Are you an environmental crusader? So are the children living in Plan’s communities around the world! They’re fighting for clean water and a healthier environment.

Planting the future: School kids in Bertoni, Paraguay, are part of a community-wide reforestation project. By planting trees, the kids are helping to promote and preserve the area’s natural resources for future generations!

Keeping watch: When tropical storms hit the area around Libertad Elementary School in the Philippines, they often bring  landslides and floods. Students are taking action to protect themselves and their teachers by measuring and recording rainfall levels near the school twice a day. If they find more than 80mm of rainfall, they’ll sound the alert and evacuate the school. Being able to read the warning signs and having a disaster preparedness plan helps keep them and their classmates safe.

Water worth drinking: Knowing that bacteria in water is a major cause of sick days and even death, children at Nyabera School in Kisumu, Kenya are taking action to make sure they’ve got clean water to drink. The method, called SODIS, is simple and good for the environment – it’s all about recycling and uses only the sun’s rays for energy! First, water is put into bottles and then it is left out in the sun for 6 hours. The sun’s UV radiation kills the bacteria and makes it safe to drink.

Filming change: With Plan’s support, children in Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Philippines used video to examine the impact of climate change on their communities. Check out their work!

Does your school or work participate in any environmental initiatives? We want to hear about them!

We know that climate change has an impact on the environment around us, but did you know that it also has an impact on people?

The dangers of climate change are very real: the world will experience more frequent and intense droughts, floods, storms and cyclones, heat waves and other extreme weather events.

And when bad weather happens, it doesn’t affect everyone equally – it hits society’s most vulnerable the hardest.

So what’s the connection between girls and climate change? Last June, Plan published a report called Weathering the storm: Adolescent girls and climate change that looked closely at the issues. When disaster strikes, girls rights are at risk.

Death by disaster: In countries where girls’ rights are weakest, girls are also less likely than boys to survive a disaster.  A big part of this is that girls are discouraged from learning survival skills like swimming or climbing, so they are unable to swim or climb to safety. Also, boys are more likely to be rescued. After the crisis, women and girls suffer more from food shortages, as well as lack of privacy and safety for sleeping and bathing and increased risk of sexual assault in camps.

Out of school: For families living in poverty, disasters add pressure to their already difficult lives. Domestic duties add up, and there is pressure on girls to stay home from school to look after the home. . Girls from Ethiopia who were interviewed for the report talked about how the drought in their country increased the time they had to spend fetching water for their families. If girls are called on to earn money for the family, it also has a big impact on their right to education.

Early marriage: For over-stretched families, sending a daughter to be married means one less mouth to feed. In Uganda, during periods of drought, this is sometimes called a “famine marriage.” As families struggle to survive, receiving a “bride price” can be a quick fix for acute poverty.

Without a voice: Even though girls and women are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, their voices are often left out when it comes to making decisions about what to do about it. Plan is helping to make sure that girls are at the table, like Beatrice, a young journalist from Kenya who attended a recent UN Climate Change Conference.

Did you know? Traditional roles of men and boys can affect them negatively in disaster as well. Society expects men to be brave and heroic, leading to expectations that they should carry out high-risk rescue activities.

This month is all about girls and the environment here at Because I am a Girl. To get us all on the same page, we’re starting out with a handy glossary of definitions of what we’ll be talking about over the next few weeks.

Climate change: When we talk about climate, we mean the general weather conditions in a particular place – not just today’s weather, but the average weather over a long period of time. Climate change means that what was normal weather before is changing and now there’s a “new normal”. What’s behind climate change? An increase in the average temperature in the atmosphere.

Extreme weather: When weather is REALLY different from normal, it’s referred to as extreme weather. Extreme weather can mean very hot or cold and very dry or wet, leading to storms, hurricanes, floods, and drought. One of Plan’s main focuses is helping girls and their families be prepared to deal with an extreme weather crisis, and help them to get through it when disaster strikes.

Climate refugee or environmental migrant: When people are forced to leave their home region because of changes in the climate, such as desertification or rising sea level. It can also refer to people pushed out of their homes during an extreme weather event. These people – especially girls – face all the challenges that other types of refugees face.

Carbon footprint: When the world is in balance, the energy coming down to earth from the sun and the energy from the earth going back into space should be about equal. Here on earth, though, we’ve started creating “greenhouse gases” that trap the sun’s heat in our atmosphere and prevent them from returning to space, leading to climate change. A “carbon footprint” tells us the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by a person, organization, event or thing. So, with a carbon footprint, lower is better!

Green: I hear the term “green” a lot and even though I have an idea about what it means, I wondered if there was a specific rule about what makes things green or not. Turns out, it’s just a general term for something or someone that tries to have as little negative impact on the planet as possible.

Sanitation: Sanitation is a word that goes hand-in-hand with water, but is often not defined on its own. When we use it here at Because I am a Girl, we are talking about any kind of system that prevents humans from coming in contact with wastes. Need an example? Hand washing and sewer systems are both sanitation strategies!

Upcycle: Reduce, reuse and recycle are common terms, but upcycling is a bit newer. When you upcycle something, you’re taking a waste material or useless product and making it into something new that has more value. Stay tuned this month as we give you some ideas for do-it-yourself upcycling projects!

Tell us about your favourite “green” activity! What do you do on a daily basis to make a difference for our planet?

(Photo credit: nattu)

Girls are the world’s water gatherers: Almost the first thing you hear about when you start learning about water and the GIRL ISSUE is that it’s a girl thing: collecting water around the world, and because of this girls often miss out on their right to an education. (Learn more about how women are the guardians of water.)

Toilets and periods: Another thing that can keep girls out of school is lack of privacy and adequate menstrual supplies. Check out girls and the toilet crisis and World Water Day: It’s that time of the month for more info!

Global Facts: Want the bigger picture? Here are 5 reasons not to take access to clean water for granted.

Girls and climate change: We’ll talk about climate change, natural disasters and girls some more later this month, but you can start to read up on how these issues are intertwined. Did you know that when it comes to girls, climate change is a two-way relationship?

Health: Clean water is a matter of life and death, especially when it comes to microscopic emergencies: infectious disease 101.

Canadian girls taking action: I’m glad to hear that someone’s doing something about it! Check out this Guest Q&A by Yadesha: Water you doing for change?

Stay tuned as we tackle these issues in more depth this month here on the blog and over at the Because I am a Girl Facebook page.

If you’ve got the urge to do something about it RIGHT NOW, send some sanitary essentials, clean water for a family or a girls’ only latrine to girls that need them!

So how does this relate to girls? Well, it means that we’re both the victims of climate change (which is especially true for girls living in poverty who are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change) and we’re also agents of change in putting an end to this crisis.

The thing is, it’s not that simple. In a lot of ways, us girls here in the Western world are doing more than our fair share of causing climate change, and girls in developing countries are getting more than their fair share of the negative effects.

This story of Aisha, whose family and village were disrupted by flooding in Pakistan last August, shows how girls’ lives can be affected by extreme weather events which are related to changing climate.

When you look at it this way, when you help to reduce your carbon footprint, in a way you’re also helping to minimize the impact of climate change on girls around the world.

How are you reducing your carbon footprint and reducing waste?  Tell us in the comments!

Climate change doesn’t just mean changes in temperature up and down, but also that what are known as “weather events” (aka, extreme weather conditions like storms, heat waves, floods and droughts).

These weather events often cause crisis in the communities that they hit, as we well know from the experiences of Haiti and Pakistan last year. We’ve talked here on the blog about how girls in particular are affected by the crises in Haiti and Pakistan and today we’re going to look a little bit more generally about how girls are affected in weather-triggered crises.

A report called “Weathering the Storm: Girls and Climate Change” from Plan used research from Bangladesh and Ethiopia to look at how girls are affected compared to boys. They found:

• GIRLS are taken out of school, rather than boys, during extreme weather events, so that they can contribute to household income and help with domestic responsibilities. Many then do not return to complete their education.
• GIRLS report that they are often forced into taking work as domestic workers or agricultural labourers when their families are hit by crisis.
• GIRLS have to spend more time fetching water or firewood during drought periods due to increased scarcity of these resources.
• GIRLS report that they face a noticeable increase in early or forced marriages after floods and droughts, due to their families’ inability to support daughters financially during these crisis periods.
• GIRLS suffer more sexual violence and harassment during and after disasters, often because they are separated from their families

Along with these issues, the report also notes that girls are also often not a part of disaster prevention and rebuilding – their voices are not heard.

This is another way us girls here in Canada are linked with girls in the rest of the world. By helping to stop climate change through taking small actions on a daily basis and supporting green policies, we’re also helping to reduce the affects of climate change on girls on a global scale.

(photo credit: emilio labrador)

Meet Beatrice.  She’s spent the last couple of weeks telling the world about climate change as one of Plan International’s young reporters currently in Copenhagen at the UN Climate Change Conference.  Way to go, Beatrice!

For a second, we’ll get her to step out from behind her video camera (check out some of the interviews done by the Children in a Changing Climate)  and tell us her story.

Beatrice is only 13, but a force to be reckoned with, interviewing world leaders and decision makers that are meeting at the Copenhagen conference.  Her reasons for getting involved?  She says,

“I am looking forward to the day when all the people will understand better use of resources and change the climate for better. We are the future leaders and if we understand the effects of climate change now, later in life we can save our countries.”

She has joined other girls, like Busra from Sweden and Annie from the UK to make sure that the right questions get asked in the fight to save this planet.  But I’m sure that when she gets home to Kenya, she won’t stop her quest to help others understand more about climate change.

Check out the team’s reports from Copenhagen here.

Climate change causes “shorter, unpredictable rainy seasons, severe typhoons, hurricanes and floods, long-lasting droughts, and repeatedly failed harvests.”

So what does this mean for women and girls?

It sounds simple, but a big issue for women and girls around the world is time.  What I mean is that the amount of time spent preparing food and managing the household can have a big impact on whether girls are able to go to school, get a job or get medical care.  Without electricity or running water, women often spend a big chunk of their day getting firewood and hauling water.

Climate change can have a big impact on the time women spend getting supplies:

• Deforestation caused by climate change means that women have to travel farther to get enough wood.
• When water supplies are contaminated through climate change, women have to travel farther to a clean water source and are often at risk of getting water-borne diseases.

We want them to come up with a good plan at Copenhagen, so that we can try to stop the negative impact of climate change on our neighbourhoods and communities around the world.  If you would like to get involved in making sure that this plan is the best possible for women and girls, you can:

• Follow Plan’s young journalists blogging from Copenhagen
• Tweet, FB, and comment about what you want from the agreement at Copenhagen

Stay tuned for my next post when I look at some of the women who are representing us girls in Copenhagen this week!  They rock!