Warsaw: India has been rated as a weakest performer in the environment and gender index (EGI), a first ever international index deve-loped to measure gender equality and women’s empowerment in the environmental arena.
Countries like Iceland and South Africa are among the strongest performers as they have participation of women in international panels, in-country policy meets, agriculture and land ownership compared to India.
Releasing the EGI on Tuesday at the UN climate change summit in Warsaw, Lorena Aguilar Revelo, Global senior gender advisor of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said gender index was finalised after studying gender participation in 72 countries.
“The countries which have very good growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) do not perform well in case of gender issues. For instance, the US had the highest performance on percentage of women without anemia, and lower performance – equal to Greece and Bangladesh — on women in policy-making positions.”
She pointed out that implementation of global international agreements on gender and environment was lacking in most countries.
The global average for women’s participation in inter-governmental negotiations on climate change, biodiversity, and desertification has peaked at 36 per cent,” she added. Speaking to DC she said, “We learnt that information about women’s role and access in environment-related sectors is not collected and reported in many countries including India.”
