I’ve written before about the racket which is wealthy, middle class white people living on the taxpayer dime in expensive western cities demanding Africans change their ways. Today I stumbled across this rubbish from the World Economic Forum:
With the 2030 deadline for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals approaching, the fight against climate change intensifies each year, with governments pumping resources into achieving them.
In the film Pacific Rim, the world’s governments pooled their resources in order to counter the threat of monsters emerging from the Earth’s core by building enormous robots to punch them in the face. That plan seems half-sane compared to what our current rulers are attempting.
One of the most critical SDGs is SDG 5, achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls, because…
…it’s the only one offering a career for a dimwit with a Gender Studies degree?
…it will have positive cascading effects on the achievement of the other SDGs, including quality education, poverty alleviation, clean energy, reduced inequalities, good health and wellbeing, zero hunger, clean water and sanitation, decent work and economic growth and most importantly, climate action.
Apparently if we let women out of the dungeons they currently languish in, pretty much every problem facing mankind will be solved. Oddly, this doesn’t quite mesh with the fact that American women are about as liberated as it’s possible to be while America is held up as being a despairing pit of inequality and the world’s biggest polluter. So maybe we should hold off unlocking the manacles until we’ve figured out what the relationship is?
We are already seeing some of the devastating effects of climate change, with increasing floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters.
As they say in Wikipedia, citation needed.
Women are the most vulnerable in these situations, facing the maximum risk due to their socio-economic status.
I think they’re talking about women in Florida whose husbands own yachts.
With 70% living in poverty, women are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events, loss of agricultural productivity, destruction of life and property and so on, all of which stem from the climate crisis.
Unless these women are living alone – not a feature of those trapped in grinding poverty – then it’s hard to see how losing a house is worse for a woman than a man, unless he just schleps off down the pub and lives there until she’s rebuilt it. And destruction of life? Does that not really affect men, then?
Women also have the knowledge and understanding of what is needed to adapt to changing environmental circumstances in order to determine practical solutions.
They do? Then why the need to do anything?
But women remain a largely untapped resource due to existing biases, including restricted land rights, lack of access to training, technology and financial resources, and limited access to political decision making due to under representation.
Is she describing medieval Europe here?
For practical and effective climate change mitigation, we must unleash the knowledge and capability of women.
Yeah, I’m not sure what’s holding them back in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, German, France, the Netherlands, Norway…(cont’d page 94).
To find sustainable solutions, it is critical to recognize the important contributions of women as decision makers, caretakers, stakeholders, experts and educators across all sectors.
A minute ago women were an untapped reserve thanks to the patriarchy standing on their necks. Now we must recognise their important contributions to world affairs. Which is it?
Greta Thunberg, Christina Figueres and Franny Armstrong, to name a few, are already leading the way in not only climate change advocacy but also in crafting sustainable, long-term solutions.
I don’t know who the latter two are, but Greta Thunberg’s solution is about as sustainable as her act of looking twelve.
According to McKinsey, in a “full potential” scenario in which women play an identical role in labour markets to men, as much as $28 trillion, or 26%, could be added to global annual GDP by 2025.
Has anyone asked women if they want to play an identical role as men in the labour market which, in case the geniuses at McKinsey have forgotten, includes working in sewer pipes and hanging off power lines?
This is more than enough to bridge the climate finance gap needed to fund the battle against climate change, which stands at €530 billion ($585 billion) per year by 2020 and €810 billion ($894 billion) by 2030.
So women are to be put to work in their millions in order to pay for the costs of climate change legislation. Apparently this is good news for women.
Just increasing the participation of women in the labour force will sufficiently increase the world’s GDP for financing sustainable development.
At the expense of the birth rate, which will leave that word “sustainable” looking rather forlorn.
One of the most potent tools for increasing the effectiveness of women in climate change mitigation is renewable energy, which can help transform the lives of women by improving their health, providing them with better livelihood prospects, improving their education opportunities and more.
Increasing the cost of energy improves the lives of the world’s poorest, apparently.
In fact, it offers women many entrepreneurial avenues for further deployment of renewable energy, which in turn mitigates carbon emissions.
So it’s not the structure of the host society which is preventing women becoming good little worker bees, but a lack of electricity?
And rural women will be the primary beneficiaries. Looking at examples such as Solar Sister in Africa, renewable energy increases women’s relevance in society, shields them from harmful health effects of indoor pollution (through burning of biomass)…
One of the biggest problems in Africa is the lack of reliable electricity coupled with the fact it gets dark around 7pm, after which there isn’t a whole lot to do but get busy making more kids. What is desperately needed to improve the lives of African women is cheap, reliable power 24/7 from a traditional grid. Solar power isn’t going to do anything to help without a storage system that has yet to be invented, and this nonsense is going to prevent a proper power station being built.
…and makes them agents of climate change mitigation through their involvement in renewable energy deployment.
I’m not sure being handed shiny trinkets is historically very empowering for natives, even if they come in the form of solar panels.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2013 found “a nation’s competitiveness in the long term depends significantly on whether and how it educates and utilizes its women” and whether they have “the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities as men.”
Which explains why the Soviet Union outperformed Japan.
Women bring more empathy and inclusiveness in their advocacy and problem-solving, which enhances their efficacy as sustainability leaders.
If women are naturally better at problem solving, why does it need supranational organisations to promote them? Surely the results would speak for themselves. I mean, no organisation ever got set up to persuade people that women are pretty good at raising kids, did it?
Whether it’s tribal women in Udaipur, Rajasthan, becoming green entrepreneurs, or Barefoot College in Rajasthan creating female solar engineers, or women-led self-help groups in Trichy, Tamil Nadu, mobilizing funds for water and sanitation (important components of sustainability), there are examples of women everywhere leading the way to a sustainable future.
All under the watchful eye of well-paid white folk living as expats in Geneva. Kerr-ching!