In many parts of the world, it is hard for children from poorer families to go to school. This limits their job prospects when they get older, meaning they are more likely to stay poor, and less likely to be able to send their children to school . And so the cycle goes on: lack of education traps people in poverty .
On the flipside, education can help people escape poverty because better educated people can access better paid jobs .
In Sub-Saharan Africa, home to more than half of the world’s poorest people , each additional year of education makes a large difference to people’s earning prospects .
通過增加收入，教育可以幫助人們及其家庭擺脫貧困。
女孩們的教育
Education empowers people; by understanding the world around us we can have more control over our own lives . Ensuring that all children get access to high quality education is an important goal but, too often, girls are being left behind .
In Sub-Saharan Africa, women have, on average, 18% fewer years of education than men .
Take a look at this map. It shows the average number of years of schooling for boys and girls in different countries in Africa (2010) .
非洲受教育年限的性別差距
As well as reducing gender inequality, losing this gender gap in schooling can benefit the environment by reducing population growth .
Educating girls consistently leads to women, on average, having fewer children :
婦女的受教育程度與生育率
Educated women have better career prospects and often choose to use family planning methods to delay having children, allowing them to pursue their careers .
Furthermore, with better education women make better health choices for themselves and their children, such as choosing to leave longer gaps between births . This leads to lower child death rates . As death rates fall, women tend to have fewer children as they no longer expect to lose their children early in life .
這對氣候變化意味著什麼？
Educating women slows a country’s population growth . This means that, in the future, its population will be smaller than it would have been if the population growth rate had remained high. So, can we assume that the country’s total emissions fall?
Often it’s not quite that simple because several changes happen at once. Higher education is also linked to economic growth of countries , so it is likely that, as the population growth rate falls, the emissions produced per person will rise . This means that the total emissions produced by the country will probably rise too.
Crucially, however, the rise in emissions will be smaller than if the country had maintained its high population growth rate and become richer at the same time .
Take a look at this highly simplified diagram:
人口增長與排放
By providing education for girls in low- and lower-middle-income countries, the subsequent fall in population growth could prevent 51.48 Gt of emissions (CO₂eq) by 2050 ! That’s 93% of the total greenhouse gas emissions (CO₂eq) in 2018 .
And it gets better: educating girls is a surprisingly cheap and highly effective way of fighting climate change !
As shown by the plot below, girls’ education is cheaper than all these emissions reduction strategies except adding insulation to existing residential buildings .
Adding insulation to existing homes ends up saving money because they decrease the amount spent on energy bills in cold countries .
This is how a sample of 1500 Germans responded to that question , alongside the true CO₂ emission reductions from each action . How did you do?
人們認為有效的東西與真正有效的東西
If people only knew these facts, they could know how best to decrease their personal emissions .
Finally, countries with a poorer public understanding of climate change are less likely to adopt policies to address it .
This is because the long-term measures needed to stop climate change can have short-term disadvantages, such as being expensive . Politicians fear that these short-term disadvantages will make them unpopular with their voters and climate laws are less likely to be passed before elections for this reason .
We cannot say for sure that better public understanding of climate change encourages stronger climate policies. There is evidence, however, that education strengthens democracy and it is possible that education about climate change could help voters see the importance of strong policies and vote for candidates that will implement them.
：讓我們看看原因。
