Women, More Vulnerable To Climate Change – WEP

The Women Environmental Programme (WEP) has urged the Federal Government to mitigate the effects of climate as it affects women more.

The Executive Director of WEP, Mrs Priscillia Achakpa, made the call in an interview with our correspondent in Abuja.

She explained that women were more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men due to their biological constitution.

WEP is a non-governmental organisation established to address the gender injustices on issue relating to the environment, economic and social rights of women.

Achakpa had this to say on an extensive research the programme did in the northern part of the country:

“Part of the research we have conducted, what we have found out largely is that women are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change not because it does not affect men. It does, but because of their biological buildup, women are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change.

“For instance, if a woman is getting to menopause, the heat waves into the body, is much higher than when she is still in her reproductive age. In terms of ageing, the women age faster than the men when you look at the issues of climate change.”

She also decried a situation where women had to travel five kilometres daily to get firewood and water for household use in the rural areas.

“We did some work in the northern part of Nigeria and we discovered that women travel over five kilometres every day in search of water and firewood. That burden is already weighing them down.

“And when they come back home they have to take care of the home front; cater for the children; cook and still do other things to keep the home front going.”

The executive director pointed out that sanitation issues such as indiscriminate dumping of refuse and open defecation, especially in the slums, posed major health hazards for women and children.

According to her, such sanitation issues caused diarrhoea, cholera, water borne diseases, among others, thus threatening the lives of women and children.

Achakpa said women needed to be more enlightened and educated on issues of climate change so that they could avoid being victims of flooding.

She added that due to ignorance, the majority of the people who lost their lives to flooding in some parts of the country in 2011, were women and children.