One of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history took place in 2004. Although precise casualty figures will never be known, the Boxing Day Tsunami is believed to have killed up to 280,000 people across 14 countries.C
What many people do not know is that the majority of those killed were women: 80 percent of fatalities in Indonesia, 73 percent in Southern India, and 65 percent in Sri Lanka. While many men from coastal areas had moved to urban centres to find work, more women stayed behind to raise families and earn livelihoods - often from unloading fish from boats. Tragically, few of these women could swim or climb trees to escape the engulfing waters.
The Boxing Day Tsunami is a stark example of how women from lower socio-economic groups suffer disproportionately from negative environmental impacts. These impacts can come in the form of disasters - like the 2004 tsunami – or environmental crimes. Electric and electronic waste recycling is just one example of where breaches in environmental legislation disproportionately affect women by posing significant harm and risks to their health directly, and through the polluted environments in which they and their families live.
The town of Guiyu in China’s Guangdong Province was once the e-waste capital of the world. According to figures cited by Bloomberg, Guiyu processed over 1.6 million metric tons of e-waste annually, with extraction of precious metals, plastics and other reusable parts earning up to US$800 million a year. Now a boarded-up ghost town, it’s hard to imagine that around 3,000 workshops used to operate here, employing mostly rural migrants – often women and children – to dismantle electronic equipment by hand.
Thanks to China’s ‘war on pollution’ these operations in Guiyu were eventually shut down at the end of 2015 after the Chinese government – which is a party to the Basel Convention – ordered all remaining workshops to move to a newly built industrial park or face power cuts and prosecution. This convention – to which UN Environment provides secretariat support – is an international treaty designed to reduce the movement of hazardous waste between nations, and specifically to prevent the transfer of hazardous waste from developed to less developed countries.
In 1989, when the convention was adopted, far less was known about the impact of informal recycling facilities on the health of women and children. Since then, multiple studies have revealed the scale of the threat. Several health studies outlined in UN Environment’s Waste Crime Rapid Assessment Report revealed surges in cases of leukaemia in children in Guiyu and a high incidence of skin damage, headaches, vertigo, nausea, chronic gastritis, and gastric and duodenal ulcers. The studies also found that Guyiu children had higher-than-average levels of lead in their blood and that about 80 percent of Guyiu children suffered from respiratory diseases. Toxins in electronic equipment also leaked into the soil and water from landfills and into the air through the burning of waste. These toxins accumulated in the food chain, especially in animal tissue but also in plants growing in the area.
A 2015 study by the United Nations University put the global total of e-waste at 42 million tons in 2014, with only around 6 million tons recycled by licensed processors. That left around 36 million tons to be processed informally, threatening the health of hundreds of thousands of women and children and causing long-term environmental damage through heavy metals pollution in towns like Guiyu.
Gender and human rights is a relatively new and emerging issue for many organizations working on environmental, which is why there is a need for more systemic anaClysis and research that can explain the drivers, involvement and consequences of environmental crime from a gender perspective. As part of UN Environment’s long-standing commitment to gender equality and human rights, we have taken strides to identify the economic drivers of gender inequality and to better understand the role of men and women in environmental crime chains, as well as the comparative advantages of increasing representation of female enforcement officers to address corruption.
One example is the recent Asian Regional Partners Forum on Combating Environmental Crime held in Bangkok, which focused on human rights and gender in environmental crime. UN Environment and several organisations – including INTERPOL, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, customs organisations, Traffic, USAID Wildlife Asia, and BAN Toxics – agreed to strengthen collaboration on the development and distribution of learning and advocacy materials on gender and environmental crimes and the joint training of customs officials.
About UN Environment
UN Environment as the leading global environmental authority sets the global environmental agenda and promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development. For over 40 years, UN Environment has been supporting countries to promote smart environmental laws, policies, and strengthen institutional frameworks. UN Environment also builds capacities of judiciaries, customs officers and prosecutors other legal stakeholders at global, regional and national levels.
For more information:
Niamh Brannigan, Communications and Information Management Officer, niamh.brannigan [at] unep.org
