Weathering Change takes us to Ethiopia, Nepal and Peru to hear the stories of women as they struggle to care for their families, while enduring crop failures and water scarcity. The film shows how women and families are already adapting to the climate change challenges that threaten their health and their livelihoods.

Weathering Change documents how family planning, girls’ education, sustainable agriculture and environmental conservation are part of the solution. As the world’s population hits 7 billion in 2011, the film calls for expanding access to contraception and empowering women to help families and communities adapt to the effects of climate change.

“A woman’s life is hard, and climate change is making it harder,” says Aregash Ayele, an Ethiopian woman featured in the film. Aregash is 32 years old and lives with her six children in a small farming community in the Gedeo Zone of Ethiopia.

“Because of changing rainfall patterns, crop yields are suffering, and the family doesn’t have enough food for everybody. My father used to get 500 to 600 kilos per harvest, but now we can barely get 100. Even though the land is green, it’s not fruitful. It has never been like this.”

As a result, Aregash’s husband is forced to work other land hours away from home. Aregash is left to manage the house, look after the children, and farm the existing land on her own. “The only way we can raise our kids is from the land. If the land fails to produce, there isn’t enough to feed them,” she says.

Aregash spends some of her time volunteering at the local health clinic, where she distributes food aid and teaches other mothers about how to prevent pregnancy.

“I feed hungry children and teach family planning to their parents,” she says. “When they use contraception and space births every three to five years, the mothers get stronger. And their children also grow up with the needed strength and care. Due to the change in our climate, mothers have understood that spacing their children is in their own best interest.”

Women and Climate Change

Aregash’s story is not unusual. Women living in poverty bear a disproportionate burden of climate change consequences. In many countries, disparities resulting from women’s roles within family and community structures are aggravated by the effects of climate change. Unequal access to education, economic opportunities, land ownership, and health care can undermine women’s well-being and the prospects for a better future for their children and communities.

And yet, women are important agents of change in addressing climate change challenges. In their roles as providers of food, water and fuel, women are instrumental in determining a family’s ability to survive and effectively cope with the impacts of climate change. Many women play important roles as community leaders, natural resource managers, and caregivers. They possess knowledge and experience that are critical in designing effective climate change adaptation strategies.

Adapting to Climate Change

Climate change has historically been driven by a build-up of greenhouse gases generated mostly by the industrialized world. The consequences of unabated climate change affect everyone, though some are more affected, and less able to cope with the effects than others.

In many of the poorest areas of the world, shifting temperature and precipitation patterns are already affecting agricultural production and making scarce water supplies even more difficult to manage. The impacts of climate change contribute to decisions to migrate as people seek safer, more stable living conditions. The world’s growing population, which will surpass 7 billion people on October 31, 2011, is likely to magnify these challenges. The majority of expected global population growth will occur in some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries.

Adapting to the impacts of climate change requires a variety of responses, including policies to improve management of climate-related risks, enhancing individuals’ and communities’ ability to cope with a changing environment, and easing pressure on resources.

Reproductive Health and Resilience

Access to quality reproductive health and family planning services strengthens women’s capacity to adapt to climate change and serve as leaders in their communities. Giving women and men the tools to determine family size can improve socio-economic and health status of women and their families.

A woman’s ability to choose to delay, limit, and space pregnancies increases her prospects for completing school, and accessing greater economic opportunities. Meeting the existing global demand for family planning will also reduce unintended pregnancies. This will save women’s lives, enhance the well-being of families, and reduce pressures related to rapidly growing population-- all of which are essential to increasing resilience in the face of a changing climate. Currently, more than 200 million women in developing countries want to avoid pregnancy, but lack modern contraception. In a number of nations, one-third or more of married women have a need for these critical services.

Call to Action

The U.S. Government should support:

• Increased investment in international reproductive health and family planning to improve the health and well-being of women and families around the world, while also reducing vulnerability to climate change impacts.

• Robust funding for international climate change efforts, including a strong emphasis on adaptation.

• An international climate adaptation strategy that integrates the health and development needs and priorities of most vulnerable populations, including women, and promotes access to reproductive health and family planning, girls education, and women’s empowerment.

For more information, visit populationactioninternational.org.

Population Action International (PAI) advocates for women and families to have access to contraception in order to improve their health, reduce poverty and protect their environment.

Nathan Golon and MediaStorm were commissioned by PAI to create a short film that would document how climate change is impacting the lives of women around the world. Women do the majority of agricultural work globally and are tasked with collecting natural resources such as water and fuel, so they are often the first to feel the impacts of climate change. In many societies, women face grievous hardships simply because of their gender, and it was our goal to explore how they are coping with the additional burden of climate change.

The film was shot by Nathan Golon in Nepal, Peru, and Ethiopia, and focuses on the lives of four women and the role adaptation strategies such as education, migration, women's empowerment, and access to family planning play in helping them adjust to changes in their natural environments.

The primary challenge was to tell a complicated global story in a concise, compelling format. Climate change is an issue that manifests itself in various forms, including melting glaciers, crop failures, urbanization, and dwindling water supplies. In one short film, we wanted to travel around the world to highlight these events in both cities and remote rural locations, which meant dealing with logistical challenges around every corner, from snow squalls in the Andes to traffic jams in Kathmandu.

While science has clearly shown that our climate is changing, we wanted to focus on how those changes are impacting individual families. In order to do this, we needed to spend significant time with women living in some of the most vulnerable locations on the planet; mountain glaciers, sprawling urban slums, and rural villages that depend on agriculture to feed growing populations. Finding subjects who could articulate their experiences in a way that would allow viewers to connect with them on a personal level, to see reflections of their own lives in the stories, would be key.

So that Director of Photography and Producer Nathan Golon could focus on the story, we largely depended on local segment producers to help us navigate each location. With their knowledge of language, customs, and geography, producers Zeresenay Mehari, Victoria Macchi, and Dhruba Basnet were an invaluable asset to this production.

Because climate change has been a highly politicized issue, we chose to bypass "talking head" experts and decided to focus entirely on the stories of women who confront the realities of a changing climate on a daily basis, often with their survival hanging in the balance. Our local producers allowed us to quickly connect with our subjects, which was an absolute priority during ten-day shoots that often included several locations hundreds of miles apart.

These women's stories were both intimate and informative, and underscored the fact that many of their problems — and solutions — are similar despite the distance that separates them.

Weathering Change has been translated into 7 different languages and shown to decision makers and stakeholders here in Washington, DC and around the world, including at the International Family Planning Conference in Dakar, Senegal, and COP17 in Durban, South Africa. By taking these women’s stories to policymakers, we are actively working to highlight the linkages between women’s health and climate change while also articulating the need for strengthened investment in maternal and child health, education, and women empowerment.

Furthermore, by licensing the MediaStorm Player to present and distribute the project, Population Action International has also been able to showcase the project in a way that allows it to reach as many people as possible with as much context as possible, thanks to the multi-language subtitles, surrounding metadata, and its embedding & sharing capabilities.

Population Action International advocates for women and families to have access to contraception in order to improve their health, reduce poverty and protect their environment. Our research and advocacy strengthen U.S. and international assistance for family planning. We work with local and national leaders in developing countries to improve their reproductive health care programs and policies. PAI shows how these programs are critical to global concerns, such as preventing HIV, combating the effects of environmental degradation and climate change, and strengthening national security.