This goal focuses on taking urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.
UNICEF and UN Women agree that educating girls and women is one of the best ways of strengthening communities on climate change. Globally, one fourth of all economically active women are engaged in agriculture, a primary driver of the loss of species and habitats. And as agricultural workers, they are at the frontline when it comes to direct climate consequences such as droughts, floods or crop failures. Many spend increasingly long hours every day hunting for food, fuel and water. UN Women says: „Through their experiences and traditional knowledge as stewards of many natural resources, women can offer valuable insights into better managing scarce resources and mitigating climate risks.“
But most importantly women’s empowerment is key to climate action for some other reason, says the climate research organization Project Drawdown: “Wherever women are empowered educationally, culturally, economically, politically, and legally, fertility rates fall,” they wrote in their paper. “Populations tend to move toward states of zero or negative growth when women achieve equal standing with men, as long as family planning services and contraceptives are readily available.” Reducing the growth of the human population would help a lot to achieve SDG-13.