About warm winters, women and climate change...

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Seems like everyone’s been talking about the weather this winter, and how warm it’s been – unseasonably warm – in many parts of Canada.  While enjoying our balmy January, some of us felt uneasy, too. There’s the elephant in the room: climate change. Is this winter a blip on the screen, an anomaly, something we shouldn’t expect will happen year after year? Or does it mean that cold winters are history?*

Clearly, our climate is changing. The first decade of this century set records for warmth, worldwide. Our uneasiness this year isn’t just about one temperate winter. It’s about how climate change will affect the health of our world and its inhabitants. And as this issue comes under greater scrutiny, we are learning that climate change is affecting and will affect women differently – and worse – than men.

Learn more here about how gender and health relate to climate change...

• Recently, The Source posted Climate change: Sex and gender-based analysis of this topic.

• In CWHN’s magazine Network find a series of articles:
  • Climate change and Canada: An untapped opportunity to advance gender equality?
  • Feeling the heat: Women’s health in a changing climate
  • Canada’s North in a changing climate: Hearing from the women of Nain

• In its report The State of the World 2009, Worldwatch Institute published the special section, Women and climate change: Vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities.

• UN Women calls for gender sensitive responses to the effects of climate change in Women, gender equality and climate change.

• In Oxfam’s Women and climate change, learn about how women are the most capable of creating change and adaptation within our communities that can lessen the negative effects of climate change.

• CWHN’s primer Women’s health and the environment offers several links to resources on climate change and gender.

• Also, check out what organizations such as Gender CC: Women for Climate Justice  are saying about this issue.

*Climatologists will quickly tell you that weather does not equal climate. To determine climate trends, you must look at much longer periods: years and years. You can’t assume that one crazy warm record breaking winter means climate change is happening. Nor doesone abnormally brittle winter mean that climate change is not real. But weather records over the long term are showing that the world iswarming. Global average surface temperature climbed up 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit (0.7 degrees Celsius) between 1900 and 2000, and the first decade of this century was the warmest on record.