Canada’s environment minister rebuked for saying climate change hurts women most

[Environment Minister Catherine McKenna got a lot of backlash online for her comment Saturday that climate change isn’t gender neutral. TWITTER]

It’s a tweet that has rebounded and hit back at Canada’s environment minister.

Catherine McKenna, attending a meeting of G7 ministers in Tokyo over the weekend, posted this Twitter statement: “DYK: The threat of #climatechange is not gender neutral? Women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men.”

Since then, the minister has acknowledged she has gotten a large number of vicious rebukes and has also said that the “hateful, mysoginist tweets are brutal.” She also called such people a “grouchy subcategory” of climate change deniers.

McKenna has been promoting gender recognition at the climate talks in Tokyo. She is not alone in making such a statement about gender and climate. In April, Ségolène Royal, the French minister of ecology, sustainable development and energy, said women will comprise most of the victims of climate change. Royal was about to sign the COP21 climate change agreement at the UN headquarters in New York.

“It is true that in some countries, in certain contexts, women are more vulnerable,” Sybil Seitzinger, the executive director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS), told Yahoo Canada News. PICS is a collaboration of British Columbia’s research universities: Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Victoria and the University of Northern British Columbia.

“It is not uncommon that there are many women who are single parents that have to provide food, water and the necessities for their children and in areas that suffer from [droughts or storms] it would be harder for them.”

For McKenna and Royal, their remarks seem to be based on an old United Nations report that women comprise 70 per cent of the world’s poor and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate. It’s from that, McKenna has likely gleaned that women have “unequal access” to resources.

But even the UN has said its report from 1995 was wrong — the former chief of statistical services at the agency told Politifact in 2014 that the 70 per cent statistic was “a mistake.” According to a 2013 World Bank study, it’s more evenly split between men and women.

‘The issue of our century’

Some of this gender thinking about climate may be affected by a 2007 London School of Economics study on natural disasters which discovered that they are more likely to kill women and especially in areas where female socioeconomic levels are the lowest. Natural disasters are expected to become more frequent and severe as climate changes.

For Seitzinger, it’s just one part of a multi-faceted problem in which everyone at every level of society will be affected. She says McKenna was highlighting the gender section of a massive problem.

“This is THE issue of our century. We need to take a broad look at its effects on everyone,” she said. “It could be the elderly who already have health problems … or [Inuit] people who say they aren’t able to hunt regularly because the sea ice keeps changing so much.”

According to Seitzinger, who previously spent seven years heading the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme based in Sweden, there are no specific studies that say women will be affected, overall, more than men. However, studies that target gender are now underway.

“In my previous job [in Sweden] I visited many countries where I saw the effects of climate change. It’s really about how it affects people differently in different parts of the world,” she said. “When I visited Botswana, which is landlocked and very arid, the reservoir in the capital of Gaborone only had a few weeks of water left. In that situation, everyone is affected.”

Recovery harder for the poor

Seitzinger also noted that those who are poor — no matter the gender — have a tougher time recovering from these kind of disasters.

“We need to look at the effects in every country and at every level. And we need to develop solutions.”

For instance, in Vancouver, they have discovered “heat islands” in the summer — spots where the temperatures are abnormally higher than other places in the city.

“So whose affected by this? Maybe the elderly or poor people who can’t afford air conditioning. So what’s the solution? Maybe we should look at planting different trees in the city.”

Seitzinger does applaud McKenna for highlighting gender inequalities but she would also like the public to think of the bigger picture.

“Climate change is already happening,” she points out. “We all need to understand and adapt to this changing situation so we can continue as a viable, vital society.”