Nepalese who are forced to migrate often end up in exploitative, dangerous
work, such as domestic work or trafficked into sex industries, forced labor and
surrogacy, often under the guise of marriage.
My work is part
of a regional project to empower the most marginalized women to determine their
own solutions to climate change. Through the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law
and Development (APWLD), I have met women from the Carteret Islands who are
amongst the first climate refugees, women working with the survivors of Typhoon
Haiyan in the Philippines, and women from Bangladesh working with the Munda
Indigenous community who are losing their lands to salinity and flooding in a
country that anticipates at least 20 million displaced people by 2050.
Reading UN
climate reports that reveal our future is truly terrifying. If we continue
extracting, consuming and emitting as we are, the temperature is likely to rise
by 4 degrees Celsius or more. That would be disastrous for humanity. But it
will be the most disastrous for those who live the most sustainable lives --
Indigenous, rural and poor women and their communities in the least developed
countries. With none of the benefits of 'development' or globalization and none
of the responsibility for climate change, Indigenous women have every right to
question the shocking selfishness of the international community.
For us, the
answers to climate change are simple and were promised decades ago. The answers
are not the creation of markets for carbon -- markets that cause women in
The answers lie
in human rights and equality. The gargantuan threat of climate change should
force us to re-think global systems that are disastrous for the planet and
deeply inequitable. These systems mean 85
people in the world have more wealth and consume more than 3.5 billion
people -- half the world's population. Our survival is dependent on governments
making binding and drastic commitments to reduce emissions. But it is also
dependent on a commitment to finally deliver on human rights promises and
provide Development
Justice to all.
As governments continue to negotiate our climate future I will be asking them to look Indigenous women in the eyes and answer us: whose lands will be traded away? Which cultures will be lost? And whose lives will be discarded in these negotiations?
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