Photo taken by a Sierra Club volunteer on a study abroad tour to the Phillipines with the Global Population and Environment Program.

Mother’s Day is not only a time to celebrate our own mothers and mothers around the world, it’s also a time to think about the things our mothers need to take care of their families. And it’s a time to remember the importance of Mother Nature.

As our use of fossil fuels has drastically increased over the last several decades, mothers everywhere have experienced undue stress. These dirty fossil fuels -- like coal, oil, and natural gas -- have not only exacerbated climate disruption but have directly impacted mothers everywhere, especially those in the developing world who are least prepared for and hardest hit by climate disruption.

Currently, 70 percent of the global population living below the poverty line are women. Without adequate access to basic resources, these women are particularly susceptible to the effects of climate change. Many poor women depend on the land for food, water and fuel, and are thus affected disproportionately by erratic weather patterns and natural disasters. In fact, women and children are 14 times more likely to die from a natural disaster than their male counterparts.

Droughts, floods, and other effects on water hit women especially hard. Water supplies are rarely close to communities and villages. In fact, roughly 25 percent of a woman’s day is spent on securing water for her family’s needs in the developing world. That’s 25 percent of a mother’s time that she could be providing for her family in other ways.

Students drilling a well at the Water4 training. Photo courtesy of Christelle Kwizera.

Editor’s note: Christelle Kwizera is a fellow with the Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program. Christelle is also part of Water Access Rwanda and will be drilling wells this summer and next in Rwanda, where some families lack access to clean water. She recently participated in a Water4 training that taught student activists about groundwater pollution and how to avoid contaminating drinking water sources. The students spent four days drilling a water well using tools that combine hand augers and percussion tools. Manually drilling is minimally intrusive and offers protection from water contamination by backfilling with sanitary layers around the well. In this blog post, Christelle reflects on some of the ways water scarcity affects reproductive health.

Water is an essential part of life. It makes up as much as three quarters of our body weight when we’re born, and more than 60 percent in adult life. We cry for it when we’re thirsty. It’s essential to the growth of crops. It's the universal solvent, a cooking necessity, and central to adequate sanitation.

However, in many parts of the world, it is rare to find clean water that is easy to access. Rather, it is often contaminated with harmful substances and bacteria, and pure streams are located below the earth’s surface, protected by layers of stone and clay.

Thus, it is not at all surprising that the average African woman spends six hours each day fetching and cleaning water. Despite the hard work and time spent collecting water, one in nine people still lack access to clean water, and every 20 seconds a child dies from a water-related illness.

In Rwanda and in most of the developing world, the task of gathering and sanitizing water is left to women and children. The scarcity of water promulgates the cycle of poverty and illiteracy, and it exposes women and children to dangerous situations outside of the home. This is unfortunate and heartbreaking when you realize that water scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa is not physical but economic. There is a tremendous amount of water in the valleys, lakes, and rivers, and even more below the surface; however, many women and children lack the knowledge and tools to make that water usable, potable, and accessible.

Deepa Pullanikatil, program manager for LEAD, speaking at the Congressional Briefing on Population, Health, and Environment.

By the end of the century, scientists expect the global population to reach nearly 11 billion. That’s almost four billion more people than are alive right now.

When you think about population growth, it’s pretty easy to see how it can disturb the environment: more resources used, more energy produced, more housing needed, more food consumed, etc. Over one billion people currently live in biodiversity hotspots, and that number is rapidly increasing.

But what you may not think about is how much of a positive effect family planning can have on the environment and women’s health.

Groups like the Sierra Club and Population Action International (PAI) are actively working to integrate population, health, and environment (PHE) into government plans in the U.S. and around the world, especially in countries like Niger where the average woman has 7.03 children and the unmet need for family planning is high. To put that into perspective, if each woman alive today between the ages of 15 and 44 had 7.03 children--that’s roughly 1.6 billion women--they would have 11.3 billion children.

“When couples can plan the number, timing, and spacing of their children, that helps the environment and the economy,” said Beverly Johnson, chief of the Policy, Evaluation, and Communication Division of the USAID Office of Population and Reproductive Health.

The more women that have access to family planning, the better their quality of life, and the better it is for the environment. When women are able to make their own choices in reproductive health, the whole world benefits.

The community of groups that work on PHE focuses on five main ideas: health, population, environment, food security, and livelihoods. Their goal is to address the day-to-day challenges of women and to integrate these ideas in a comprehensive way.

And PHE can be found all around the world.

What do a Unitarian minister, an economics student, an HIV/AIDS educator, and a Sierra Club outings leader all have in common?

It may sound like the beginning of an off-color joke, but what unites these four activists is an interest in global population and reproductive health as they connect to the environment and climate disruption. Along with 24 other spirited volunteers, they spent last weekend exploring these issues in depth at the Global Population and Environment Program’s Fall Activist Training.

Bringing together participants of all ages and backgrounds from every corner of the United States, we spent the weekend exploring the complex relationship between human and planetary well-being, digging into the important contribution of voluntary family planning and women’s empowerment to the health of our planet, human pressure on scarce resources, and the resilience of communities to climate disruption.

Participants heard from experts in the field on topics ranging from global population projections to integrated development models. They explored infographics on recent population data, watched two films on Population-Health-Environment (PHE) programs around the world, and discussed best practices for social media, messaging, and community engagement.

Most importantly, participants shared ideas and inspired each other to make these connections for students, Sierra Club members, communities, and policy makers – spreading the weekend’s messages far beyond the walls of a conference room in our nation’s capital.

What was most inspiring about the weekend was observing everything that goes into making our issues salient in a world of competing interests. Just like the Sierra Club as a whole, the training included an incredibly diverse range of people, opinions, experiences and ideas that result in robust discussion and creative problem solving. Integrating environmental and reproductive justice in the faith community, discussing population pressure with hikers on outings trips, and linking condoms and climate disruption on college campuses were just a few of the ideas that emerged from our dynamic group.

As participants filed out of the training Sunday afternoon, exchanging last-minute hugs and emails, I thought about this diversity and the rich outcomes it produced. How often do a 16-year-old highschool student, a septuagenarian college professor, and a middle-aged Sierra Club political chair get together in one room to discuss their beliefs about the causes of and solutions for our changing climate and growing planet?

These conversations should happen more often – and we commit to facilitating dialogue and action by continuing to bring together diverse groups and brainstorm actions to change our world. To get alerts about future training opportunities with our program, sign up for our PopNews listserv here. Together, we will make the world a better place for women, families, and every citizen across the planet.

Ron Weisen (third from left) and other members of the National Volunteer Committee for the Sierra Club Global Population and Environment Program stand with Kim Lovell (sixth from left), the program's director.

By Ron Weisen, National Volunteer Committee Chair, Sierra Club Global Population and Environment Program

This is my last Father’s Day as just a father.

My daughter is expecting her first child, and by next year, I’ll be Grandpa, too. It’s one of those moments that makes you take stock, think about the future. Think about what really matters.

Right now, I’m thinking about what kind of world we’re leaving my daughter, and her child. My daughter grew up blessed, as did I, to live in a country where we have access to clean water, health care, education. A country where more and more women are empowered to make their own choices about when to become parents, knowing that they’ll be able to raise healthy, happy children.

Not all women are so lucky. Several years ago, as part of my volunteer work with the Sierra Club, I visited a small village in Madagascar. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life. The entire village turned out to meet us – men gathered under one tree, women sitting under another, as eager as we were to make new friends.

By Naomi Brodkey, Program Assistant, Global Population and Environment Program

While moms in America are celebrated this Mother’s Day weekend, we should take time to recognize how climate disruption is making mothers' jobs much harder everywhere.

In many parts of the world, women continue to fill traditional roles as mothers and caregivers. They are often the first to rise to collect water and firewood, prepare food, and care for young children, but these already strenuous tasks are becoming ever more daunting due to unanticipated and continued climate disruption. In the 2009 United Nation’s Population Fund (UNFPA) “State of the World Population” publication, Leucadia, a rural Bolivian woman, tells of the dried streams from the Huayna Potosi glacier and the hours she now spends collecting water to prepare food and irrigate crops. For many, securing these resources is not just a struggle, but a fight. At a presentation about his newest book this week in Washington, D.C., author and doctor Paul Farmer quoted a Haitian woman who spoke of her daily struggle for survival as a fight to collect food, wood and water – for her 5 children.

The realities of climate disruption are well documented, as are the disproportionate effects that it has on women. United Nations WomenWatch’s “Women, Gender Equality and Climate Change” states, “The effects of climate change, including drought, uncertain rainfall and deforestation, make it harder to secure … resources. By comparison with men in poor countries, women face historical disadvantages, which include limited access to decision-making and economic assets that compound the challenges of climate change.” The unreliability of resources forces women like Leucadia to wake up even earlier and walk even further from home, spending more time collecting water and fuel – tasks which already comprise about 26 percent of their waking hours – rather than spending time with their children at home.

A health extension worker outside Delhi, India teaches a group of villagers about the benefits of birth spacing. (Photo: Kim Lovell, Sierra Club)

By Kim Lovell, Program Director, Sierra Club Global Population & the Environment Program

As Earth Month comes to a close and we send off the last few packets of activist swag, it’s fitting that our stack of factsheets on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is rapidly dwindling. We are fast approaching the 2015 deadline to achieve these eight indicators of global poverty reduction and development gains, and the D.C. and international communities are looking back to gauge our success.

It's encouraging to see enormous progress in meeting some of these goals: we've halved the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day, bolstered enrollment in primary education in the developing world, and increased access to lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide. Yet the goal of achieving universal access to reproductive health (MDG 5a) has seen the smallest amount of progress.

Global Population Program Director Kim Lovell (third from left) with Sierra Club volunteers Virginia Phelps, Karen Gaia Pitts, and Chuck Knutson at the Chico Sustainability Conference

By Kim Lovell, Sierra Club Global Population & the Environment Program Director

As the world celebrates International Women's Day today with tweet-a-thons, film screenings, and high-profile speaking events, I am celebrating at the Chico Sustainability Conference at California State University, Chico, with a small group of committed Sierra Club volunteers. Nestled between panels on clean energy, green gardening, water pollution, and composting, we are making the case for an investment with profound impacts on the sustainability of communities, environments, and the people who depend on them—an investment in women.

In most parts of the world, women serve as a family's primary resource manager, responsible for the procurement of food, water, and other resources to keep a household running and ensure that children are healthy and fed. Given this responsibility, women contribute to the health of the land and community around them; thus, risks to the environment, like those stemming from climate disruption, affect women disproportionately. Investing in the health, education, and livelihoods of women not only helps them to thrive in a changing environment, it empowers women to help solve global crises like resource stress and climate disruption.

One investment we're highlighting at the conference today is voluntary family planning. There are 222 million women in the world who want to plan their family size but are not currently using a modern method of contraception, either because these forms of contraception are inaccessible or too expensive. Eliminating the barriers to this important health intervention by making contraception more accessible and affordable has far-reaching benefits. Women who are able to make their own decisions about family size have an easier time acquiring what's needed for a healthy, thriving family, and are better able to help manage a community's resources. And when aggregated, the broader effect of increased availability of resources for family planning decreases carbon pollution and helps slow the worsening climate crisis that affects women and their families.

The Sierra Club volunteers I'm speaking with today have unlocked the secret to a more sustainable world, and they're working tirelessly to spread that message wherever possible. The health of our families, communities, and planet are intricately tied, and investing in women is a critical step to ensuring the sustainability of all three. This International Women's Day, I'm proud to be putting women at the center of discussions regarding health, the environment, and the future of our planet. It's a spot they've certainly earned.