UN Acknowledges Women's Leadership in Environment Conservation

The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) said on Tuesday that farmer women leadership is paramount in biodiversity and nature conservation.

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In rural contexts, seed stocks and traditional plant-based drugs are often under women's running. Female leadership frequently leads to sustainable natural resources exploitation on health, nutrition, and farming.

According to the report, 164 nations acknowledge women's entitlement to lead, administrate, and to decide over land in equal conditions than men. However, only 52 legally ensure female farmer leadership, which jeopardizes their livelihood, therefore, their maintainable relationship with the environment.

"To a poor woman in a rural setting who is managing this (the loss), it becomes very real," said executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme Inger Andersen.

The CBD disclosed The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 (GBO-5), a report on global environmental situations, and the efforts on biodiversity conservation. CBD officers also offered a press brief to discuss the incompliance of 2020 goals.

GBD officers referred to several women-led communities with successful experiences in environmental conservation, like Peruvian Amazon women who patrol the rainforest to prevent illegal logging and help to re-plant. In Liberia, female leaders reinvest their profits from agricultural activities in children's education.

"Women have a much closer relationship with biodiversity than men do. Men hunt and plant crops, but it is the women who go into the forest to gather medicine, gather food, and gather water. It's the women who have a lot of the traditional knowledge of plants and biodiversity that indigenous communities rely on," said a Latin American forest and Indigenous expert with the Rainforest Foundation US, Josh Lichtenstein.