Beijing Platform for Action, Chapter II: Global Framework - Paragraphs 34 and 35

—

34. The continuing environmental degradation that affects all human lives has often a more direct impact on women. Women’s health and their livelihood are threatened by pollution and toxic wastes, large-scale deforestation, desertification, drought and depletion of the soil and of coastal and marine resources, with a rising incidence of environmentally related health problems and even death reported among women and girls. Those most affected are rural and indigenous women, whose livelihood and daily subsistence depends directly on sustainable ecosystems.

35. Poverty and environmental degradation are closely interrelated. While poverty results in certain kinds of environmental stress, the major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment is the unsustainable patterns of consumption and production, particularly in industrialized countries, which are a matter of grave concern and aggravate poverty and imbalances.

Beijing Declaration (1995)

Our environmental situation on the thin surface of the blue-green marble of Earth is precarious as the systems of the planet have been less and less able to manage human waste, as if an overburdened liver. Paragraph 34 of the Beijing Declaration deals with this facet of women’s rights or wellbeing. As with many of the problematic impacts here, we are seeing the disproportionate impacts on women compared men.

The health and wellbeing of women are more negatively impacted because of the environmental degradation from modern pollutants and toxic wastes. These are tied to the removal of the systems capable of renewing the planet’s system, e.g., “large-scale deforestation, desertification, drought and depletion of the soil and of coastal and marine resources.”

These link to one another in the planetary systems. The health problems that emerge out of this context produce worsened health for the women of the world. Even though, as explored earlier, the negative impacts on women continue to be more severe compared to the men in a number of domains.

This leads to questions about the sustainability of ecosystems with the current systems and the motivation to change things. The negative impacts, mind you, are starker for Indigenous and rural women. Thus, the most vulnerable become the most impacted, where the most fortified and resource-rich are the ablest to bear the brunt of the coming catastrophes of environmental degradation spoken about more than 2 decades ago.

Paragraph 35 of the Beijing Declaration continues from the emphasis on the deep interconnectedness of the world’s ecological systems. The ways human industrial activity produces problems for the health of the ecosystem and how this impacts women disproportionately implies the poverty-stricken areas are more impacted by these environmental problems.

Those poverty-stricken areas found, often, to be the rural ones with more Indigenous populations, and in particular more women too. The pockets of penury in the world can produce despair and mental illness. The unsustainable of the current course continues to exaggerate and exacerbate the grotesque social inequalities of the world with disproportionately negative impacts on the women compared to the men.

The solutions for these problems will need – and have needed since, at least, 1995 – to address a number of different issues with emphases on women, the Indigenous, and the rural, based on this most recent paragraph. There have been calls to work for the greater good on this. Furthermore, many of these impacts come from a singular issue for the fate of several, especially coastal and less developed, communities around the world, which is, of course, is climate change or global warming.

The consequences for worse social and economic inequality producing and aggravating the issue plaguing so many of the poor communities of the world can, in part, begin with dealing with climate change. The animal agriculture industry, fossil fuel industry, and others require continuous activism, media coverage, and proposals of alternatives in order to create the idealized form of sustainable development discussed at the United Nations.

By making this transition to sustainability, and to argue for this in a variety of domains, there can be the steady, but rather rapid, transition into sustainability, and so improvements in the health and wellbeing of the general population. It has been done before. In fact, the knowledge of the increased efficiency of the alternative energy sources is becoming more widespread, so the general public is more and more privy to the fact of climate change the ways in which to solve it.

—

One can find similar statements in other documents, conventions, declarations and so on, with the subsequent statements of equality or women’s rights: