When approaching climate change and its effects there is a need to address how to avoid reproducing existing inequalities. This calls for a de-colonized gender perspective when analyzing the effects of globalization and climate change on a local scale. “Climate change is not only about overheating, but it’s also about how people copse with it and how it’s dealt with on a local scale”, professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues in his lesson: An overheated world: anthropology, global issues, and accelerated change.
There is an urge to re-formulate today’s concept of ‘sustainability’. Prof. Eriksen –author of An Overheating World– warns us in his project: alternative and sustainable energy, alongside dramatic changes in consumption or population, have one thing in common: the conviction that traditional narratives in the modernity of progress –concepts like ‘development’, and ‘growth’– have no longer the persuasive power that they used to. Luckily for some, social debates on a local scale for climate and social justice have become part of the mainstream narratives. But overheating –or the so-called and less accurate term, ‘global warming’– takes place particularly during the last 25 years of human existence, as professor Eriksen points out. And communities around the world are facing today some of its worst consequences in different ways. Feminist and LGTBQA+ movements, such as climate justice voices, claim that sustaining the current system will only drive to collapse. To tackle climate change the existing systems of power and privilege need to be challenged.
Educating and empowering women and LGTBIQA+ people can have a positive effect on society's reactions and responses to climate change. While in some countries like the United States or Spain women represent the majority of students in Universities, only 30% of today’s world scientific research personnel are women, according to UNESCO and so few are the studies done on LGTBQA+ scientists. Curiously –or not so much– the same study reveals different rates of women researchers in different countries. For example, in France, women account for 26% of researchers, compared to Ethiopia at 8%. The gender gap is also found in today’s policy-making: only two out of ten directors in the scientific field are women. Still, a growing number of studies remark the necessity to acknowledge gender and sexual inequality to understand intersecting vulnerabilities on a local scale. Involving women and non-binary people in the local discussions is a key element to bypass the current patriarchal narratives of reality and understand their specific relation with climate change.
Societies interact with climate change and copse with its effects on a local scale. The same way do gender relations and power roles. In different societies, both people from the LGTBQA+ community and women– face different inequalities and social oppressions. The co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance in the USA, Elizabeth Yeapire, even explained to an interview for Yale Environment 360 that “climate change is the result of a legacy of extraction, of colonialism, of slavery”, as a result of a one –hegemonical– perspective on scientific and sociological research. For instance, when studying phenomena like the causes of population growth during the first industrial revolution, we might have to consider the fact that women were able to work for money for the first time in western’s capitalist history, or that homosexual marriage was then and there a sin. Today though, gender roles seem to finally be slowly fading. More diverse and child-free families are socially and legally accepted in a big number of communities around the globe; which also might be important to point out when studying the reasons for population growth during the “digital revolution”.
Traditional narratives of growth and progress are not attractive anymore, professor Eriksen warns us. The so-called Identity crisis, –one of the daughters of globalization– has left humanity with a feeling of uncertainty due to climate change and social inequalities effects. And now people have started to powerlessly wonder: who do I blame for the oppressions and vulnerabilities that cross me? What can we do as members of a local community to approach them? May, the answer reside in the transfeminist approach on local scale climate action.
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