Tangelic Talks – Episode 02
How Women Are Leading the Fight for Climate Justice. Interview with Dr. Spitzer on Tangelic Talks
6 minutes to read
In this episode of Tangelic Talks, we sit down with Dr. Peg Spitzer—author, climate activist, and advocate for gender equity—to explore the vital role of women in the fight against climate change. Dr. Spitzer shares powerful insights from her work and research, highlighting how women in the Global South are leading the charge against environmental degradation while confronting systemic inequalities.
The Nexus of Gender and Climate Change
Dr. Spitzer outlines the critical intersection of gender and climate change, emphasizing that women in developing regions are disproportionately affected by climate crises. Their traditional roles in water collection, food production, and caregiving put them on the front lines of climate impacts such as droughts, floods, and resource scarcity.
However, Dr. Spitzer’s work demonstrates that women’s unique perspectives and roles in their communities also make them powerful agents of change. “Women have the resilience and knowledge to implement localized, impactful solutions,” she explains.
Empowering Women Through Gender-Just Solutions
Dr. Spitzer’s book, Empowering Female Climate Change Activists in the Global South, explores grassroots innovations led by women. From her time researching irrigation technologies in Gujarat, India, to examining solar-powered cooking initiatives in Africa, Dr. Spitzer has seen firsthand how empowering women can transform entire communities. She highlights several gender-just solutions:
Bungaroo Technology in Gujarat: This irrigation solution grants women control over water resources, bypassing traditional land-ownership barriers.
Mealworm Farming in Guatemala: Women-led micro-enterprises cultivate mealworms as a sustainable protein source, addressing food insecurity caused by climate change.
Solar Battery Building in Turkey’s Refugee Camps: Women learn to assemble and sell solar batteries, creating both sustainable energy solutions and economic opportunities.
The Role of Transnational Advocacy
Transnational advocacy is essential for scaling these local solutions. By connecting women-led projects across borders, communities can share knowledge and resources to address common challenges. Dr. Spitzer emphasizes the importance of platforms like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where gender-just climate solutions are recognized and celebrated through initiatives like the Women and Gender Constituency Awards.
Challenges and Opportunities
While women’s leadership is vital, systemic barriers often hinder progress. In many patriarchal societies, women’s participation in decision-making remains limited. Dr. Spitzer notes that building confidence and community support is key: “You can’t just put women in charge overnight. It takes time, training, and trust-building to ensure long-term success.”
She also stresses the need for financial and technical support from the Global North, particularly in the form of loss-and-damage funds and capacity-building programs. “Richer nations bear responsibility not only for historical emissions but also for empowering those most affected to adapt and thrive,” she argues.
Thought Provoking Q&A Session with Dr. Spitzer
Absolutely. There’s a term for it. It’s called traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that people use to talk about the way in which we understand the world and we observe changes in the world. And I think that a lot of, again, indigenous communities or people who live in one area for a long time are able to see changes in nature and able to understand and appreciate things that are happening. This one project that I’m working on now is in Guatemala again, but it’s looking at the way in which people are cutting down trees, not thinking about what’s happening as a result of this. So there’s some human changes that need to occur. What they’re seeing is when you cut those tress down, it affects the wildlife, the ecosystem, and even temperature rise, because you don’t have the shade, which is significant too.
So I have an interesting project that I can tell you about in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s an oral history that we’re doing with Panina. And Panina is somebody who grew up in the urban slums in Mathare, slums right outside of Nairobi. But her family were originally farmers. And so there was this huge. Traditionally in migration, men come and the women and children stay back and cultivate the land and so forth but what what really happened is because of the drought conditions many of the families moved to the urban areas.
And so this is really getting to your point of urban versus rural. What Panina found was she developed two different approaches or solutions, I will say, for the problem. First was how to feed people. And so she introduced a hydroponic farming in these, what are just sheets, to try to figure out how to feed people, and give them healthy food. And again, as I mentioned before, it wasn’t a cakewalk, if you will. There were drug addicts and other people that were coming and ripping up the farming thing. So she was constantly working on that and had to locate the farming outside, directly outside of the urban slum. But then the other issue that she mentioned is the fact that women are increasingly vulnerable to domestic violence and there are very high rates of pregnancies in these small areas. So she developed Safe Spaces for them, which is a center that helps educate women.
So it was two part solution. It was Awesome Blossoms, which was hydroponic farming, and then the Safe Spaces to help alleviate the problems that go along with that. In this case we can see both the differences between urban and rural, and how they become overlapping in many ways as well.
So much. An example in the book is from Tunisia in which a woman was developing projects in Tunisia and really focusing on young people. And the idea was to educate and raise awareness of environmental challenges that are really prominent while countering unstable political leadership. And I think this shows why it’s really important to educate young people and educating them to become environmental defenders in the face of such unstable leadership.If you don’t have that, if you don’t cultivate that, then you’re really missing out on trying to figure out how to deal with the future.
I think one of the things is that in all societies it seems to me, there are characteristics that are considered feminine and characteristics that are considered masculine. And we don’t get away from that too much, but there’s a spectrum of zero to a hundred percent on either side. And we all fall somewhere within the spectrum. And so I think that the combative aspect of it is just trying to understand how we don’t want to characterize one or the other, but really combining the best of both and edging the needle, I think, closer to the feminine characteristics because they add things that are currently missing in our system. And that is developing, building consensus is a really big sort of if you will, feminine characteristic that can be embraced by all sorts of people.
Well, listening is really, really important. In fact, one of the things that we often talk about in our oral histories is we want to have people tell their stories. And what I’d like to emphasise is that, it’s not only telling the stories, it’s listening to the stories. And that’s the thing that we really have to focus on as well. by trying to adopt more of a female-centered approach, if you will, with story listening and really consensus building and figuring out and communicating the practical aspects of, well, in my case farming practices.
Dr. Peg Spitzer
Research Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York.

Peg Spitzer is an interdisciplinary scholar and Research Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota, and master’s and doctoral degrees from American University in Washington, DC in International Relations with a specialty in the modernization of sciences and technology in the developing world. She tackles structural gender norms to empower women to speak up for their rights. Peg collaborates with innovators and entrepreneurs to conduct oral histories that uplift those who experience environmental degradation in their communities. She has developed two digital oral history projects, one on Women in US–Asian relations and the other on the implementation of a women-led irrigation technology in India, titled Mirroring Hope.
Prior to her work in climate change, Peg wrote a series of short biographies on women leaders in local communities; and served as a program consultant, with a specialty in Asian and Asian American studies, in Washington, DC for the Kluge Center for International Scholars (Library of Congress), Freer and Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the East-West Center. Her book, Empowering Female Climate Change Activists in the Global South: The Path Toward Environmental Social Justice, was published in 2023.