This is the seventh in an ongoing series illustrating the relationship of Drawdown strategies to landscape architecture. For context, read the initial post here.

A segment of Drawdown solutions focus on a topic that is not directly about landscape architecture, while perhaps transcending disciplinary boundaries, and literally being one of the most important things to life. To being human. To our future. The connection how empowering Women & Girls, which in this context includes Education (#6), Family Planning (#7), and Women Smallholders in relation to agriculture (#62) are all strategies in the Drawdown book, and it doesn’t take a leap to understand why information and realignment of power is key, and may actually be the key, to successfully reversing global warming.

I’ll leave this one short, and leave it to this great TED Talk from Katherine Wilkinson, part of TEDWomen2018, who does a way better job of discussing this than anyone else I’ve seen.

The summary: “If we really want to address climate change, we need to make gender equity a reality, says writer and environmentalist Katharine Wilkinson. As part of Project Drawdown, Wilkinson has helped scour humanity’s wisdom for solutions to draw down heat-trapping, climate-changing emissions: obvious things like renewable energy and sustainable diets and not so obvious ones, like the education and empowerment of women. In this informative, bold talk, she shares three key ways that equity for women and girls can help stop global warming. “Drawing down emissions depends on rising up,” Wilkinson says.”

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HEADER: Image via Drawdown, photo credit Hugh Sitton