Pushed to Poverty: Women, Girls, and the Climate Crisis
We had a great conversation! Find an article with video with the follow up: Pushed to Poverty.
When addressing climate change and pollution that imperils soil, drinking water, and quality of life, the dangers compound for communities and families, especially for women and girls.
Tuesday, October 4, 11:00am PT / 2:00pm ET at the Climate Cafe Multifaith we will take a look at how environmental degradation and worsening climate chaos impacts family life, especially for women and girls. Especially alarming is the increasing erosion of women's and girls' rights, which leads to rising child marriage rates and human trafficking, documented globally, but also in the United States, where recently Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island & New York banned child marriage.
Leading discussion at the Cafe we welcome international human rights attorney Nesha Abiraj. Nesha is the Diplomatic and Advocacy liaison to Stop Ecocide International, and works with communities of faith to address the climate crisis by ending ecocide. Ecocide is broadly understood to mean mass destruction of nature, ecosystems and widespread extinctions of plant, animal, ocean, and microbial life--a destruction that is shown to directly affect families, women and girls. When we talk about facing a 'Climate Emergency' the moral implications of that emergency are clear. It is urgent to stop ecocide, with a moral call for international laws that protect communities and, quite literally, life on earth.
Nesha Abiraj is an International Human Rights Lawyer. She currently serves as the Diplomatic and Advocacy Liaison to Ocean States, with Stop Ecocide International, an organization seeking to make ecocide, which is broadly understood to mean, largescale and systematic destruction of nature, the 5th International Crime against Peace. She also serves as an Ambassador to Coastal Regions from the Caribbean to the Pacific on climate justice and human rights. She previously worked with Human Rights Watch, Save the Children and continues to serve as a Lead Advocate for UNICEF USA on international humanitarian response relating to key poverty focused issues impacting the lives of children living in humanitarian and developmental settings including conflict zones. She is also a recently trained, Climate Reality Leader with the Climate Reality Project led by Former Vice President Al Gore.
Her passion for climate justice for all people, in part stems from her Hindu & interfaith upbringing which ingrained in her the principle of “ahimsa” which means non-violence to all living beings. It also shaped and influenced her relationship with the earth and all living beings, as spiritual forces, inertly divine, to be protected, honored, respected and loved.
Nesha has worked on global human rights policies related to the rights of women, children, migrants and global health and human rights. Notably she worked on infectious diseases law and policy in India, China and the United States. In the last 2 years she worked on 5 successful human rights campaigns which resulted in child marriage being banned in the US States of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, New York and Massachusetts. She was awarded the Citation of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for her tireless work to protect children from early, forced and child marriages. She is also the recipient of Recipient of the Pen America, Pen Toni & James C. Goodale, Free Expression Courage Award. She has also done over a decade of humanitarian service in the aftermath of natural disasters and recently in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic in the Caribbean and the United States.