The exact effects of biodiversity loss on the world’s women and girls will vary based on their pre-existing vulnerabilities, marginalization, and how much they depend on specific parts of our shared environment.
Green spaces
When forests, pastures, and other green spaces start to experience biodiversity loss, this affects the food, water, and air of those who depend on them.
This can have wide consequences for women and girls. Some 26 per cent of employed women work in agriculture, and millions more have informal responsibilities that depend on the environment, such as tilling a family plot or fetching water.
When those environments are placed under strain, families may resort to drastic measures. For example, there is a strong correlation between increasing aridity and higher child marriage rates—and child marriage often leads to adolescent pregnancies, dropping out of school, a lower lifetime income, and an overall lack of agency within and outside the home.
Biodiversity loss also exacerbates the care burdens that women already bear, particularly relating to health issues. Pollution and habitat degradation increase the spread of vector-borne diseases like malaria, and women disproportionately act as caregivers for ill members of their families and communities.
Changing oceans and water scarcity
Climate change, pollution, land use changes, and unbridled increases in water demand have resulted in the decreasing health of the world’s rivers, oceans, and other bodies of water.
Globally, women tend to reduce their own food intake when food is scarce, in favour of other household members’ nutrition. Across countries with available data, women living near water with algae blooms (often the result of agricultural runoff and the overuse of fertilizers) are more likely than other women to experience high levels of anaemia, an indicator that their intake of varied and nutritious food is insufficient.
This is particularly true for women living in the poorest households of these coastal communities, which are more likely to rely on fishing and marine harvesting for their subsistence.
Increased water scarcity also has specific impacts on women and girls. In many regions, women are responsible for collecting water and managing household food supplies. Environmental degradation significantly increases their unpaid labor and reduces their access to essential resources.
Millions of women also depend on the oceans for their livelihoods. In Senegal, for example, roughly 50 per cent of jobs in the fishing sector are held by women. But the depletion of the area’s fish stocks because of over-fishing, climate change, and other drivers, is increasing women’s poverty and food insecurity.
Political and economic power
Women are still largely excluded from decision-making in the public and private-sector organizations that have the biggest impacts on the world’s environment.
Only 16 per cent of environmental ministries are headed by women, and women are largely absent from leadership roles in ministries related to water management, fisheries, and other areas critically important environmental conservation.
And no women are CEOs at any of the world’s top fishing, forestry, agriculture, or energy firms, when examining the top 10 companies in those sectors by revenue. Many of those firms are responsible for the largest contributions to biodiversity loss around the world.
The absence of women in top leadership positions in these ministries and firms limits women’s potential to influence decision-making processes that have lasting global impacts.