Climate Change and Its Distribution of Inequality

The crisis our climate is currently facing is incredibly drastic, but the impacts of our crisis do not affect all humans equally. Female civilians across the globe face the despising effects on a larger scale compared to their coexisting male counterparts. From spiking cases of violence to being pulled from educational institutions, the effects vary widely.

One instance is in Nigeria. According to UNICEF, 10 million children ages 5 to 14 lack a proper education and are substantially absent from school. Statistics show an even lower number of female students than male, with some regions having nearly half of the female population in schools. While education scarcity is due to a multitude of reasons, when the climate worsens, the statistics continue to decline as well. With the rising temperatures, flash floods, and landslides are becoming more prominent, making access to schools highly difficult.

However, there is proven evidence to show that with every additional year that an average girl attends school, the chances of her country being affected by climate crises improve by around 3.2 points on the vulnerability index. In Northern Nigeria, the Center for Girls’ Education continues to provide sufficient resources and education to large groups of young Nigerian women. The school even provides a course on how to cope with the impacts of the ever-changing climate.

Another example is in Brazil, where the largest forest in the world, the Amazon, is facing extinction. The Amazon is an incredibly vital carbon sink on Earth, as it continues to consume massive amounts of carbon dioxide from our overloaded atmosphere. Unfortunately, as deforestation becomes more prominent, the forest continues to shrink at a rapid pace.

For a group of women in Northern Brazil, the forest not only provides sufficient oxygen, but also their livelihoods. These women work at coconut collecting farms, which rely on the native Babassu Palm trees. Their careers are now consistently threatened by deforestation companies, which limit their accessibility to these scarce native trees. To combat these difficulties, more than 2,000 women bound together to form the Babassu Coconut Breakers Movement. They continuously fight to protect and ensure the safety of their beloved Babassu trees.

Drastic changes that threatened their day-to-day lives and the world around them impacted these women. They did not choose to sit aside and watch; they instead found ways to combat the harsh world and continue to persevere through the hardest of times. (Written on August 7, 2025)