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Tag archives for gender

Will Swedish women take care of the climate?

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woman-with-bikeGreen Swedish Woman? Photo: Barbro Björnemalm (CC: BY-NC-SA)

Every second Swede is worried, or even very worried, about climate change. That’s the answer that 1010 persons gave when a big insurance company asked them recently, anyway.
What’s interesting with this survey is that when it comes to doing something about this concern, it’s mainly the women who seem to be willing to act.

63 percent of the women in the survey said that they have reduced their consumption of electricity, water and heat at home. Only 49 percent of the men did the same things. Women were also more willing to buy organic and local products and sort out their household waste.
Research has also shown that men generally use more energy than women (here is a report about that with an English summary), and that women are more affected by climate change than men. So maybe that’s why women do more about it?

The newspaper Dagens Nyheter (in Swedish) has spoken about this with the sociologist Anna-Lisa Lindén, who has done research on consumption and climate change. She says that the differences are slowly evening itself out, but still points out the men as the biggest environmental crooks. One big reason for that is the way we still distribute work at home.
– In many households it’s the women who have the biggest responsability for planning purchases of food, children’s clothes, textiles and so on.

According to Anna-Lisa Lindén says that Swedes in general have a pretty high awareness about the environment. The problem is just that people – and in this case especially men – don’t use their knowledge.
– But there are exceptions. When a young family has its first child, the awareness increases, she says.

So, let’s all have babies! Or..?

 

More environmental news (in Swedish, but can be translated here):
Big oil spill outside Sweden’s West coast Göteborgs-Posten

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

September 19, 2011

Prepare for a warmer Sweden

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Sweden might not be known for its heat waves, but persistent high temperatures will actually become more common even here as a result of global warming. And one group particularly affected by this will be – the women.

Normally Swedes are the first to welcome a bit of heat, but recently a report published by the Swedish Defence Research Agency FOI stated that the Swedish knowledge about what risks heat waves involve and about how to prepare for them has to become better.

What counts as a heat wave in Sweden varies a bit, but in this report the definition has been when the average daily temperature exceeds 22–23 degrees during more than two consecutive days. This happened in several parts of Sweden during July last year, for example.

Temperatures like these might sound rather normal if you’re for example from the South of Europe. But they did have consequences. FOI found that during this heat wave there were more dehydrated patients in hospitals and health care centres, residents in elderly care homes that feel ill at ease, tired personnel, troublesome bugs and parasites, sun curves on rail, overheated buses with tired drivers, lack of water within the agriculture, cows that do not milk as usual, foodstuffs that do not hold the measure, lack of drinking waters, fires and thefts…
On the other hand there were those who benefitted from the heat too, such as fan and ice cream sellers and those who rent canoes.

Elderly persons and newborn babies are of course especially vulnerable to heat waves. But one interesting thing is that women as a group are the most affected. Gender roles and the division of labour they lead to have a big impact on this.
When I earlier made an interview with one of the researchers behind this report, Annika Carlsson-Kanyama, she talked for example about how the kind of unpaid work traditionally done by women, as taking care of children and elders, cooking and cleaning, are things that you cannot cancel, while much of the work traditionally done by men can be postponed in case of extreme heat.

Another explanation lies in our travel habits: men more often have access to air-conditioned cars, while a higher percentage of women travel by buses with bad cooling systems. (More about this in the report Gender Issues in Climate Adaptation)

These scientists say it’s time for Sweden to realise that these heat waves won’t be extreme and rare happenings, but recurrent seasonal phenomena that we have to prepare for and adapt to.
So maybe we have a thing or two to learn from countries in the South?

scaniaparken-malmoThe Scania park in Malmö. A bit of heat is nice… but it has its problems too, scientists point out. Photo: Elsamu (CC BY-NC-SA)

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

April 18, 2011

Bringing women’s perspective on climate change

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climate-talk

Rebecka Hagman (in the middle) talking about gender and climate change at Stockholm's Culture Festival. Photo: Helene Mårtenson.

This past week I have fully enjoyed Stockhom’s Culture Festival. Somehow I think that the mere fact of so many people getting together, enjoying free concerts and theatre, dancing and discussing, is an important ingredient in a truly sustainable society. But this year’s festival also had a lot of items specifically about sustainability and climate change on the programme.

For example I heard the feminist climate debator Rebecka Hagman talk about her experiences in the work to bring women’s perspective into the global negotiations about climate change in Copenhagen last year.
As an intern with the Swedish Mission to the UN in New York, she was asked to formulate a proposal for a gender paragraph to be included in the resolution.

So in what sense is climate change an issue that touches gender roles? Well, explained Rebecka Hagman, until now climate change has often been discussed in a technocratic and scientific sense. But it’s also important to see that men and women – as groups – actually have different climate impacts (according to studies men drive more, eat more meat and consume more energy intensive things, while women for example are more likely to use public transport).

Furthermore men and women are affected by a warmer climate in different ways. For example women in many parts of the world bear the main responsibility to provide the family with water and food. In times of more serious droughts this can mean that women all of a sudden have to spend much more hours fetching water and firewood than before. This in turn means less time for studying, participating in democratic and political processes or getting a paid job.

Because of all this, Rebecka Hagman concluded, it’s enormously important to bring all aspects into the climate change work.
– It’s not a gender neutral issue. We need different solutions, and we need voices from south and north, east and west, women and men – all groups in society, she said.

And what happened to the paragraph she wrote? Making more than 190 countries agree is a tough job, Rebecka Hagman admitted. After political horse-trading and struggles about commas and full stops, a watered down version finally made its way into the document. But a document that did not take strong action on emission reductions, which is after all its main purpose, said Rebecka Hagman. So: there is still a lot of work to be done.

Read Rebecka Hagman’s full master thesis “On a gendered road to Copenhagen”.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

August 16, 2010

Women take climate threat more seriously than men

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women-walking
Photo: Nicho Södling/www.imagebank.sweden.se.

Recently a news show on the Swedish national television made a poll to find out how Swedes react to the scientists’ description of global warming. The poll also tried to find out to what extent we are willing to lower our standard of living through reducing our incomes in order to combat greenhouse gas emissions.

Willing to take action

The result shows that it is the women aged 30 to 49 years who are the most willing to lower their (or maybe I should say “our”, since I actually belong to this group) standard to reduce carbon emissions.
This poll was rather small, but it confirms what more extensive ones have already shown: for instance 69 percent of the women participating in a survey made by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency declared that they would consider eating less meat to curb global warming, compared to 45 percent of the men. Women also said they were prepared to go less by car and use public transport more often in order to curb their emissions.

Men would lower their income

In this last survey, men over 65 years are pointed out as the “lost generation” – they form the biggest group who are not prepared to lower their standard of living at all to save the climate. But men did not distinguish themselves only in a negative way: the largest group willing to reduce their incomes with more than 500 Swedish kronor a month (around 72 dollars) to combat greenhouse gas emissions were actually men aged 30–49 years.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

October 15, 2009