Ndiilokelwa Nthengwe
Environmental justice is a phenomenon that is seldom understood, especially when we consider our personal level of commitment to address climate and environmental issues. Lost in the quagmire of interpreting concepts and having to translate them into tangible, actionable motives is proving to be an arduous feat on matters concerning climate change and environmental justice. It doesn’t get easier when we consider the environment and climate as an aloof, abstract, sometimes even pie in the sky area nobody wants to focus on, or has enough patience to. Yet, environmental issues continue to worsen, despite our wilful ignorance.
“Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, colour, national origin or income, with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies,” as defined by ClientEarth, an environmental law charity. This definition is further buttressed by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, when she says that climate justice “insists on a shift from a discourse on greenhouse gases and melting ice caps into a civil rights movement with the people and communities most vulnerable to climate impacts at its heart.” In fact, a broader definition of ‘environment ‘is the surroundings or conditions in which a person lives. By this definition, the environment would include your home, place of work, schools. These are the places where you spend your time, and they play a big role in your overall health, happiness and well-being.
In light of the above, what do these definitions mean in our local context, and how has Namibia defined it for herself to adequately implement measures which will ensure that reproductive justice, inter alia, is realised through climate justice and progressive environmental policies? More importantly, what have been the long-term impacts of climate change on reproductive justice and the communities that would otherwise be most affected? When we begin to link the overarching goal and meaning of reproductive justice, which is in simple language the right to parent, the right not to parent and the right to parent in a safe and healthy environment, then we need not treat the topic of environmental justice and climate change as a Western, Global North cause but as a serious, irrefutable and inescapable global and local threat to social development and human existence as we know it.
A written submission by SOUL, ‘Saving Okavango’s Unique Life’, to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) for the 82nd session, succinctly and unequivocally summarises the serious environmental implications that would arise as a result of gas and oil exploration in the Kavango East and Kavango West of Namibia. This comes after the announcement that a Canadian oil and gas company, ReconAfrica, would be drilling in the north-eastern parts of the country for oil and gas, all fossil fuels which contribute to greenhouse emissions that exacerbate climate change. Even more alarmingly, beyond the obvious environmental risks and damage it poses, is the impact it would have on women and children who would disproportionately be affected due to existing economic and social conditions. The submission reads, “...the development of oil and gas in the Kavango region—home to critical freshwater sources on which numerous Indigenous Peoples and local communities depend, in a semi-arid, drought-prone country—jeopardises the rights of rural women and girls in the affected communities, including the rights to water, health and livelihood, under CEDAW Articles 12 and 14.”
In the framework of the above definition of an environment, against the backdrop of reproductive justice, mostly women’s livelihoods and the right to parent in a safe environment would be at threat (as alluded to and confirmed in the submission). For example, the right to water and uncontaminated water would be undermined; with the Kavango East and West already being the least-developed regions in Namibia, and ‘much of Namibia’s water resources based on groundwater aquifers and to a lesser extent on water from the Kavango River’, the consequential and cascading impacts of oil and gas exploration would undermine even government’s efforts to attain gender parity.
Contaminated water as a result of oil and gas drilling would lead to health implications and inevitably, reproductive health risks. It jeopardises a person’s ability to have a healthy pregnancy (should they choose to carry a pregnancy to term), and there are chances of experiencing infertility, which certainly is an outside interference with the right to plan for a family in a safe and healthy environment. In addition, complications at birth and the costs thereof would economically strain a family as well as the government, particularly the local community of the Kavango Regions, who purport to have 42 clinics for a combined population of 223 352 inhabitants. What is even more alarming is that the Kavango Regions ‘had the fourth-highest probability at birth of not surviving to age 40’, according to the UNDP Human Poverty Index (HPI).
Surely, there are more examples on environmental threats which undermine reproductive justice beyond the oil and gas exploration case study, and a comprehensive assessment of wider impacts and examples are yet to be adequately advocated for and mainstreamed within existing environmental policies. Be that as it may, once again, intersectionality as a tenet in meaning and practice must be fully adopted by our government to demonstrate its political will and commitment to advancing gender equality through the prism of reproductive and climate justice.