Nestled under the Women and Girls category, ranking and results by 2050:
- 5.6 gigatons reduced CO2
- See impact below
Girl’s education has a dramatic bearing on global warming. Women with more years of education have fewer, healthier children and actively manage their reproductive health. If all nations adopted a similar rate of 100 percent enrollment of girls in primary and secondary schools, by 2050 there would be 843 million fewer people worldwide than if stats remained as they are today. The difference between a woman with no years of schooling and one with 12 years of schooling is almost 4 to 5 children per woman! It is precisely those areas of the world where population growth is the highest that are hardest for women to get educated.
“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen, can change the world.” — Malala Yousafzai, Nobel laureate and girl’s education advocate
Education also shores up resilience in terms of climate change impacts, since there is a strong link between women and natural systems at the heart of family and community life. Women are stewards and managers of food, soil, trees, and water. Educated women can bring into play new disease control and altered seed sowing times, and whatever ways of evaluating changing environmental factors required to sustain themselves and those who depend on them.
A 2013 study found that educating girls is “the single most important social factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.”
Today, 62 million girls are denied the right to attend school. We need to make schools more affordable, closer to home, more girl friendly, better in quality, and more helpful with overcoming health barriers.
Nurture the promise of each girl!
— from Paul Hawkens book “Drawdown”