• We both were raised Catholic and we both struggled to understand the recalcitrant opposition of the Church to respect and support women’s reproductive rights.
• The belief that advancing gender equality is akin to quantum leaps rather than incremental change.

The book is not Melinda’s autobiography. Milestones and Aha! moments in her life are used as conducting thread to weave hard data with champions stories that highlight key factors to women’s progress. More specifically, Melinda highlights family planning as the single most important aspect for advancing women and humanity.

I knew family planning was important to women empowerment, but as a woman that always had access to contraception, I was not aware of its full impact at a global scale. Serendipitously, I recently landed on a quiz to test my knowledge on solutions to fight climate change based on Project Drawdown (for access to the quiz click here).

Project Drawdown ( https://www.drawdown.org/) is a worldwide cross-functional non-profit organization whose mission is to “map, measure, model, and communicate” about practical solutions to global warming. They compared more than 100 solutions based on current availability, scaling, economic viability, potential to reduce greenhouse gases, negative secondary effects, and feasibility to simulate their impact globally for 2020-2050.

Their research found that jointly educating girls and enabling family planning are the most powerful solutions to reduce CO2 emissions. In other words, the modeling predicts that empowering women could prevent 102.96 billion tons of emissions over the next 30 years. The equivalent of 722 million cars!

Table ranking the most effective solutions based on Project Drawdown research (see a full list here).

The authors of the study compare the UN High and Medium Population projections. The first one projects unchangeable trends on family planning and girls education. The second assumes tackling both issues aggressively. As the table below shows, an increase in the population translates on an increment in food, electricity, transport, construction, materials, and land requirements, which in turn impacts CO2 production.

Effect of population change on the reduction of generated emissions by different sectors (details here).

The side effect of empowering women through education and give them control over their reproductive rights is the key to climate change.

What is stopping us from making gender equality our universal priority? 

#MomentofLift #EmpowerWomen #globalwarming  #climatesolutions