New Material from Earth Day 2021:
Girl Rising, Girls Opportunity Alliance, and Malala Fund experts all say: “Educating girls is one of the most powerful solutions to addressing climate change and its effects.”
Here’s a great article and 2-minute video explaining why and how.
Paul Hawken is an environmental writer and activist. His latest effort, Project Drawdown, maps, measures and models the top 100 solutions to climate change. It has been called the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming and was outlined in the #1 best selling environmental book of 2017.
“Number six was a surprise: educating girls. As was seven, clinics to support family planning and women’s reproductive health – not just in the developing world, but here in places like Alabama. (These are the pink slices of the pie.)
Both issues are intertwined. If you leave girls in school and support their education, they tend to plan their families very differently. When they’re married off early, which happens all over the world for cultural and religious reasons, their choices are made for them. Educated girls become women who make different family choices: they’ll have an average of two children rather than five or six. It’s the difference between high and median world-population predictions. Put six and seven together, and it becomes the number-one solution.”
Source: Green America, Winter 2017
Aside from family planning, educating girls makes them “more effective stewards of food, soil, trees and water, even as nature’s cycles change. They have greater capacity to cope with shocks from natural disasters and extreme weather events.” Source: www.drawdown.org
For more information:
http://www.drawdown.org/
http://www.futureearth.org/blog/2017-aug-8/getting-drawdown-qa-paul-hawken
