West Australians will join forces on Wednesday 4 March to urge the creation of state-wide ‘Sisters on the Planet’ communities of action to tackle climate change.
Oxfam Australia Board Member and Murdoch academic Dr Jane Hutchison will address the launch of the Oxfam Australia/Make Poverty History initiative at the Alexander Library Theatre, Northbridge at 6pm on Wednesday 4 March 2009.
Dr Hutchison will be joined by international student, Guerlaine Bingwa, who will talk about the impact of
climate change in her home country, Zimbabwe.
In launching the series of short films, Sisters on the Planet, Jane and Guerlaine will be joined by
representatives of community organisations, business and public sectors in a call for all Western Australians to consider how they can act locally to arrest the worsening impacts of climate change at home and overseas.
The films capture the inspiring stories of women who are tackling climate change head-on, from spearheading community efforts to adapt and prepare for flooding in Bangladesh, to finding a new homeland for the families of Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands which are being swamped by rising sea levels.
Oxfam Australia Community Campaigns Coordinator Jael Johnson said climate change hit women in developing countries hardest as it exacerbated already existing social inequalities.
“Women often grow the family’s food, fetch fuel and water, and bring up the children. So when clean water becomes harder to find during a drought, crops are destroyed by floods, or children become sick as a result of dirty water or lack of food – women are hit hardest and they have to find solutions,” Ms Johnson said.
She also said there was compelling evidence that women were harder hit by natural disasters, which were increasing with climate change: “In the 1991 cyclone disaster in Bangladesh, the death rate was almost five times as high for women as for men. This was because warning information was transmitted to men by men in public spaces. As many women are not allowed to leave the house without a male relative, they perished waiting for their relatives to return home and take them to a safe place.”
One of the short films tells the inspiring story of Ursula Rakova from Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands, who is leading the people in her community in the forced relocation from their island home because of rising sea levels.
“The problems of climate change often seem too large to address. It threatens to increase the number of disasters in Australia, worsen the health of our indigenous communities, and engulf entire Pacific nations through rising sea levels,” Ms Johnson said.
“What’s inspiring about these women in the films is the amazing changes they have been able to initiate, often with limited resources,” she said. “It makes you wonder: if women from Papua New Guinea can inspire such change, what can we achieve, with the technology and networks that we have at our fingertips?”
For more information visit the websites http://www.oxfam.org.au/sisters AND/OR http://www.makepovertyhistory.com.au/
