Submission: "Women, Girls and the Right to a Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment"

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, Dr. David Boyd, is preparing a report on “Women, Girls and the Right to a Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment,” a right recognized in 2021 by UN Human Rights Council Resolution 48/13. For that purpose, he issued a call for inputs on the topic from States, rightsholders, and other stakeholders through responses to a questionnaire.

Akar Foundation (Indonesia), the Federation of Native Communities of Ucayali and Tributaries, the Federation of Indigenous Kechwa Peoples of Bajo Huallaga San Martín, the Federation of Indigenous Kechua Chazuta Amazonian Peoples, the Wapichan Wiizi Women’s Movement, South Rupununi Council and the Forest Peoples Programme, prepared the following submission to inform the Special Rapporteur’s analysis and contribute to his report, to be presented to the Human Rights Council in March 2023.

Read the full submission here

The aim of this submission is to highlight the reciprocal and mutually reinforcing relationship between indigenous women’s and girls’ rights and a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, affirming: Indigenous and forest-based women and girls depend on clean, sustainable, and healthy environments to realise their rights guaranteed in international law, including UNDRIP, and the realisation of Indigenous peoples’ collective rights contributes to sustaining clean and healthy environments. This link is illustrated through experiences and testimonies from FPPs partner organisations. Recognizing these linkages is particularly important for Indigenous women and girls, who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination on the basis of their identities as members of indigenous peoples, and as woman, as well as often on class, racial, and other lines.

Sustaining clean and healthy environments is at the core of indigenous peoples’ cultural practices, cosmologies, spiritualities, and identities. As this submission shows, securing indigenous peoples collective land rights and supporting Indigenous peoples to manage their land and territories, in ways that are self-determined and culturally-rooted, reinforces, and is reinforced by, the right of women and girls to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.