Women and girls' education is a vital frontier in the fight against climate change

In August 2019, the strongest hurricane to hit the Bahamas since records began almost 200 years ago raged across the island. A category 5 storm, Hurricane Dorian brought with it a 20ft surge of floodwater and winds over 220mph that destroyed countless homes and buildings and took 74 lives.

Dozens of schools were damaged and 10,000 students were displaced, put at risk of missing school.

When droughts, floods, and other disasters strike a region, as in the case of Hurricane Dorian, alongside a threat to life comes the threat of lost learning, particularly for girls. It is an often hidden, but devastating effect of climate change, and one that, if tackled, could lead to huge benefits.

Hotter days, emptier classrooms

An 18 year study from Plan International followed a cohort of girls from nine different countries and uncovered myriad ways that women and girls’ education is impacted by climate change.

One of the most immediate impacts is caused by environmental disasters: infrastructure damage – damage to schools themselves, but also the roads and routes necessary to reach them. As a result, girls can miss days or weeks of education.

But the risk of falling behind doesn’t end there. When severe weather events make it harder to obtain basic necessities, parents may pull girls out of school to help with household labor, and school-age girls become more vulnerable to getting married, as families seek to lessen the financial burden on the household.

These are just some of the ways the burden of climate change falls heaviest on women and girls and steals their right to learn.

The power and potential of women and girls

Those same women and girls are also an untapped resource that could help in the battle against climate change and its effects.

Back to 2019, when Lauren Ritchie, a climate justice advocate and storyteller from the Bahamas, watched Hurricane Dorian unfold over her home while studying sustainable development in New York. It starkly highlighted something she had noticed about her learning environment.

“I realized that a lot of people who were at the forefront of the conversations around climate change didn't look like me. I was the only black woman in a lot of my classes, the only Caribbean person.”

She felt compelled to act, to find a way to give more voice to marginalized groups.

“I started the Eco Justice Project, really recognizing that need to platform small island nations, but also other vulnerable communities who are bearing the impact of the climate crisis but don't usually have a seat at the table.”

The Eco Justice Project is a digital platform that amplifies underrepresented voices and promotes intersectional climate advocacy.

“We know that about 80% of climate refugees are women,” says Lauren. “There's a disproportionate number when we think about climate vulnerability – gender justice needs to be a part of that conversation.”

Studies have shown how girls’ education – including strong literacy, numeracy and science skills – helps improve their preparedness for climate shocks. Even something as simple as being able to read and understand weather reports can mean the difference between a family keeping or losing their home.

The Eco Justice Project. Courtesy of Lauren Ritchie

And educating girls does not just benefit individual families, it transforms communities, even whole countries. Higher levels of education for women leads to their greater political participation, and when women become parliamentarians, they support climate conscious actions. One study of 160 countries, over 15 years, found that women in parliaments advocated for reduced investments in fossil fuels and increases in environmental spending.

Lauren has seen this in her own advocacy work:

“Education is the root of change, and I think empathy is also the root of change. So, I think that education is a way to equip women and girls with the skills that they need to be able to adapt to the climate crisis, to be able to contribute their ideas and their solutions, giving them that platform and politics to be changemakers.”

Boosting girls’ education now will see big rewards

The Eco Justice Project. Courtesy of Lauren Ritchie

In 2023, Lauren led a summer camp in Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas, supporting teen girls to learn about, and creatively document, the damage climate change had caused in the area. She saw how the girls she worked with were directly affected by climate change, and how that puts them in a unique position to help fight it.

“A lot [of the girls], their dads were fishermen. Eleuthera is more of a rural community of sorts, a more island community. So they were very tied to cultural traditions that are also connected to the environment,” said Lauren, continuing “We need to place women and girls as educators and as experts in their own story and in their own experience.”

But how do we do it?

The Plan International study concludes with three recommendations that come from the girls involved:

1) Make schools safe
2) Improve climate change education
3) Financially support families impacted by the climate crisis, so that they don’t feel forced to sacrifice their daughters’ futures

These goals seem simple, but if enacted, their impact would be huge and wide ranging. We’ve seen this borne out in existing statistics: a study from 2017 found that for each additional year of schooling a girl receives, a country will increase between 1.6 - 3.2 points on the ND-GAIN index – a measure of a country’s vulnerability to climate change, where a higher score indicates higher resilience.

NGOs and organizations like The Eco Justice Project are an absolutely vital part of this work. When girls and women, especially those in poorer, less supported communities, are empowered not just to learn but to express that learning, they have a voice. And more than that, they have influence.

“I think that it's more than just looking at [women and girls’] struggles and what they face,” says Lauren. “It’s also [listening to] the solutions that they have to offer. That's really important.”