Unfair

Girls Bear Brunt of Climate Change

As if adolescent girls didn't already have enough on their plates, a new study suggests climate change will make life harder for young women in developing countries. The nonprofit Plan U.K. and the British Department for International Development issued the report, which zooms in on 500 million adolescent girls in the developing world. Young women, the authors say, are often responsible for tending to livestock and looking after the house, so they often leave home later than boys when a natural disaster hits—if they leave home at all. The report says young women accounted for 90 percent of deaths from a 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh and 80 percent of deaths from the 2004 tsunami in Asia. Their workload is also likely to increase with the earth's rising temperatures that will make water and wood harder to obtain.

Read it at Scientific American

August 2, 2011 9:54 PM