It’s a brand new year and the perfect opportunity for some impactful new year’s resolutions! As far as new year’s resolutions go, saving the world might sound quite ambitious, but in need of saving it is.

In November last year, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) published an alarming report, showing that greenhouse gas emissions are at their highest levels ever. “The window of opportunity for action to stop climate change is almost shut”, it read.

Fortunately, a list of science-backed potential solutions to climate change does exist.

Project Drawdown is an initiative that aims to gather and facilitate “a broad coalition of researchers, scientists, graduate students, PhDs, post-docs, policy makers, business leaders and activists to assemble and present the best available information on climate solutions in order to describe their beneficial financial, social and environmental impact over the next thirty years.”

The Project has identified 80 solutions that can help address climate change — and ranked them in order of impact on the reduction of emissions.

Women and girl’s education ranks sixth. Combine it with the impact of better family planning (a well-documented outcome of better education for women) — and it becomes the highest ranking solution.

One of the key forces driving climate change and emissions is rapid population growth. Africa, in particular, is in the midst of an unprecedented population boom — with its population expected to rival that of China by 2100.

According to studies by the United Nations and the Global Partnership for Education — women with better access to education marry later and have fewer children. The potential is there for a significant slowing in population growth.

In addition, in Africa in particular, women are directly responsible for the management of many natural resources, such as water and land. The more educated women are, the more empowered they are to manage those resources in a sustainable way, and to successfully deal with the impacts of climate change.

The UN and Project Drawdown estimate that universal access to education could result in a 59.6 gigatons of emissions reduction by 2050.

So if you’re looking for a worthy and impactful cause to support in 2019, as part of your new year’s resolutions, please consider supporting Women’s Education.

Students at the Akilah Institute

At the Akilah Institute, we educate Africa’s future female leaders to solve the world’s most pressing problems through a lens of sustainability and opportunity. Currently, we have almost 1,000 students enrolled at our campus in Kigali, Rwanda.

If you’d like to get involved, please reach out to us here, send us an email to info@akilahinstitute.org or connect with us on social media.

If you’d like to make a donation, please follow the link below. The planet thanks you!