UN-Habitat: has developed a checklist for mainstreaming gender under the second phase of Cities and Climate Change Initiatives (CCCI) initiated by UN-Habitat in 20 cities of 13 countries. The check list is being tested in different countries and Nepal (Kathmandu Valley) is one of those few countries chosen by UN-Habitat. The purpose of testing the [...]

Sudan Vision: The timely, thought-provoking essays of this book provide valuable evidence of the impact of different gender and faith perspectives on practical development issues while also highlighting the complexities and ambiguities of religious influences. Development workers, researchers and social activists will gain from these studies a greater awareness and more critical understanding of how [...]

RAYAGADA, India, Apr 27, 2012 (IPS) – Tribal farmer Harish Saraka has rediscovered the key to sustainable farming in this rain-dependent hinterland of eastern Odisha state – mixed cropping. Saraka, 38, is careful not to take credit for helping to turn around farming in this area, in the news just a decade ago for starvation [...]

DowntoEarth: AFTER spending 6 months in the Indian Himalayas, my pessimistic attitude towards the developing world has eased somewhat. My experience has also led me to believe that the current ideology needs to be changed in order to restore the environment to the people, alleviating some of the everyday drudgery in their lives while preserving [...]

Innovative measures by women farmers across India are helping several poor families adapt better to climate change and keep hunger at bay. As Sursati from village Janakpur, district Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, explains, “Earlier, we could not produce enough food for a year because our village would get water-logged by the flood waters. Now, using [...]

As the world celebrated International Women’s Day, my thinking goes back to the time of my childhood I spent in my remote village — a beautiful green and mountainous land in the north of Pakistan. I remember women and little children getting up before sunrise and help their families in fields during the sowing and [...]

A Sustainable World Will Advance the Rights and Welfare of Women International Women’s Day celebrates the vital roles of women in society and the global progress made toward gender parity. Thus far development programs in health and education have directly addressed and improved the particularly vulnerable plight of women. But detrimental disparities between women and [...]

What are the gender dimensions of climate change? As a starting point, we know that women and men do not experience climate change equally. Pre-existing gender inequalities mean that neither their contributions to the carbon emissions responsible for climate change, nor the way that they experience its effects, are the same. In many developing countries [...]

This year’s unusually rainy season in Peru is having a negative effect on the wellbeing and health of women in rural areas who are forced, for example, to spend three times as much time walking to collect firewood and water. But the authorities continue to turn a blind eye to the problems they face. “It’s [...]

Mr. Cyril R Raphael: In this article Mr. Raphael writes the agony of mountains in general by taking an example of overall development in one of the Indian mountain states called Uttarakhand. His discourse covers the social and economic development, governance, leadership, availability of basic amenities, health, education, livelihood, effectiveness of information and communication, role [...]

The government in support with the World Conservation Union is working to formulate a gender and climate change strategy to stress the need of gender-responsive policies and strategies in combating the climate change impact. A three-day workshop titled ‘Linking gender and climate change’ is being organised from Tuesday by the Ministry of Environment (MoE) in [...]

National Geographic: We have the knowledge that can contribute to finding solutions to the crisis of climate change. But if you’re not prepared to listen, how can we communicate this to you? — Marcos Terena, Xané leader, Brazil. The precipitous rise in the world’s human population and humankind’s ever-increasing dependence on fossil fuel-based ways of living [...]

Through Climate Change community of UN Solution Exchange India the Earth Day Network has floated query on Women and the Green Economy for its Campaign (http://www.earthday.org/wage) to increase the opportunities for women’s leadership in designing and advancing the new Green Economy. It finds that there is limited participation of women in the discussions, planning, and leadership of the newly [...]

Gender and Sustainable Mountain Development in a Changing World Conference Vision In 2002, ICIMOD organised the international conference ‘Celebrating Mountain Women’, as the only global event during the International Year of Mountains to focus on mountain women in the context of sustainable mountain development. It brought together 250 participants from 35 countries around the world. [...]

BioOne: Despite the growing number of studies and research projects on climate change adaptation, only a few have examined the gender and cultural dynamics of the adaptation process. Inequality has been identified as a major indicator of the vulnerability of individuals and groups; nevertheless, the gender and cultural aspects of inequality have not received much [...]

UNEP: Investment in Green Technologies Can Improve Women’s Climate Adaptation Capacity & Livelihood Opportunities. There is increase in Human Trafficking Associated with Climate-related Disasters.  Women, particularly those living in mountain regions in developing countries, are facing disproportionately high risks to their livelihoods and health from climate change, as well as associated risks such as human [...]

IPS (Durban): Negotiators at the 17th Conference of Parties owe it to the world’s more than seven billion people to deliver a deal with a work plan for agriculture, a sector that is expected to be the worst affected by climate change. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO of Food Agriculture Natural Resources Policy Advocacy Network told [...]

Reuters: Sammad Sheikh of Tangchekh village in north Kashmir cannot understand why the rice fields that his family cultivated for generations are drying up. “It is a mystery as to why water is getting scarcer in summers,” he says. “This has been happening for the past few years though there have been one or two [...]

The Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region is highly dynamic as there are many socioeconomic and environmental drivers of change at play, including climate change. The impacts of these changes challenge the resilience of natural and human capacities and environments in the region. Climate change is believed to contribute to extreme weather events and possibly to increase [...]

Noreen Haider: Writes from her visit to the beautiful Naran valley of Khyber Pakhtunkwa province in Pakistan, where she observes various dimensions of social and environment development. Noreen came across various developmental projects and activities in the region and finds that poor education and poorly planned social and environmental projects lead to acute poverty natural [...]

Radio Netherlands Worldwide: The Climate Change Risk Atlas ranked Nepal as the fourth most vulnerable country in the world last year. Given the vulnerability of the Himalayan country, USAID donated $30mn for the Hariyo Ban project last week. The programme hopes to build mechanisms that will help Nepal cope with climate change risks. Along Nepal’s [...]

IPS: CUZCO, Peru- “This year the freeze killed my crops, our small livestock died, and now I can’t even sleep because I’m worried sick thinking about how to put food on my family’s table, since I’m a widow,” said Rosaura Huatay, an indigenous farmer in Peru’s northern Andes highlands. Huatay and four other campesinas or [...]

Business Recorder: The humanitarian emergency caused by the few last months’ devastating floods in Asia is a warning that the situation could get worse, The people affected by this crisis have lost everything, and their difficulties are only just beginning. Two countries Pakistan and Thailand have been badly hit by the disaster. Hundreds of thousands [...]

WWF-Nepal: A five-year program to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change and threats to biodiversity in Nepal, was officially launched at a ceremony in Kathmandu on 8 Nov 2011. The Hariyo Ban program is a new investment in biodiversity conservation in Nepal, funded by the US Agency for International Development​ (USAID). The program will [...]

Shalini Dhyani: Writes about hill agriculture, agro-forest and such ecosystem practices from Indian Himalayan region. She emphasizes on improving the socio-economic condition of mountain people by adopting a range of animal husbandry, agro-forestry and traditional agriculture practices through better scientific and technical inputs. Entire Himalayan ecosystem is undergoing rapid land-use and climatic changes in last [...]

Washingtonpost: Humans have mined resources from the remote and rocky coast of Peru and Chile for more than a century and a half, gathering the guano deposits of seabirds for fertilizer and gunpowder. Those seabirds flourished on anchoveta in the coastal waters, while Peruvians in the highlands ate the same fish as dried snacks. Now [...]

DAWN: More than climate change, more than the depletion of fresh water supply, a fast population growth rate is the key element which will determine the survival of humankind. Of these three, population growth requires the least complex planning in a way but the most challenging strategy. On the one hand, its success does not [...]

GRAIN: Climate change endangers food security in Himalayan communities such as Dunche, in Nepal’s Rasuwa District. In this photo Tamang women pound and sift wheat. (Photo credit: Minority Rights Group/Jared Ferrie) Food is a key driver of climate change. How our food gets produced and how it ends up on our tables accounts for around [...]

IPS News: Some symbolic acts are powerful reflections of a broader struggle. In March some 300 women planted trees in the Santa River basin in northwest Peru to demonstrate their determination to preserve the environment and help adapt to climate change. Now a network of councilwomen have organised to that end. The organiser of the [...]

Environment News Services: Environmentalists are blaming climate change for the unprecedented massive monsoon rains in Pakistan, which so far this year have affected eight million people, claiming 350 lives and damaging 1.3 million homes. Over the past month, the country’s southern region has received the highest monsoon rains ever recorded, local metrological experts confirm. In [...]

Suman K A: The National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA), one of the eight missions under the NAPCC, lays emphasis on four key functional areas and ten important dimensions. Through these, the mission seeks to target both; the imminent challenges from the likely impacts of climate change on Indian agriculture and the more fundamental ones [...]

Womens eNews: The documentary “Weathering Change,” released today, shows how climate change is disproportionately impacting women. In one Nepali woman’s village, the forest has been depleted and only a quarter of the inhabitants have enough to eat. Walking into the forest near her home, Sarada Chaudhary likes to look up. Above her head, branches weave [...]

Tribune Pakistan: The government is waking up to the need for permanent solutions to tackle malaria, dengue and flooding given that the country “may have to learn to live with heavy rains and floods due to global climate change”. According to President Asif Ali Zardari’s spokesperson Farhatullah Babar, this was the outcome after a slew [...]

MRD Journal: Several months ago, my colleagues at Utah State University began discussing how anthropology could better contribute to the popular discourse on climate change, particularly in mountain areas of the world. So much of the climate science, it seemed to us, focuses on fairly technical measures of irregular weather patterns or isotopic variation in [...]

Daily Nations: Small-scale tea farmers are highly vulnerable to climate change due to their dependence on one crop, the Tea Research Foundation of Kenya has said. It is urging farmers to consider crop diversification to reduce the danger of complete harvest loss due to weather extremes and pests. According to a joint study by TRFK [...]

Shalini Dhyani: Well developed agro-forestry systems have been integral to traditional hill agro-ecosystem for the innumerable techno-socio-economic benefits that they provide. Farmers in the rural areas of Indian Himalayan Region have integrated and practiced agro-forestry based agriculture, reaping rich benefits, individually and for the community as well. Therefore, agro-forestry has been a part of peasants’ [...]

The PRI World: To get to some of Peru’s most remote Andean communities, you head out over pockmarked dirt roads from a small town already 10,000 feet up. Up – up – up — past llamas and alpacas and sheep and cows. The vegetation thins out and the air becomes even thinner. Your lungs clamor [...]

The Hindu: A group of young urban professionals embark on a year-long discovery of rural India, to share and receive valuable insights.  “Give us the job and we will do it.” This comment from one of the 28 young professionals taking part in a State Bank of India Youth for India (SBIYFI) fellowship programme captures [...]

The News: Experts have indicated that women are more likely to be unseen victims of resource wars and violence directly related to adverse effects of climate change. Bushra Khaliq, general secretary of the Women Workers Helpline, said the phenomenon in years 1999 and 2000 clearly indicated the vulnerability when thousands of poor families had to [...]

EDF Talks: With 400 million people living below the poverty line, and an agriculture sector that is heavily dependent on the Monsoon, India is on the frontlines of climate change.  But with such a rapidly developing country and signs of climate change already manifesting, how can both development and climate changebe addressed? The world’s largest democracy [...]

Shalini Dhyani: With depletion of agricultural lands due to shift in monsoon patterns, landslides, run off, regular leaching of nutrients, and drying up of natural springs and lack of irrigation facilities has resulted into uneconomical agriculture in the mountain regions of India. Most of the villages in mountains are witnessing migration at a very large [...]

TimesLive:Climate change can’t be solved without empowering women, and global problems can’t be solved without addressing climate change, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane says. “Women produce up to 80 percent of the food in the developing world as here in South Africa, and especially in Polokwane,” the minister said. She said in [...]

Shalini Dhyani: Changes in the fragile mountain ecosystems affect local people who are very much dependent on agriculture and forests. The economy in major mountain regions of the world is mostly dependent on women, and they are among the important actors of change and holders of significant knowledge and skills, which makes them crucial actors [...]

Pakistan Observer: Sustainable Development may be defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generation to meet their own needs” In other words sustainable development means development of those resources which fulfil needs of the present population and also sustain for the next generation and so [...]

GIZ NEWS: Climate change is not gender neutral: gender roles determine who does what, when and where, which results in distinct vulnerabilities for women and men. Despite evidence of gender-differentiated impacts, few gendered approaches to adaptation exist. A good example comes from Bolivia. The Proagro programme in Bolivia partnered with the Climate Protection Programme to [...]

Shalini Dhyani: The Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) is home to 40 million people, which is 3.8% of the total population of India. Since independence, the system of democratic governance ushered in new institutional arrangements with some specific arrangements to protect and maintain socio-cultural identities of the mountain societies in the Indian Himalayan Region. A wide [...]

The News: Women s development plays a vital role in sustainable development, said the climate change and sustainable development experts in a media discussion forum on Inspiring leadership for sustainable development held here on Sunday. According to a press release, the discussion was a part of three-day action lab organised by Lead Pakistan. News Analyst [...]

Alertnet: At the intersection of two of the world’s most vulnerable groups – children and women – adolescent girls may end up bearing the biggest burden of climate change impacts, according to a new report. In times of economic hardship – often caused by droughts, floods or other natural disasters – girls regularly suffer from a [...]

Plan International’s new report, Weathering the Storm: Adolescent Girls and Climate Change, calls for better integration of the needs of adolescent girls in climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes. The findings presented in the report are based on interviews with girls involved in Plan International’s programmes in Ethiopia and Bangladesh. We [...]

There are a number of publications available from IGREC, New Delhi online, on cross cutting aspects of Climate change, Forest, Women empowerment, Energy and REDD. The title and abstracts of each has been given in following section for further reading and download. REDD in Afghanistan: Empowering Women and Increasing Access to Energy Prolonged civil war has [...]

IISD: The UN Development Programme (UNDP) has released the sixth issue of its Climate Change Adaptation Bulletin, a quarterly publication that provides an overview of the technical assistance to countries at the national, sub-national and community-levels. The Bulletin reports on projects carried out in Liberia, Cape Verde, Bangladesh, Lao PDR, Samoa and Cambodia. The issue [...]

IDRC: Canada’s International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) support to developing countries has been in the form of research aimed at promoting growth and development thereby resulting innovative and lasting local solutions for the communities that need it most.  IDRC’s Climate Change and Water (CCW) Program with the purpose of helping researchers from developing country helps [...]

RECOFTC Blog: RECOFTC’s Regan Suzuki thinks focusing on something as small as a stove could make big changes for women in forests. If women were more deliberately considered in REDD+ and development projects, the significant potential of fuel-efficient stoves for improving their lives and reducing deforestation would make it a high priority. When considering underlying [...]

The most recent issue of MRD offers articles on various topics of concern to sustainable development in mountains around the world, such as integrating farmers into land use planning processes, the consequences of amenity migration, women’s role in food and economic security, mountain vegetation, biodiversity conservation, and risk management. The Mountain Platform section presents a [...]

Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh announced the two awards at the convention of the Vishnoi samaj at the Guru Jambeshwar Dham in Churu on April 12. He said the law would be amended to enhance punishment for wildlife poaching. The following is the text of his speech. “I come here not as a Minister but [...]

At the end of April, a committee of countries chosen to work out the details of a U.N.-backed Green Climate Fund holds its first meeting in Mexico, to discuss how to get the fund up and running. It faces some important questions: How to ensure the money goes to those more vulnerable to climate change? [...]

Just three years after the 2007-2008 food crisis, food prices are again increasing and becoming more volatile amid expanding biofuel production, rising oil prices, US dollar depreciation, export restrictions and panic purchasing. In Indonesia, for example, food inflation rose by 14 percent between March 2010 and March 2011. The world’s poorest consumers, who spend some [...]

The women of Kunderpara village are used to having water all around them. They live on an island in the middle of one of Bangladesh’s many large rivers. The women are even used to the occasional seasonal flood. But lately when the river floods, it takes on new, terrifying meaning. The women do all they [...]

The speakers at a seminar unanimously agreed that women should be sufficiently represented in decision-making process on climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. The seminar on ‘Climate Change and Gender: Prospects and Challenges’ was organised here by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI). Mome Saleem, Research Associate of SDPI, said that throughout the world, there [...]

ISLAMABAD – Women shall be given sufficient representation in decision-making processes on climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies as no national or international policy framework on climate change addresses gender issue. The experts on environment and other speakers stressed this while discussing absence of gender perspective in policy framework on climate change in Pakistan here [...]