Busisiwe Ndlela

Busisiwe Ndlela was radiant when I met her yesterday. Just this month, and with money she earned selling tiny trees, she has bought a new cupboard and an electric stove and she is proud as can be.

I met this 60-year old mother of seven on the outskirts of Durban, South Africa where she and hundreds of other women are helping to transform their communities and the landscape around them, one seed at a time.

Welcome to the Buffelsdraai landfill site, operated by the eThekwini (Durban) municipality. Under law there must be a buffer zone between it and local residents, and until recently this was occupied by fields of sugar cane.

“Sugar cane did nothing for us,” says Busisiwe when I ask her about life before the tree-planting project began. “It was for them [white farmers], not us.”

This all changed in 2008, when the municipality began to work with local people to turn this 800-hectare area into a mosaic of native grasses and rich forest, to help offset the carbon emissions associated with South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup.

As the new trees mature over the next 20 years, they will absorb 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide — about the same amount produced by 25,000 passengers flying from Northern Europe to South Africa and back again.

As well as helping to limit climate change, the project aims to protect wild nature, improve water quality downstream and create new livelihoods for poor local communities.

It is a simple idea, and it revolves around jobless local people like Busisiwe becoming ‘tree-preneurs’.

First, they collect seeds of native tree species and then they plant them at home in old bottles, plastic bags and other containers. Once the trees reach a certain height the tree-preneurs can sell them to the municipality, which then grows them up a bit more in a nursery before planting them in the buffer zone.

So far more than 600 people have got involved — 80 percent of them women — and they have sold a quarter of a million baby trees, including acacias and several species of wild fig trees.

A 30-centimetre tall tree is worth five rand but if a tree-preneur tends it a little longer and it reaches a metre in height, she can sell it for ten rand (US$1.25). In reality, this is a cashless project. Instead the tree-preneurs receive vouchers that they can exchange for things like food, building materials and school fees for their children’s education.

Since 2008, Busisiwe has sold about 1,200 trees and — depending on their height — this will have earned her vouchers worth between US$750 and US$1500. In a part of the world with 80 percent unemployment, few opportunities and a minimum wage of under a dollar an hour, this income is not to be sniffed at.

The star seed planter though is Ningi Gcabashe. She has sold 15,000 trees to the project and now works as a facilitator, teaching other members of the community about native tree species and how to grow them from seed.

“When the project came to Buffelsdraai, I never realised it would help the community,” said Ningi yesterday, before explaining that she has been able to build a new home using bricks she brought with vouchers from the trees.

“My life improved,” she said. “Before the project I never touched a car. Now I have paid for driving lessons.”

Today she manages the Trees for Life programme of the Wildlands Conservation Trust, the organisation that runs the reforestation at Buffelsdraai. This is just one of several full-time jobs the project has created.

There is temporary work too, especially at this rainy time of year when around 60 communities members are paid to plant trees.

And in a couple of years when the job is complete and 500 hectares of forest have been replanted, new opportunities will spring up.

“After the canopy is planted there will be enrichment plantings, i.e. planting in the understory to increase the biodiversity in the forest,” says Sean O’Donoghue of the eThekwini municipality’s environmental planning and climate protection department.

“Thereafter we’re hoping to create jobs with regards maintaining the forest,” he says. “There will also be waste-preneur opportunities — collection of recyclable waste and selling back to us. And we hope to stimulate eco-tourism in the buffer zone, for example mountain bike tracks.”

The idea is that these activities can form the basis of sustainable businesses and long-term employment for the surrounding communities.

In time, the forest can bring many new benefits but women like Busisiwe and Ningi are already gaining from the greening. “People did not believe,” says Ningi. “Now they do.”

This story originally appeared at Mike Shanahan’s blog — Under the Banyan

Tired of suffering in silence, rural women from across southern Africa, and many from further away, gathered outside the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Convention Centre in Durban on Friday to make their voices heard during the COP17 climate change conference.

Shouting slogans, ululating and singing protest songs, they held a rally before marching through the streets around the centre, watched closely by police.

Nora Mlondoboza (51) from Mopani, near Tzaneen in Limpopo, explained: “We are here to make our voices heard by those people who are sitting there deciding our fate, deciding how we are going to live, how our future is going to be. We want them to take decisions that are going to benefit all of us, not them only.

“Getting together as women, we are sharing the similar experiences and challenges we face – all over Africa. Even in India women are experiencing the same problems we are having. As rural women, we have nothing. We cannot speak alone – if we are united, those people who are seated there, they are going to listen.”

With water shortages on the rise across the globe, people in dry areas suffer most. And women with families to feed feel it most. Margerieta Pieterse (46), from Rawsonville in the Western Cape, said: “We didn’t get rain in the winter. Rain only came in September, and vegetables grew ripe too quickly. It was very strange.

“Water is our biggest problem. We were given land to grow food by the municipality, but that land is far from our houses and it’s very dry, it needs a lot of water. And we have to pay for that water – they put in a meter to see how much we use. We have a right to use water – we grow vegetables not just for ourselves but to feed our whole community. We sell it cheaply because so many people are unemployed. Even if a man has a job, he earns almost nothing.

“We can’t afford healthy food so our kids get sick. Sometimes we don’t have clean water for days at a time. The soil is polluted with chemicals and so is the food that grows from that soil. If you eat it, the chemicals get into your body. That’s why we see so many different illnesses today.

“Government really needs to do something about it…”

Right now as she toils hard to prepare her land for the growing season amid uncertainty about what the changing climate will bring, some of her countrywomen have adopted another strategy to attain food security.

Eunice Chipengule and 13 other women have travelled from Malawi to Durban for the UN climate change conference underway here so they can lobby for change.

“I thought I needed to be here in Durban with my fellow women farmers so that together we send a message to the leaders about our concerns,” says Chipengule, a smallholder farmer from Kasungu.

She is optimistic that despite abandoning her farm to come to Durban her trip will yield positive results, as it is her chance to tell rich countries to reduce carbon emissions and contribute handsomely to funds that will help farmers like her adapt to the changing climate.

“It is very frustrating to buy seeds, sow them, apply manure or fertilizer when at the end of the day everything is washed away due to floods,” says Chipengule. “If it is not the floods, then it will be drought which dries up three quarters of what you planted.”

Making money matter
Despite assurances from Malawi’s Meteorological and Climate Change Department that the country will have sufficiently normal rains, droughts and floods have become common, and farmers are having second thoughts about sowing their hard earned and expensive hybrid seeds.

Meanwhile, at the conference in Durban there are growing calls for international donors to do more to enable farmers like Chipengule and Magombo to protect their farms from climatic threats.

Women produce 80 per cent of the food in developing nations, according to a presentation made in Durban by Lorena Aguilar, the global senior gender advisor at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

IUCN and GenderCC Southern Africa say women farmers should get the lion’s share of donor funds for adaptation to climate change because compared to men, women tend to have more limited access to resources — including land, credit, agricultural inputs, decision-making bodies, technology and training services — that could help them to adapt.

Nongovernmental organisation Self Help Africa says the simple act of getting more money into the hands of Africa women farmers of Africa could boost food production on the continent.

It is not calling for new funds but urging donors to reserve for women a fair share of their existing budgets for agricultural development in Africa.

“African women currently receive as little as 5 per cent of the available supports — training, access to inputs, to land, and to farm credit,” reads a petition the organisation will send to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, UK Minister for International Development Andrew Mitchell and other senior policymakers.

Lorena Aguilar of IUCN, which is among the organisations that have signed the petition, agrees: “Equalizing access to productive resources for female and male farmers could increase agricultural output in developing countries by as much as 2.5 to 4 per cent and reduce the number of undernourished people by 12 to 17 per cent.”

The donor persective

But the global financial crisis means that some donors could cut their funding to developing nations, thereby frustrating the women’s demands for more support, says Rachel Kyte, the World Bank Vice President for the Sustainable Development Network.

Kyte said the World Bank would aim to fill any gaps, and was encouraging banks and companies that lease farm equipment to provide more support to women farmers in Africa.

“We are working with Exim Bank in Tanzania and Access Bank in Nigeria to soften up their conditions towards women so that as many as can should have access to bank loans,” says Kyte. “The problem is in most African set-ups, women do not have assets which they can use as surety.”

As Governments of the world assemble to discuss a way to slow down the pace of climate change, 1000 women farmers across Africa engaged in a peaceful protest to add their voices to the growing cry for climate justice.

They say climate change has resulted in lost crops, lost income and a reduction in the fertility of their land.

climate insurance feature by Winnie

The San Antonio Tuk community forest, a three-hour drive south on the Yucatan peninsula from UN climate talks in Cancun, is just one of Mexico’s many communal land trusts, or ejiros. Created on the back of the Mexican revolution a century ago, they account for a staggering 70 percent of the country’s 64 million hectares of forest cover.

Environmental NGOs say the ejiros would be perfect for preserving forests under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Land Degradation (REDD) regime now under negotiation at the UN climate talks, a scheme to pay tropical countries to keep forests standing.

The difference is stark between Cancun and the forest village of San Antonio Tuk. Cancun is a tourist playground where mangrove forests have long made way for dozens of air-conditioned hotels, one of which is the gigantic Moon Palace, host to the climate conference.

The contrast exemplifies the threat facing Mexico’s forests. “It’s not logging or fires that are the biggest threats to our forests, but development in the tourism, mining and agricultural sectors,” says Sergio Madrid Zubirán of the Consejo Civil Mexicana para la Silvicultura Sostenible, a network of NGOs that work on forests.

The Consejo supports four forest projects which it hopes will benefit from a future REDD scheme by sequestering carbon and protecting trees. San Antonia Tuk lies in one of the larger zones, a 70,000-hectare community forest in the heavily deforested state of Quintana Roo, home to 54 Mayan communities.

LOCAL PARTICIPATION IN REDD?

In Mexico, conservationists are divided on whether to protect forests by keeping people out of them, or by appointing indigenous people like the Mayan forest dwellers as official forest custodians. Some REDD proposals on the table take an ambivalent approach to the participation of indigenous communities, with some nations reluctant to use the scheme as a way of empowering local ethnic groups.

“It’s the people who live in the forest that know best how to preserve it,” counters Zubirán. “A non-touch strategy won’t work because nobody accrues benefits from conserving the forest. If we involve local communities, we win much more.”

Community member and biologist Marco Antonio explains that the project was launched with the aim of giving economic support to the keepers of the forest. “Over 40 groups of land owners deliver essential environmental services for which they receive an incentive from the central government,” he says.

This concept, in which forest people get paid for safeguarding, for instance, the water supply used by downstream communities, is rapidly gaining ground. “For our stewardship, the government gives us 326 pesos ($26 US) per hectare per year,” says Cante Chuc who runs a privately owned network that mediates between communities and project funders.

That number doesn’t seem much, but with hundreds of hectares per community member, it provides an additional income, while the trend of deforestation has been halted, says the Consejo’s spokesperson, Iván Zúñiga Pérez-Tejada.

The project is supported by a $200,000 grant from HSBC Bank, the Ford Foundation and the Consejo.

The Mexican NGO hopes to complete a baseline survey of carbon sequestration in the forest in June next year, and has an eye on how it could benefit from a REDD agreement at the Cancun climate talks.

The Consejo argues that many of the tricky issues associated with REDD – such as ensuring loss of forests doesn’t occur in other ways, verifying how much extra carbon is stored as a result, and making sure that carbon isn’t simply released later – could be solved by putting the Mayan forest communities in charge of monitoring schemes, because they have used the forest sustainably for centuries.

“A well-organised community is the most effective remedy against illegal logging,” argues Zubirán.

FORESTS FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

Catalina Briceño Lopez, a sinewy 69-year old, was one of the first Maya to arrive in the area. “I came here at 15 with my husband who was one of the founders of San Antonio Tuk,” she says.

She recalls a pristine forest where no one lived. “It is important to pass on this sense of conserving the forest for next generations. I have a piece of land, and when my children and grandchildren come to visit me, I teach them about how to live from the forest without over exploiting it,” she says.

“It is a beautiful thing to preserve the environment, I am very excited about this (project).”

Don Santos Ilichois, 64, carves out an environmentally sustainable living by harvesting gum (known as chicle) for the chewing gum industry. A packet of “organic tropical forest chewing gum” sells for as much as 2 euros in European supermarkets.

While most Westerners his age are reaching for their slippers, Don Santos straps on a pair of spikes and readies himself to climb an 800-year-old chicle tree. A couple metres above ground, he hacks diagonal lines into the ancient forest giant.

“The gum will run down the tree through these lines where we can collect it,” he says. “It will not kill the tree.”

Wiping the sweat off his tough, sun-hardened face, he explains it takes several hours to work the entire length of a tree like this. In one day, he can harvest about 1.5 kg of gum from a tree, with 1 kg of gum fetching about 55 pesos ($4).

“We hope that with an agreement on forests (at the U.N. talks), we can keep on using the trees in our traditional ways,” he says. But the future of REDD – hailed only a few weeks back as one of the few likely successes from Cancun – seems uncertain.

The Japanese government reiterated last week it will not join a second phase of the Kyoto Protocol after the initial period expires next year, injecting a sense of pessimism into the negotiations.

The death of the Kyoto Protocol would jeopardise the carbon offsetting initiatives it has given birth to, including the Clean Development Mechanism. And any subsequent collapse of budding carbon markets around the world could pull the rug from under a hard-fought REDD deal before it even gets off the ground.

“Projects on the ground are looking for a signal that REDD is coming and that long-term sustainable finance will be available,” said Davyth Stewart of Global Witness, a London-based NGO that advocates for the fair use of natural resources.

“Without a REDD deal here in Cancun, some of those projects will be forced to search for funding elsewhere, including multilateral development banks and the private sector, where they will be subject to different or minimal international common standards.”

They argue that women risk being excluded from the benefits of these initiatives, which are known collectively as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+).

They say that women are a distinct group among forest-dependent people but that — unlike the indigenous peoples — they have not had their rights recognised in either the multilateral negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or in national and local level projects.

“There is a widespread omission of not seeing women as forest people too. I cannot say that the non-governmental organisations have their eyes open more than the governments do,” says Jeannette Gurung, founder and director of Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (WOCAN).

Gurung was speaking at launch of the Global Initiative on REDD+ and Gender during the first week on the UN climate change negotiation’s in Cancun, Mexico. The initiative is backed by WOCAN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Women’s Economic Development Outreach (WEDO).

Carole Saint-Laurent, senior forest policy adviser at IUCN, said: “We have followed the REDD+ negotiations for quite a long time, as well as developed a number of initiatives at the national level. At both levels, there are major gaps in the way the women’s role has been addressed or not addressed in REDD+ initiatives.”

“Women’s rights must be included in the REDD+ negotiations and projects,” says Monike Essed-Fernandes, interim executive director of WEDO. She said the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women — ratified by 186 countries — should be used to legally recognise women’s rights in the REDD+ arena.

“This treaty is absolutely unknown to the people involved in the REDD+ dialogue and discussions,” she adds. “Everyone in that room is familiar with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, even the organisations who have a mandate to look at gender issues and take a rights-based approach seem to have no familiarity with those very legal rights.”

“Our aim is to ensure that gender considerations are fully integrated in the international and national works on REDD+, so women can be seen as major stakeholders,” she explains. “Moreover, at the local level, we will work to develop the capacity of women’s organisations so they will be able to engage in the REDD+ processes.”

Not stakeholders yet

If formalised under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, REDD+ could lead to billions of dollars flowing from industrialised countries each year to compensate developing nations for protecting their forests.

However, in a recent trip to assess the role of gender in REDD+ activities in Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangkok, Thailand, Gurung was not surprised when she found not one project, either on REDD+ or on Payments for Environmental Services, that recognised women as stakeholders.

She points out however, that women are the primary fuel collectors — in all the Asian countries, for example. “In many cases, they are even patrolling the forest under very dangerous conditions. Still there is no recognition. There is gender blindness.”

“And if they aren’t recognised as stakeholders, they aren’t invited to the table and the consultations, where the dialogues are going on about the distribution of roles and benefits,” she says. “If women aren’t brought to the table at this stage, while the REDD+ framework is being established, we are fearful that when the benefits of REDD+ payments — whether market-based or through government mechanisms — start to be distributed, women will be left out.”

The same situation applies here in Mexico. Xyatil is a Mayan community about 250 kilometres from Cancun where a REDD+ pilot project has been underway since 2009. The community has already established its territorial zoning, started a reforestation plan and gone through training courses with the technical and financial support of NGOs and the Mexican National Forestry Commission.

Ana Berta Colli is a small-scale farmer there. “I am a landowner. I have my property papers,” she says proudly. But when asked if she took part in the development of the REDD+ project, she answered with a shy smile: “No, I have never been to their meetings”.

Last week the leaders of the Xyatil community told journalists about their REDD+ activities and plans for the future. But the question “have the women of the community and those who are landowners themselves participated in the design of this initiative?” took them by surprise.

They looked at each other in astonishment, without grasping the meaning of –- nor the reason for –- the question. “No, not now,” was the answer. “Not in this phase. In the future they will be included”.

But when asked in which activities women would be included, they could not name one.

Guring says there are cultural reasons why women are often seen only as housewives and housekeepers. “What we hear again and again is, why should we invite women to the table?”

Women and climate change in numbers

* An analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that the worst impacts of climate change will be on the poorest regions and the poorest people, who have the fewest resources for meeting the changes brought by increasing droughts, floods and storms. As many as 70% of these poor people are women.

* Climate change will affect agriculture, food security and water management. In developing countries, women are traditionally responsible for performing the activities related to these functions. In Africa it is estimated that 80% of food production is managed by women.

As a rural woman, she says, the biggest challenge she faces is food insecurity caused by changing  climatic conditions. Gazing over her dry and dusty fields, she adds: “If there was good weather, timely rain, and availability of water, energy and food security, our work as women would be much easier.”

Maluleke, a 66-year-old KwaZulu Natal small farmer, has seen many changes for the worse in weather and climatic conditions  on her land in Ntshongweni, north of Durban. “Over the years I have seen floods and drought ravaging my village, which was once considered the provincial maize basket,” she says.

In good years her maize would be shoulder-high by the end of the growing season. Even in bad years, her crop would rustle around her waist. But this year only a few plants have survived to grow knee-high, withering in the heat. Maize production on her land has dropped from five tons per hectare to three. Experts now believe dry-land maize production could fail entirely in much of southern Africa by mid-century, forcing a switch to alternative crops.

“We have experienced droughts recently but this is the worst I can remember,” she said. “The sun is so hot, and there is little hope now that we are going to survive.” The negative effects of climate change are likely to hit the poorest people in the poorest countries hardest.

Maluleke is the primary care-giver for her family in times of disaster and environmental stress.
“The existing shortfalls in water have been exacerbated and now, the time I take to fetch water or wood has certainly increased my workload, limiting my opportunities to branch out into other, non-traditional activities,” she said.

People hereabouts used to farm in keeping with a familiar seasonal pattern. The farmers would  clear their land in October and November so they could spend December and January planting and working their fields. “But things have changed. When we think we should be planting, harvesting or resting, in fact it’s the opposite, because of the climate,” Maluleke explained.

Rural women form a disproportionate share of the rural poor. The developing world is likely to feel the consequences of climate change particularly in terms of water availability and from a compounding of the effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, says Maira Zahur of Gender and Climate Change (Women for Climate Justice). It is a global network of women, activists and experts. Zahur, a researcher, adds: “Women are more vulnerable to climate change because they are more likely to be poor and have fewer coping mechanisms than men, and have additional responsibilities.”

Themba Linden, political adviser to Greenpeace in South Africa, said the effects of climate change worsened existing problems like food security, water scarcity and HIV/AIDS.

A UN Development Programme report says women in sub-Saharan Africa spend about 40 billion hours a year collecting water and doing their household chores. This means that increased water scarcity would particularly affect women, girls and to some extent boys, because they would have to travel further to collect water, or would have to use a less safe water source closer to home, Linden said.

“Seventy per cent of human beings worldwide living below the poverty line are women. In particular, in developing countries and communities that are highly dependent on local natural resources, women are likely to be disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change,” says Ulrike Röhr. Röhr is director of Genanet, a Berlin-based group working on gender, justice and sustainability.

She said climate change often affects the areas that are the basis of livelihoods for which women are responsible, for example nutrition and water and energy supplies. “And because of gender differences in property rights, access to information and in cultural, social and economic roles, the effects of climate change are likely to affect men and women differently,” she said.

Those effects are not limited to immediate impacts and changing behaviour but also lead to subsequent changes in gender relations. Spending more time on traditional women’s tasks such as collecting water and fuelwood and feeding the family reinforces traditional work roles and works against a change in which women might begin to play other roles.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), women farmers in Africa produce up to 80% of the continent’s food. “To be successful, adaptation policies and measures within both developed and developing countries need to be gender sensitive,” Röhr said.

So far, climate change negotiations have responded poorly to the impacts on women, she said.
“And while global policies advocate a gender perspective, and including women in environment and development efforts, few governments have incorporated such policies into their national plans.”

“Extreme events and environmental degradation become a women’s issue because we are responsible for providing for the whole community,” said Anna Pinto, programme director with the Centre for Organisation, Research and Education (CORE), an NGO based in north-eastern India. She was speaking at a  side event during the UNFCCC Bonn climate talks in early June.