Editor’s note: This profile is part of our 11 Women to Watch in Science package.

Soils hold more carbon than the plants in the ground and the atmosphere combined – a fact that Paige Stanley repeats often. That makes soils an important part of the efforts to curb climate change, because properly managed soils keep carbon in, while poorly managed soils let carbon out. Stanley researches how changes in grazing management can help soils absorb carbon and keep it locked in. 

The United States has about 800 million acres of grazing land, most of it located west of the Mississippi river. These landscapes used to feature native grazers like bison, deer or antelope, Stanley says – but cows are now the primary animals there. If managed poorly, the animals can overgraze the land and release soil carbon into the atmosphere. Better practices include moving cows around and letting land rest, essentially mimicking how it was before Western settlers moved in and impacted how grazers like bison naturally moved. “We’re kind of trying to replicate that native behavior, trying to restore some of the benefits that once led to the really amazing soil carbon stocks, biodiversity and wildlife benefits,” Stanley says. 

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To understand what’s happening under the ground, Stanley takes a lot of soil samples – she works in four controlled experimental grazing sites, and 59 real-world working farms and ranches spread across U.S. grazing regions. But she also translates science back to the people working the land: The ranchers. She is as comfortable sitting with them on a porch as she is in an academic conference room, and it shows – part of her degree is in rancher sociology. “The beef industry is not ranchers,” she says. “A lot of ranchers are really trying to do what’s best.” 

Stanley grew up in rural Georgia, and started her academic career as a cell biologist. Eventually, she found her passion in a food and agriculture ethics course at Georgia College & State University, during a discussion about the environmental and animal welfare impacts of the livestock industry. “Lightbulbs went off,” she says, when she thought about the simple act of eating, and the way it had huge impacts on everything around her. 

Now a rangeland agroecologist – a scientist who integrates ecological principles with rangeland management – at Colorado State University, she is also a research fellow on a project called 3M (“metrics, monitoring and management”). The five-year project, which looks at how grazing management influences a variety of ecosystem functions, has 80 scientists working with ranches and farms across 12 disciplines. The goal is to reveal the connections between soil health and greenhouse gases, biodiversity and productivity, Stanley says. “In the next few years, we will finally be at that point where we have the first really large data set of soil carbon from grazing management over time.”

Ultimately, she wishes that more people knew that there’s a lot of nuance and grey area in our food systems. Many people think that cows grazing on land isn’t great for the land – but if managed well, it can be a healthier way to treat soil than growing crops. “Not all grazing is created equally,” she says.

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Water is all around us: From the respiration in plants to the clouds in the sky to rivers cutting paths through land. When people ask what Cynthia Gerlein-Safdi does, she tells them she works at the intersection of the carbon and water cycles – looking at environmental science on scales both tiny and enormous. “Water is really flowing through our ecosystems,” she says, “and there are so many issues linked to water, both on the science side of things and on the social side.”

At University of California, Berkeley, where she is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, Gerlein-Safdi’s research covers an incredibly broad range – from examining the impact of dew and fog on plants in the Bay Area to monitoring waterways in the tropics via cutting-edge satellite technology. She is particularly interested in how climate change disrupts water cycles and affects disaster management.

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At the largest scale, satellites help build an understanding of water moving around the world. Last year, Gerlein-Safdi led research to develop a new way to map water on land in the tropics – technology that can see below clouds and tree canopies to understand how lakes, rivers and wetlands change over the seasons. It’s critical work to predict future flooding, she says, and also to help quantify how much methane is being produced by wetlands. 

She also works with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Alameda County, California, on projects to take field samples that link carbon and water in vegetation. She is looking at dew and fog, and trying to build better models of photosynthesis across different sites in the U.S. That information could provide vital background to understanding climate change’s impacts on plants in different areas. 

Gerlein-Safdi’s background also straddles borders and ideas. She grew up in Alsace, France – a town that sits between France, Germany and Switzerland. In high school, she remembers learning about plate tectonics in relation to Hawaii: she thought it was “just so cool” that there was one little spot of magma coming from deep inside, creating individual islands as the plates slid over it. 

That sparked an interest in the deep interior of Earth, she says. During a research project in her geophysics degree, she started applying geophysical tools to look at plants – by looking at soils and roots. “I went from geology to soils and roots, and then from roots to whole plants,” she says, “and water was always running through.” 

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She says that as long as she is contributing to human understanding of our kind of natural world – and potentially offering the tools to face hazards like flood – that’s success. 

The future questions she hopes to address still contain water. One of the big ones involves searching for water’s pathways though different ecosystems, she says. “Are we seeing kind of large shifts in where water is due to climate change? If the water is no longer at the surface, where is it going?”

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Editor’s note: This profile is part of our 11 Women to Watch in Science package.

When Marianne Cowherd grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she had dozens of snow days, which she often spent sledding and skiing. Snow fell abundantly, and she never heard about droughts or water issues in the local environment. But when she arrived in northern California for college in 2015, she soon found a widespread and urgent conversation happening about water resource problems. 

One research project impacted her career trajectory in particular. She was able to work at the University of California, Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Lab, an area that measures snow and collaborates with the California Department of Water Resources on water supply issues. “Between spending a lot of time up there, and doing research in water storage and predictability,” Cowherd says, “I got really interested in snow as a water resource – because it has all of these characteristics that rain doesn’t have.” 

Cowherd is a snow hydrologist, now at Montana State University in Bozeman. She works on questions related to snow’s presence and absence, and how that impacts water supply. Those big questions include exactly how much water will be available from snowfall in any given year – and how that might change in the future, due to climate change. 

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Studying snow brings with it a whole spectrum of interesting challenges. First, it takes up more volume than rainfall. And second, snowfall can hold varying amounts of water, depending on how fluffy or dense it is. As the climate changes, so do the delicate calculations of where water needs to be, and when it needs to be there, Cowherd says. It’s a challenging dance that changes year to year, and place to place. “One of the downsides is that snow is relatively far away from where most people live and work, and it’s relatively inaccessible,” she adds. “We rely on relatively sparse networks of snow measurements and manual measurements that tell us how much water is going to be available in the spring.”

In Montana – another snowy state, but much drier than where she grew up – Cowherd focuses on predicting snow-related water availability. Measuring snow can be tricky, so she also works on better ways to actually assess the fluffy, frozen water. “Snow is difficult to measure using satellites or airplanes,” she points out. “We don’t really know exactly how good those measurements are going to be in the future, because they are based on past weather – and we expect the future climate to be different.” 

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The basic message of climate change is readily apparent: A warmer future, with melting glaciers and higher seas. Cowherd wants the public to hear a slightly more nuanced version. “There’s a lot of variability in how snow and ice respond to climate more broadly – it’s not a one-size-fits-all,” she says. “Some places are affected more; some places have increased snow. It’s a problem that is complicated.” 

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Katherine Siegel remembers the day that fire became part of her daily reality. Raised in Boston, she was always interested in environmental stewardship – both from her family and from her reform synagogue – and nature conservation was at the heart of her studies. She was in a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley, when she awoke one October morning at 2 a.m. – convinced her house was on fire, because it smelled so strongly of smoke. 

Siegel woke up her roommates, only to discover that she was smelling smoke from a wildfire burning miles away in the North Bay and Napa Valley. “Growing up on the East Coast, I hadn’t really thought about wildfire before,” she says, “but that kind of opened my eyes to what an interesting and urgent case study fire is for how we can learn to live in a changing climate.” 

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Now an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, Siegel’s research combines big geospatial data sets with on-the-ground conversations with forest managers, policymakers and local communities. The purpose, she says, is to understand their challenges and knowledge gaps. “Telling people data and information doesn’t really make as much of a difference as working with people to think about how we can make this actionable,” she says. 

Siegel leads a project working with land managers in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, where she researches how the ecosystems are changing after fires. After big fires in the 1980s, some forests recovered fully, while others didn’t. Some forests turned into grasslands, which changes how carbon is stored, as well as what creatures can live there. In addition to studying the causes of these shifts, Siegel interviews land managers, bringing in environmental data to help front-line workers prioritize their actions “My work is to bring together different methods and different ways of understanding the world, the environment,” she says, “in order to empower more sustainable and specifically climate-adapted management.” 

As wildfires become more frequent and intense, Siegel also studies how to better predict where ecosystems might be on the verge of switching – before something happens to tip them over the balance. There’s a whole host of outcomes between forest and grassland, she says, and those have implications for biodiversity, carbon storage and water availability. 

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Ultimately, she hopes her research will make meaningful contributions to management and policy on the ground – with people and the ecosystem. “I love doing the big data stuff,” she says, “but it’s also really rewarding to have that be in conversation with methods that are more kind of in conversation with people.” 

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Editor’s Note: Cesunica Ivey is a winner of The Story Exchange’s 2022 Women In Science Incentive Prize.

In high school in Atlanta, Cesunica Ivey was a devoted member of Earth Tomorrow — a club that collected recyclable items and took part in conservation activities. “We were kind of not the cool kids,” she says with a laugh. “But I was always inclined to do environmental advocacy work.” 

Today, Ivey has taken that early passion, combined it with computational skills developed at Georgia Institute of Technology, and turned it into highly regarded work on “wearables” — that is, fast-response monitors that allow even small households to measure exposure to dangerous air pollutants. 

As principal investigator of the Air Quality Modeling and Exposure Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, Ivey works at the intersection of community engagement and air pollution science. Using supercomputers and satellite data, Ivey’s lab predicts air pollution levels under future climate conditions, with the goal of protecting communities that might be disproportionately affected. “My lab’s approaches come from the data, and the end goal is to make sure those data-driven solutions will also support the adoption of new policy at the local or state level,” she says. 

In one recent project, Ivey used complex meteorological models to forecast that regulators in southern California would need to continue aggressively reducing nitrogen oxides from transportation and other sources to combat the impacts of changing climate, as rising temperatures would increase the likelihood that ozone levels would become more problematic in the future. “Our work provides a clear warning that climate change will interfere with attainment goals,” she says. 

In 2021, Ivey was chosen as one of Chemical & Engineering News’ Talented Twelve — a list of up and coming researchers to watch. 

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Her lab also has been recognized for its work in analyzing wearable sensors that monitor a person’s exposure to air pollution. That’s important because individual exposure can often be measured incorrectly when traditional methods are used, as people move around and may come into contact with unique pollutants based on their lifestyle inside a home.

One wearables project looks to monitor wildfire smoke exposure risk in West San Bernardino. Ivey and her team first combined GPS data and readings from wearable air pollution sensors in their pilot study to understand the short-term pollution risks.

“Sunni has created a research program that is the essence of inclusive, community-based work,” says Sharon Walker, dean of the college of engineering at Drexel University. “Her experimental design and work is never far from those most impacted by the implications of the air quality.” 

Ivey says she is intensely interested in environmental justice issues in California and other parts of the country. For her, success would be partnering with legislative aides to draft state policies to manage air pollution. “And hopefully that policy would focus on setting standards for indoor air quality in disparately impacted communities,” she adds. 

She also would like to be a motivational speaker for women of color in air pollution science. “I’m one of a handful of women of color in the air pollution side of things,” she says, “and would like to do more motivational speaking to give women of color a visible role model if they want to go into the geosciences or climate mitigation.” 

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Editor’s Note: Garima Raheja is a winner of The Story Exchange’s 2022 Women In Science Incentive Prize.

Garima Raheja remembers growing up in New Delhi, India, where air pollution was part of daily existence. She’d come home from school, wash her face, and watch the water run down the sink, brown and full of the soot that clustered in the air. “It’s one of those places where the roadside signs that used to have advertisements now just show what the air pollution concentrations are for the day,” she says. “So it was never something that I could just ignore.” 

When she was ten, Raheja moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and found a very different world — one where technological solutions were at the front of every conversation, and hiking in forested areas was within reach. “I didn’t even know national parks were a thing before — that you could enjoy nature without wondering if you were going to breathe in something crazy while you were there,” she remembers. 

Today, she is combining those experiences by using cutting-edge technology to tackle the persistent problem of air pollution – especially in disadvantaged communities. Now a third-year doctoral student at Columbia University in New York, Raheja is leading projects using low-cost air pollution sensors in Africa and Asia and historically marginalized communities in the United States. 

As part of her work, she tested the merits of low-cost sensors against sophisticated scientific equipment in Accra, Ghana. She also installed the first-ever scientific instruments in Togo, West Africa, that could monitor air quality at a regulation level – and wrote code so local scientists could analyze the air pollution without technical obstacles. 

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She hopes that an outcome of her work is to empower people to look out for themselves even when they can’t control the air at large, by taking protective steps such as wearing masks while commuting in smog-choked streets, or creating inexpensive filters for homes using box fans, air filters, and duct tape. 

Raheja also works with communities to collect and analyze their own air quality data. For instance, in rural areas of Ohio that have been impacted by hydraulic fracturing and natural gas emissions, Raheja helped community leaders monitor air pollution, especially after residents reported feeling sick. Air quality in the area frequently exceeded standards set by the World Health Organization, and the situation could have gone unknown if it weren’t for the citizen-run sensors, which picked up high levels of benzene, toluene, and fine particulate matter. The project caught the attention of the publication Grist, which wrote about Raheja’s work. 

“Garima is the true intellectual leader of this research,” says her advisor, Columbia scientist Daniel Westerelt. 

Raheja also takes her work outside of the labs and cities she studies, working as a climate activist and also as a US Department of State Air Quality Fellow for the U.S. Consulate in Kolkata, India. She says most of her work up to now has been diagnosing the problem of air pollution and its impacts on disadvantaged communities. The next step is to use this information to improve the situation – to do something substantive about it, she says. “Not just show the problems, but actually reduce the problems.” 

Her work is increasingly urgent, as air pollution is a health emergency in cities around the world – and it’s becoming common knowledge that disadvantaged communities need special care in environmental justice. A wider knowledge of the disparities is happening – which will hopefully lead to better ways to decrease the burden, she says. “If you’re in a position where you don’t have to think about these things every day, you are increasingly part of a rare population,” she says.

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Brittany Kendrick grew up on Chicago’s South Side and was always aware of water – she was given water quality testing strips for Christmas one year to evaluate the high levels of water contamination in her neighborhood. When her parents discovered the problem, they began buying bottled water, and eventually moved out of the neighborhood to an area where water wasn’t a concern. 

Water intersected with her life path in other ways, too – she attended a high school that specializes in agricultural sciences, engineering and animal sciences. She didn’t think about water quality as her life’s calling at that point, recalls Kendrick, “but whenever I had a chance to participate in an innovation challenge, I gravitated towards water.” 

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Kendrick started working for the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that serves as environmental engineers, as well as pursuing a master’s degree at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. That’s when she started to take water seriously as a future challenge.

One class project led her to work with a group of public policy students to evaluate an atmospheric water generator – a device that could suck moisture from the air. Kendrick was responsible for the project’s water quality testing, and when it wrapped up, she told her classmates that she thought they had a real business opportunity. “They were just interested in finishing their thesis,” she remembers. 

The equipment from the project was laying around on a rooftop lab space in Brooklyn – abandoned by the other students – and Kendrick picked up the items to start tinkering with them to create something new. 

In 2019, she co-founded Hydronomy, a company that creates solar-powered water generators to deliver clean water to people who need it. The units capture moisture from the air and then filter it, churning out more than 10 gallons of water each day on average. Kendrick says they end up less costly than paying for water from the utility company, and create no carbon emissions. 

Water and energy need to be considered together, she says – right now creating clean water relies on fossil fuels. Centrally located water systems are costly and can lack redundancy – in times of extreme weather conditions, if one pipe fails, the whole system fails. In Texas earlier this year, the water system broke down at the same time as the power grid failed: the two were inextricably tied to each other. 

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That’s why Hydronomy’s system is decentralized, off-the-grid and based in individual households, especially Black and brown neighborhoods, intended to address the environmental racism these communities suffer. New York State Parks will test some of their hydration stations with Hydronomy in a proof pilot program. Kenrdick says they plan to build brand awareness about the water they are providing, and then eventually scale to households in a public-private partnership. “My co-founders and I are from areas that are afflicted by these challenges,” she says, and that drives them to improve the situation. “Our intent is that the people who are the most vulnerable get the product first.” 

Water advocacy is another passion for Kendrick – she wants people to know where their water comes from. A long term goal is to get more access, more cost savings and encourage people to really understand their water quality and scarcity. “How do we all get together to talk about this utility that continues to rise in cost and also make us sick?” she says. “We’d love to spearhead, but can’t do it on our own.” 

This post was originally published on Dec. 8, 2021, and updated to include a video.

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Editor’s Note: Cindy Hu is a winner of The Story Exchange’s first annual Women In Science Incentive Prize.

Cindy Hu remembers her thirst when she was a child on a hot summer day in China. All she wanted was some cool water to drink, but since the tap water wasn’t potable, she had to wait for her parents to boil water and for it to cool down before she could take a sip. 

When Hu arrived in the United States for graduate studies, she was amazed at how people could drink straight from the tap — and how little people thought about what was in their water. She became particularly interested in the human health risk assessment aspect of environmental science — all those tiny amounts that created regulations and standards. She wanted to know how those numbers came about. “Why is it okay to have a drinking water contaminant be present at, say, 5 micrograms per liter but not 10?” she says she asked. “I was just really interested in that from the research side of things.” 

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She has honed in on researching a problem that has poor data but is of vital importance: the lack of drinking water monitoring data that can lead to harm to human health. For example, Hu’s doctoral thesis at Harvard shows that contaminated drinking water disproportionately affects the poor, especially when it comes to a class of chemicals known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals.” 

Private drinking water wells, she says, which mostly serve rural and underserved areas, are more polluted than public water supplies due to proximity to pollution sources. About 43 million people rely on self-supplied water sources, which are not subject to the same level of testing as large drinking water treatment plants would be under the Safe Drinking Water Act. 

In 2018, Hu and collaborators created a website — Whatisinmywater.org — that offers people an intimate view of the substances in their water supply. She says it’s designed to be a one-stop resource for information on contaminant occurrence, health impacts and solutions. 

She says that over the past 30 years, the U.S. has poured resources and attention into the problem of air pollution — now, there’s a comprehensive air quality management network that feeds information to a smartphone widget, telling people the air quality index in their particular location. Hu says she is inspired by this pioneering work. 

Water quality has many more factors at play, but it is also of vital importance. Among the over 80,000 chemicals used in industry and commerce, researchers only have good toxicology data on a few hundred and the government only regulates 96, she says. More information could help the problem. Hu wants to make this invisible problem more visible — especially to consumers. 

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“Tap water in itself is a great source of hydration,” says Hu. “So we definitely don’t want all these studies about drinking water quality scaring people away because we also know that bottled water is not necessarily better. But it’s really important to make the information available so that consumers can make the best decisions.” 

Hu is optimistic that the monitoring and management of drinking water quality will accelerate in the next decade. She envisions a world where forever chemicals like PFAS are more regulated and where models can predict water quality issues ahead of time, so regulators can collect samples and monitor specific areas, she says. “I’m building toward this vision of being able to elaborate better the link between drinking water quality and human health.”

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Anisa Nanavati, 17, found her voice two years ago. In the summer of 2019, she went to a protest for reproductive rights in Orlando, Florida — and she was taken with the energy and enthusiasm of the crowd. She felt that the climate movement was gaining steam, and she says at that moment she knew she had to start fighting. 

“Personally, I just became really tired of just watching. I really just wanted to do something,” Nanavati  says. “So one day I just got on my computer and I emailed hundreds and hundreds of organizations all over. I was like: I want to be a part of this movement.”

She became involved in climate organizing with a group called Earth Uprising, but now works as a student volunteer with an advocacy organization called Action for the Climate Emergency. As part of her outreach efforts, Nanavati actively works to combat climate denial and shares advice on how to talk with skeptical family members in a non-hostile way about the real facts of climate change. ACE is “really focused on education and storytelling,” says Nanavati, and “really uplifting youth voices when it comes to the fight against climate change.” 

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She’s just one of a swelling tide of young women working to organize and promote activism around the climate crisis. In the wake of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, young activists are digging in for a fight at home. 

Young women were present at the conference, even if they weren’t seated at the negotiating tables. Greta Thunberg taunted political leaders from outside the event, telling protesters the UN climate change summit was a “two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah” to “maintain business as usual” and “create loopholes to benefit themselves”.

A UN report published last month showed that even though men made up just over half of government delegates at past climate talks, they spoke for 74% of the time, making their voices vastly overrepresented in negotiations. Climate justice advocate and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson dismissed the summit in Glasgow week as “too male, too pale, too stale.”

Alexandria Villasenor, a 16-year old climate activist from New York who attended the conference, tweeted her dissatisfaction with the lackluster climate outcomes of COP26, saying “When you get really, really close to the #COP26 negotiations and outcome, you can see that power is held by only a few world leaders, who have been bought and paid for entirely by the fossil fuel industry.” (For his part, President Biden played up the positives of COP26, saying “I can’t think of any two days where more has been accomplished on climate.”) 

Nanavati, who has been profiled as a young activist in Business Insider and The Guardian, was watching Twitter in the days leading up to the summit and saw that youth activists weren’t even allowed into the summits. “Honestly, I feel like at that point, things like COP become less about making progress and more of just a ceremonial type of thing, trying to show the world that we’re moving in a direction,” she says. “But the goals that were made there were in no way adequate to the crisis that we’re facing at the moment.” 

Nanavati and others say that in terms of climate goals, an expedited commitment to net-zero emissions is of critical importance — but also thinking about the needs of people who may already be disadvantaged. “We need to really ensure that there’s a just equitable transition from fossil fuels,” she says. “And to make sure that we address environmental racism, we should look to indigenous peoples for solutions when it comes to the climate crisis. I want to see that process sped up: I mean, anything is progress at this point.”

At the COP26 conference, Indigenous delegates at the conference emphasized how their people are bearing the burden of climate policies. Even well-intentioned policies like switching to electrification and renewable energy can wreak havoc on tribal lands, because of the mining for minerals needed for batteries and panels. “You can’t be sacrificing Indigenous Peoples and clean water in order to get solar panels,” an Indigenous climate activist named Nuskmata told Canadian media company The Narwhal before leaving for the Glasgow summit. “It’s not just swapping out oil and gas. It’s about changing the system so that it’s sustainable for everybody.”

Women and girls around the world bear the brunt of climate change: 80 percent of the displaced by climate related disasters and changes around the world are women and girls. Vanessa Nakate, a 24-year-old Ugandan climate activist, addressed a crowd of protesters in Glasgow to discuss the immediate impacts of climate change facing her country and continent. “We are in a crisis,” she said. “We are in a disaster that is happening every day.”

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Nakate has emerged as a voice for climate action in Africa, a continent that is responsible for only 3 percent of global emissions, but whose people are suffering some of the most brutal effects of the climate crisis. 

Nanvati says she sees the immediate climate impacts already happening in her home region in Florida, and she wants to see more climate education happening in schools. 

“In our state, teachers are only required to teach that the climate is changing — and they can attribute it to whatever they want. They can say that it’s natural,” she says. “But obviously we know that climate change is a man-made, anthropogenic event. So our education systems are not teaching us that it’s an important thing. So why would students be worried about something that we know nothing about?” 

She remains optimistic through her anger at the fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobil that critics say push a story about personal responsibility rather than systems-level change. That’s partly because she has seen the impact in her own life of having challenging conversations about the climate crisis with family members and peers. 

“I think every little thing matters — every letter that you write to a representative, every call you make to them — they will listen. It is so important for us as young people to be reaching out to these people, because we might not be able to vote but as their constituents, they have to listen to us. Every little step helps.” ■

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This coming week, the world’s eyes turn to Glasgow, Scotland, where the COP26 conference — a meeting of countries to tackle climate change — takes place Sunday through Nov. 12. The meeting is expected to address several challenges, including food security, carbon markets, and how much rich countries should pay to bolster poorer nations’ ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world. It also has huge implications for gender politics. 

Climate change is an existential threat to people and the planet, and it’s far from a gender-neutral phenomenon, says Mayesha Alam, a senior fellow at the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research in Washington, D.C. “Women​, especially from poor and marginalized backgrounds, are disproportionately and uniquely affected by the impact​s of climate change.”

That’s because women are the majority of the world’s poor, and especially of the ultra-poor, who live on less than $1.25 per day. That makes them vulnerable to any bumps in life, especially ones that could displace them from their homes and force them to find new places to live. 

Women are more likely to be small farm owners — and as climate change alters the arability of land, it is more difficult for them to move and grow food in other places that may be more favorable. Data show that women are less likely to have identifying documents that prove their land ownership, and even less likely to have documents that might give them insurance coverage. 

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A new study, out this week, showed how women’s access and ownership rights to land and trees are key to addressing global warming, biodiversity loss and the inequity crisis. 

When climate-related disasters hit, women are more likely to be killed or injured. For example, an Oxfam report found that after the catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, women comprised over 75 percent of deaths in some communities. Alam writes that this was attributed to the fact that socially constructed gender roles tangibly shaped not only the prospects of survival for men and women, but also quality of life in the aftermath of disaster for those who survived. 

In a recent U.N. poll of young people in South Asia, 78 percent said that climate change has impacted their studies. More girls reported that climate change affected their daily journey to school.  

Even without acute disasters striking, climate change can adversely impact women and girls’ everyday existence. They are often tasked with gathering firewood, water or other supplies — in Africa, women and girls collect 60 to 80 percent of firewood for families’ use, according to a recent report on women and climate change authored by Alam. Deforestation means they have to search farther afield for supplies.

As they have to travel farther from home to accumulate these household items, the risks to their personal safety increase. Also, these tasks leave less time for other types of work or educational pursuits. “In conflict settings, the farther women and girls have to travel, not only the harder it is to collect these essential resources but also the more they are exposed to violence, movement restrictions, and other security risks,” Alam says. Research also shows that domestic violence spikes in the wake of economic and social pressure in the wake of ecological upheaval, in developing countries as well as developed ones. 

Many climate groups are eyeing the meeting to see what issues are at the forefront. On Nov. 9, negotiations are specifically expected to address gender equality and the full and meaningful participation of women and girls in climate action. Another topic to be raised is climate financing, a term used to describe how resources are allocated from developed to developing nations to tackle climate change — and that financing has a gender component as well. Meeting organizers say developed countries must make good on their promise to mobilize $100 billion per year to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. 

Alam is also watching the gender makeup of the delegations tasked with making those decisions. The delegations can change until the start of the summit. Are those groups made up of equal numbers of men and women? “We’re ultimately talking about who gets to make decisions ​and how ​resources are allocated,” says Alam. If ​national delegations don’t include women, that’s half the population of ​those countries and thereby their talents and perspectives that are left essentially unrepresented. ​This is an issue of equality and efficacy.”

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Tracy Mann, a project director for Climate Wise Women says she has very little expectation for the meeting, as she hasn’t seen women’s voices elevated in past COP meetings.  But “what is important is that women show up to these events,” she says, because that at least means having a seat at the tables of power. “My focus is always on the marginalized women, the women for whom it is hard to get access — and getting those voices as close as possible to the seats of power.” 

For many indigenous women leaders, even getting into the summit has been a challenge. For participants coming from countries without widespread vaccinations, it has been hard to figure out logistics and how to pay for a quarantine hotel, prompting some groups to call for the conference to be postponed.  

“My personal belief is that the moment the world finally takes women and climate change seriously,  we will see huge advances in the health and well-being of our planet,” says Mann. 

The Global Women’s Assembly for Climate Justice is urging world leaders to include women at every level of the summit, from scientists to politicians to activists. In a seven-point plan delivered during the UN General Assembly in New York in September, the women’s assembly called on governments and financial institutions to act on the critical findings of the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the United Nations group responsible for advancing climate change information —  in an equitable way. 

“The ocean is in our backyard, and literally on our front lawn. There is no higher place that is safe to retreat to,”  Hilda Heine, former president of the low-lying Republic of the Marshall Islands, told the assembly. “But we also have lots of knowledge and innovations to share, as bright spots for others in the fight against climate change.”

Alam says she sees glimmers of hope in young peoples’ actions around climate — for example in the fashion industry, a resource-intense production. Women hold the purchasing power in most families, she says, and they can tilt their money to go towards more climate-friendly places. It’s important to be hopeful, she says, but also grounded. “The key is optimism paired with action, and one reinforces the other. That’s what the driving force needs to be.”

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