The Key to Climate Action and Sustainable Peace? Women’s Full and Equal Participation

Mar 31, 2022
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Climate change is not gender neutral, and for activist Fatima Muriel, this fact is all too real for thousands of women in her home country, Colombia. 

In 2017, disaster struck her hometown, the city of Mocoa in the department of Putumayo. Just before dawn on Saturday, April 1st, unusually heavy rains triggered flash flooding and landslides, which buried several neighborhoods along the banks of the rivers Mocoa, Sangoyaco and Mulato.

Although the region, situated in the south end of the Andes in Colombia, is notorious for frequent rains, that year, Mocoa was hit with 33 per cent of its monthly total of rainfall in one night. The ones who paid for this change in weather patterns were mainly women and children.

“Ninety per cent of all those who died were women. Since it was a Friday night, men were out drinking and partying while women were taking care of their children and parents. Among the rubble we even found some mothers holding on to two children, all drowned. It was heartbreaking,” Ms. Muriel tells UN News.