Since December 7, representatives of governments and civil society have gathered in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyang (Montreal) to negotiate an international agreement aimed at halting and reversing the catastrophic decline of biodiversity. Expectations are high for the emergence of an ambitious framework with global collective goals and targets for 2030.
With violence against women on the rise worldwide, the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework must strongly affirm gender equality by explicitly recognizing the equal rights of women and girls and their access to land and natural resources, as well as their equitable and meaningful participation in biodiversity governance and law-making.
COP15 negotiators cannot ignore the fact that the degradation of natural ecosystems has gendered impacts, and the empowerment of women and girls everywhere, especially those who are indigenous and those living in developing countries. South, is essential to effectively remedy the loss of biodiversity.
Women make up more than 40% of the agricultural labor force and 47% of the fishing labor force globally, but they make up less than 20% of landowners. A recent United Nations report indicates that in at least 102 countries, women are denied land ownership rights under customary, traditional or religious laws. They are also overrepresented in precarious, poorly paid and sometimes unpaid jobs, with fewer legal rights than men: less access to credit, less territorial rights, less access to decision-making structures and spheres of governance. They represent 70% of the world’s poorest people and are therefore particularly affected by ecological destruction which restricts access to basic food, energy and water resources.
Biodiversity loss, climate change, environmental degradation, resource depletion and population displacement exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities.
In 2018, the UN reported that 80% of people displaced by environmental disasters were women. We also know that violence against women has increased following climate disasters. In Pakistan, gender-based violence, such as sexual assault, human trafficking and forced marriages, increased by 80% after devastating floods forced 33 million people to flee their homes in 2022.
Mining industries present critical risks for women. In Canada, the exploitation of fossil fuels is deeply linked to the loss of biodiversity and violence against women. The Government of Canada’s report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls identifies (non-Indigenous) labor camps hired to build pipelines on Indigenous lands (referred to as “men’s camps”) as a substantial factor in the increase in sexual assaults and murders of Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people.
According to the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project (JCAP), mining companies in Latin America – 41% of which are registered in Canada – have routinely turned a blind eye to brutality perpetrated by their employees against local women.
Wars and military campaigns also irreversibly damage natural ecosystems and landscapes with explosives, heavy metals and polluting vehicles, and subject local women and girls to abuse and murder, sometimes as a tactic.
The realities of ecosystem degradation and climate change show that biodiversity and climate law reform must be prioritized and become a vehicle for protecting and strengthening the rights of women and girls to life and access to food, water, sanitation, land, housing, education and decent work. Yet at all levels of law-making and environmental governance, women have been underrepresented.
Faced with the triple crisis of biodiversity loss, climate change and sexual and gender-based violence, women and girls around the world face daily violations of their fundamental rights.
International decision-making forums such as COP15 must make room for indigenous and southern women. It is only with their active participation and in a position of authority that the international community can succeed in implementing effective measures to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity.
Empowering women and girls is at the heart of many solutions that must be implemented immediately to settle the ecological and climate debts that countries in the North owe to the South. For too long, military and corporate interests have driven responses to biodiversity loss and climate change, while women and girls have been at the forefront of struggles for environmental and climate justice. It is time for this inconsistency to end.
*Sabaa Khan is a member of the National Steering Committee of the National Association of Women and the Law