Initiatives in feminism, environmentalism and action.(Cover Story)

Today, many women's groups around the world are preparing for the fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, which will take place in Beijing, China in September 1995. By then, it will have been ten years since the end of the UN Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, which produced The Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women to the Year 2000. Although much work remains to be done in ensuring that women become full participants in environmental policy making on a local, national and global level there have been some important initiatives and accomplishments to date. The following are some examples.

Women's Environment and Development

Organization (WEDO)

Organizations such as the Women's Environment and Development Organization, which includes women from all continents, continue actions to promote women's leadership in policy making. WEDO succeeded in forcing a women's agenda at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 in Brazil where none would have otherwise existed. Network members pressured their respective countries to honour the Decade for Women resolutions they had signed in Nairobi in 1985.

As part of its strategy to influence the UNCED agenda, WEDO held the Worldwide Women's Congress for a Healthy Planet in November 1991 in Miami, Florida, declaring that:

Women - more than half the world's population - must have an equal say when the fate of the planet is being decided ... the people of this world are confronting evidence that all issues of environment, development, population growth and equity are interrelated, that all life is interdependent. Finding solutions requires co-operation, and urgently, the full participation of women. Inclusion of women as policy makers is the first step to bring earth's political, economic, social and spiritual systems into healthy balance. …