Educating Young Women is the Climate Fix No One is Talking About

Jan 27, 2021 | Vanessa Nakate
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What springs to mind when someone says ‘climate change solution’? Probably wind or solar farms, maybe meatless burgers or ‘moonshot’ technologies. These are all important if we are going to urgently cut our carbon emissions in line with the science, but they also all happen to be solutions in the model we have been taught to see them - from the market, with potential to make money. In fact, there are a wide range of climate solutions with huge potential. We have been talking more about restoring nature, but what about educating girls? Universal education can start improving people’s lives right away, as well as stabilising our climate. Educating girls, together with family planning, is listed by Project Drawdown as the fifth most impactful solution we have, if we want to limit global heating to 1.5C. The climate change mitigation project calculated that taking steps toward universal education, as well as investing in family planning in low and middle income countries, could result in a massive reduction in emissions of 85.42 gigatons by 2050. That’s almost a decade’s worth of China’s emissions.