Girls' Education and Climate Change Mitigation

Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education just released a report called "Gender Equality and Education: A Report Card on South Asia Living and Learning for Future -The Power of Adult Learning", which ranks girls' access to education among South Asian countries. Sri Lanka comes in first, India second, with Nepal trailing at fifth, and Afghanistan last. It's not clear how many countries they're including in South Asia, but with 60% of girls without access to a secondary education, Nepal obviously has some work to do.

...especially in light of this paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer at the Center for Global Development. The paper suggests, based on projections that developing countries will contribute as much as 50% of global carbon emission by 2030, that the best dollar-for-dollar impact in aid programming targeting climate change mitigation is...a combination of family planning and girls' education.

Now, I think there may be some potential issues with this, although I'll admit to sort of skimming at this point. For instance, the 2030 projection is based on a definition of "developing" (from a 2007 study by Wheeler) that equates the term with the Global South, which includes China. While China ranks first in emissions, family planning isn't exactly a problem. I don't know how much this affects projections, but since China isn't really getting a royal share of foreign aid, maybe it doesn't matter. The second issue I have is that two major sources of CO2 from developing countries cited by Wheeler and Hammer and are "rapidly industrializing countries" (like India, China, and South Africa), and massive deforestation, like in Brazil. Now, I'm not going to summon the statistics to back up what I'm about to contend (just now, anyway), but I would say that we need to think about to what degree the unsustainability of those systems of production is driven by unsustainable patterns of consumption in the global North. I'm not sure Wheeler's 2007 "inconvenient truth" ("A Carbon-Intensive South Faces Environmental Disaster, No Matter What the North Does") is so true; I think we have a moral imperative to change our consumption patterns to reflect a dedication to sustainable systems of production (something I think they are ignoring in their critique of Naucler and Enkvist).

However, that said: there is an awful lot of money being thrown at climate change right now, especially in places like Nepal (and rightfully so, given that, according to ICIMOD the Himalayas are suffering temperature changes at eight times the global rate). Some of that money is going to effective mitigation and prevention programming...but then you have the motherload of climate mitigation aid: REDD. I can't necessarily speak to other countries, but in Nepal, for instance, I can't really see REDD working in practice, for a whole slew of reasons, despite a robust tradition of decentralized forest management. Despite my tentative reservations about Wheeler and Hammer's conclusions, and especially taking into account the other proven economic development outcomes of programs aimed at women's empowerment, they make a compelling argument to look at other strategies before diving headlong into REDD and other similarly expensive and expansive, yet largely unproven, systems.