Both these issues need to be tackled, urgently. While there is little the UK scan do in Afghanistan after the mighty cock
But minimising climate change and the very real effects it’s having on some of the world’s poorest as ‘plastics and dolphins’ is a terrible way to try to draw attention to the issue.
The Girl Summit in 2014 was a reasonable starting point but didn’t do nearly enough and most importantly didn’t become a regular thing. The UN does not put enough resources into this, and summits and charters tend to be one offs rather than getting sustained political pressure.
No life is worth more or less than another. Minimising the current and future death and suffering of thousands because you see the suffering of others as more deserving of attention is frankly abhorrent.
The people suffering extreme hunger in Madagascar as a result of a catastrophic drought that scientists have directly linked to climate change are not ‘first world’ or ‘dolphins’. They are extremely poor men, women and children.
The people in low-lying island nations who are seeing their home, livelihoods and basic subsistence destroyed due to inundation and salinification of arable lands and the saline contamination of their groundwater supplies because of sea level rise aren’t in ‘the first world’.
The millions in Bangladesh who are at severe risk from climate impacts aren’t in ‘the first world’.
The poorer and hungrier and more desperate people are, the less likely girls are to be educated and respected, and the more likely they are to be at risk.
Economic development and education have long been a path out of some of the direst breeding grounds for violence against women and girls. Climate change puts that development and the education it pays for at risk. The more desperate people are, the more likely they are to do desperate and appalling things that are either enabled or ignored by despicable regimes.