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The top politicians who will gather in Copenhagen in December 2009 are faced with great expectations. Crucial decisions need
to be taken in order to handle and reduce climate changes which threaten to cause much suffering for large parts of the world’s
population.
The focus in encountering climate change has often been on technical development and research within the sciences. This is
undoubtedly necessary, but yet not enough. More research and focus are also needed on both how people are affected by climate
change and how they can contribute to stopping it.
Since the first UN Climate Change Conference, women's movement activists have pointed to the fact that climate changes are
not gender blind. Slightly simplified, it can be claimed that men to a larger degree than women contribute to climate change,
which, however, affects women to a larger degree than men. Naturally, the differences are based on unjust relationships not
only between women and men, but also between people of, for example, different educational backgrounds, income, age and ethnicity.
A focal issue has been the concept of adaptation, that is, how people are to accommodate their lifestyles to climate change.
A stronger focus needs to be directed onto the concept of mitigation, that is, how we can use various strategies in order
to reduce the effects of climate change.
But the real revolution will have arrived only when we are prepared to organise our societies in a way that does not cause
changes in the climate. To this end there is much to learn from people who are already living a sustainable life – both from
those who have made this deliberate choice and from those for whom there simply is no other alternative.
