The countries that are most affected by climate changes are the poorest and within these states, women bear the brunt of the negative effects of the changes to natural resources, agriculture and environment. Hence, climate change is not gender neutral and all policy relating to it must take this in consideration.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the poorest populations live in the rural areas, which are severely exposed to the climate change impacts: desertification, droughts, brutal floods and so on. In these rural areas, women play a key role in providing support to their families: Assuming such responsibility puts them on the front line for the creation and implementation of climate change adaptation measures. They are supporting their families and their local communities to mitigate the effects and adapt to climate changes, by adopting innovative and clever responses to the increasing environmental challenges in the region.
At the same time, women keep important knowledge about the best practices and measures to adopt to limit disasters impacts. This valuable knowledge is matured from their own experiences and their ancestral knowledge. This shows clearly the gender dimensions of climate changes in the Middle East and North Africa region, where, unfortunately, social and cultural rules, as well as discrimination greatly hinder gender equality in rural areas.
When addressing climate change, a gender sensitive approach should be adopted for the creation of strategies and policies in the Middle East and North Africa. In these areas, women work to collect small branches of wood to use as energy sources, for cooking and heating. Promotion of renewable energy technologies would be the intelligent solution to cope with climate changes and to improve the living conditions. In the southern regions of Morocco, after distributing solar ovens, women no longer had to travel long distances to collect branches and wood from the Argan forest. They can now save time and invest it in activities at home; such as caring for their children as well handcraft and gardening. Meanwhile, the deployment of solar PV water pumping made it easy to create water points closer to rural communities, meaning women no longer had to travel to collect water. Installation of photovoltaic home systems is also an alternative for lighting and for running basic home equipment, such as small refrigerators.
The use of new sustainable development technologies, such as renewable energy presents interesting opportunities to limit the impact of climate change on health, energy, water and food availability. It also takes in consideration the gender equality approach. In other regions in Morocco, by creating wells and using environmental friendly energy resources, we can bring water to every home. Currently, women devote much of their time and efforts that they used to spend collecting water, on creating small gardens where they cultivate fruit trees and vegetables for their own consumption. This has increased their self-esteem, and reduced the family expenses for purchasing food. They can also invest the saved money in educating children and sending them to school. At the same time, the use of PV generated electricity to power small refrigerator helped women to start some home processing activities such as processing tomatoes.
These experiences clearly show that by adopting intelligent measures and policies that focus on gender, we can achieve sustainable development quite rapidly. Hence, there is a need to integrate the gender equality dimensions into national and regional policies addressing the climate changes in the Middle East and North Africa. Policies and strategies must consider gender equality when addressing climate changes by incorporating gender division of labour in rural areas. Women are embodying specific knowledge related to environment protection and this is valuable to integrate when projecting national and regional strategies at a local level.
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