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Protect rights and advance gender equality to mitigate climate change

Nature Climate Change volume 11, pages 368–370 (2021)Cite this article

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Initiatives to protect carbon sinks are crucial to mitigate climate change and avert its worst effects. Advancing the rights of women and forest-dependent communities will strengthen these initiatives and enable them to have greater impact.

The year 2020 left no doubt that the climate crisis continues to worsen at alarming speed. The impacts of global warming have plagued many communities around the world, and governments are lagging behind the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change, having failed to ramp up climate action1. To prevent the worst human rights impacts to come, governments need to take bold action now. Natural land processes absorb carbon dioxide equivalent to almost one-third of global emissions2. Thus, protecting terrestrial carbon sinks, such as forests and peatlands, is among the most effective — and urgent — mitigation actions governments can take.

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Fig. 1: Deforestation in Indigenous territories in the Legal Amazon, Brazil.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Women’s Rights, Human Rights Watch, Ames, IA, USA

    Juliana Nnoko-Mewanu

  2. Environment and Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, New York, NY, USA

    Luciana Téllez-Chávez

  3. Environment and Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Paris, France

    Katharina Rall

Authors
  1. Juliana Nnoko-Mewanu
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  2. Luciana Téllez-Chávez
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  3. Katharina Rall
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All authors contributed to conceptualizing and writing the Comment using case examples from their various research projects at Human Rights Watch.

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Correspondence to Juliana Nnoko-Mewanu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nnoko-Mewanu, J., Téllez-Chávez, L. & Rall, K. Protect rights and advance gender equality to mitigate climate change. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 368–370 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01043-4

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