At climate change's 'Ground Zero': Women most vulnerable but vital resource

(news report)

(UPDATED)COUTONOU, BENIN – Here at the fringes of climate change's "Ground Zero", no mourning bell tolls for the women who are most vulnerable to climate change's impacts, and rightly so, since they can be a key to survival even in a more inhospitable, warming globe.

Monique Ouassa, a sociology of art professor at the University of Abomey-Calavi says here this week that her recent study of agricultural Beninese northern tribes show how development planners must understand indigenous worldviews as they look into local adaptation strategies for climate change. "This way, women's potentials for adaptation and survival can be harnessed," she added.

According to a recent study of the IUCN, the Conservation Union, "women in indigenous communities are more vulnerable to climate change impacts because of their disportionate involvement in reproductive work, their insecure property rights and access to resources and their reduced mobility as they care for children and the elderly."

Meanwhile, Benin's environment agency admitted recently that little has been done to harness womenfolk's potentials in adapting to the effects of the quickly changing temperature of an already "feverish earth", half a year since the Bali Plan of Action at the Climate Conference in Indonesia last December 2007.
Ouassa issued the findings of her study "like the sound of African morning bells": not as a mourning toll but as a wake-up call.

African morning bells, known as djin djin, have been popularized worldwide by an eponymous title of an album of world music by Angelique Kidjo in 2007. Kidjo won a Grammy award for the album this year.

Ouassa, 34, had set out on a four-year study of the worldviews of the agricultural bush-burning tribes in the departments (equivalent to provinces in the Philippines) of Atakiri and Alibori in northern Benin, along the borders of Mali and Niger,about 400 kilometers from this port city of Cotonou.

"I sought to understand the indigenous cosmogony, their worldview so we will know why, for instance, they keep on burning trees and grasslands and why they have no tradition of planting trees and instead are contributing to desertification," explained Ouassa.

The West African country of Benin, slightly bigger than the size of Luzon island, has lost virtually all its primary forest cover and desertification is taking over its northern territories..
The upper north of Benin is on the edge of the sub-Saharan Sahel region and shares the same climate and terrain.

Jan Engeland, UN Secretary-General's special adviser on conflict, while on a visit in this area last month, called this part of Western Africa , as climate change's “Ground Zero”, where the worst impact of climate change will be felt by the world's poorest peoples, especially women and children.

Moreover,, climate scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which evaluates the risk of climate change caused by human activity, has also projected that the West African Sahel and Central Africa will experience some of the highest temperature increases anywhere in the world over the next few decades.


In its regional report on adaptation and vulnerability in the Gulf of Guinea, the IPCC also noted that the region's high maternal mortality rate but low female literacy rate indicate low status, making women more vulnerable to climate change’s impacts. The IPPC further noted that these low rates also show that the educational and health infrastructures, indicators of vigorous rural development, are weak.
Oussa also learned in her research, which she has been conducting since 2004,that for these Beninese tribes, women are associated mostly with water, rain and fertility while men are associated with soil,land and fire.

"That's why women are tasked with gathering water and watering fields while men are associated with the soil and the harvest," said Ouassa. She also found that the tribes that the tribes consider fire, which is used to clear the land, an important element associated with new beginnings and rites of passages.

These beliefs can have an implication on women's land rights, said Ouassa, as women in these parts traditionally cannot own nor inherit land. So, she urges development planners in the government and private sectors to find ways to change these negative aspects of this worldview in order to benefit tribal women.

"Only when women can have their land rights can women be fully harnessed as resources and stewards of resources for survival in an era of climate change," she stressed. She said that women, for instance, can plant trees, just like their counterparts in Benin’s southern departments where cultural values are different.

But among these tribes, only men are associated with trees and the land. Besides, she said, in their cosmogony, trees are God’s gifts, like the land, and do not need to be planted and nurtured by people.

Meanwhile, Juliette Koudenoukpo Biaou, the country's environment minister, readily admitted in a press conference that her government has not done much in charting out the course of the country's adaptation plan in the midst of "unequivocal" climate change.

The minister spoke against a backdrop of a brightly-colored painting of women farmers. "Generally, we have done little in terms of making a plan of action, concerning gender and climate change. We are still in the phase of re-confirming research results and informing and orienting decision-makers on what to do, policy-wise," said Koudenoukpo Biaou, a former non-government worker who is also the country's first woman forestry expert.

She informed that the United Nations Environment Program is organizing a gender and climate change conference late this year for Western Africa, in which research like Ouassa's can be discussed and disseminated.

"Things are going slow, we have not done much to implement the Bali Plan of Action. We have not gone beyond improving women's incomes and providing seminars on planting trees and making more efficient cooking stoves," the minister said.

Note: July 30 -- this article has been updated,incorporating the editing suggestions from Professor Nick Mills, (of Boston University), author of "Karzai:The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan", who was my co-participant at the Media 21 workshop in Geneva and the field work in Benin.