By Patricia Miranda Wattimena, Climate Justice Programme Officer, APWLD
APWLD adopts Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) to work with women and their communities affected by climate crisis and dissect various thematic focus and climate issues. In 2019, a Feminist Participatory Action Research on Climate Justice (CJ FPAR) brought together seven women and grassroots organisations from the Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan and Nepal to document their stories with a specific focus on the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). They have successfully organised rural, indigenous, peasant, urban poor and agricultural women workers, mobilised their communities to unfold climate impacts, and identify solutions based on their lived realities and experiences on the ground. The stories of the struggles of women and their communities for climate justice and country specific analyses are reflected in their country briefers.
FPAR findings from the seven countries strongly indicate that, on a daily basis, grassroots women are bearing the brunt of the impacts of climate crises. For instance, Matiari Women agricultural workers in Pakistan are witnessing extreme daily temperatures reaching up to 52 degrees Celsius along with the increasing heat wave periods of five times longer in the last 30 years. This situation is exacerbated by their poor working conditions and lack of access to public health services, resulting in the domino effects of the declining daily earnings and increasing number and frequency of women agricultural workers suffering from worsening health conditions.
In the Philippines, millions of houses of the urban poor are demolished to pave way for development projects. Through their research, urban poor women in the Southville relocation site reported that they are battling not only with the impacts of demolitions but also the worsening climate crises. In the course of climate induced disasters such as typhoons and floods followed by the aftermath, the urban poor women in Southville are losing their properties, struggling with lack of space in the emergency shelters and in finding ways to make earnings in the face of inadequate government support.
As shown in the Climate Finance Delivery Plan, for more than 12 years, rich countries continue to break their promises to channel 100 billion USD every year for poor countries to cope with climate impacts. At the same time, many poor countries are spending five times more on debt to deal with the impacts of climate emergency. For years, CJ FPAR women have attempted to engage with the process of Nationally Determined Contributions in their countries. Yet, FPAR findings are showing that although many NDCs are pledging to achieve gender equality, grassroots women are largely excluded from the process. Lack of access to information and the traditional gendered division of roles and responsibilities are among many factors that exclude women from contributing to shape climate actions and solutions.
Through the CJ FPAR, urban poor women of the Philippines testified that despite their country’s commitments to tackle climate crises through its NDC, the government continues to implement laws that allow the destruction of mountains for mining operations such as the Philippine Mining Act of 1995, causing the increase of natural disasters such as flash floods and landslides. Similarly, peasant women in Thailand testified that the country’s NDC risks promoting false solutions when large harmful projects such as hydropower dams are proposed as a solution to tackle extreme droughts in the country.
The FPAR data analysis shows an extremely concerning trend of government’s climate inaction and lack of political will to engage grassroots women and their communities in tackling climate crises. More importantly, keeping the earth temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius requires at least 45 percent of the global emissions by 2030. However, the most recent revised NDC synthesis report confirms that the global NDCs commitments would result in a 16 percent increase in global emissions by 2030 leading us to 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.
Through the CJ FPAR journey, grassroots women are presenting not only their undisputed lived experience but also community based and women-led climate solutions ranging from a community mobilisation for tree planting initiative by the indigenous women in Indonesia to the early warning system developed by rural women in Vietnam to mitigate impacts of climate induced disasters facing their communities. This set of evidence from the ground must continue to be amplified at different levels to challenge false narratives promoting business as usual orchestrated by the polluters.
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The CJ FPAR must be replicated as a tool to challenge unbalanced power relations, false climate solutions and putting women at the front and centre to lead the way for a system change and not climate change.
