Gender and energy. Other Dimensions of Sustainable Development

Access to Energy and Energy Poverty
Why is access to energy an important indicator of poverty? 
In the subject “Sustainability, Renewable Energies and Society” we analyze the use of energy throughout history. Energy is linked to development; without energy, it is simple: there would be no life. It is one of the basic needs of humanity and can be considered the currency of the universe. Sustainability is directly related to quality of life and to the possibility of accessing a more dignified life. The most serious poverty is energy poverty. How is it measured? For example, by access to a series of elements that complement our life: at home, you have a telephone, devices that support you, a blender, a washing machine, and electric light; if you live in a very hot climate you have a way to cool the environment, if you live in the cold you can heat yourself… Everything around quality of life has something to do with energy and lacking that kind of support makes you energetically poor, and that energy poverty, the lack of quality of life, becomes the worst of all. 
There are various groups in the world studying this through indicators; there are ways of defining these indexes that indicate energy poverty and there are ways of defining the situation of a country in this aspect, which is very important when it comes to adopting scientific and development policies that will make it possible to combat energy poverty. 


We have gone from considering poverty as the absence of resources for consumption to this more holistic view. Is this a paradigm shift? 
When we look at the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), some of them point to basic conditions for life; if you don’t eat, if you don’t have food, if you don’t have energy, if you don’t have water, there simply is no life. But we would like not only to survive but also for life to have a certain quality; this is when the SDGs appear, such as access to education: I not only want to survive, I want to be educated, I want to have good health, I want this dignified, quality and balanced life not to be differentiated among people. Equal opportunities must be sought, and all of this must happen within a governance framework; it is not enough to survive, it is about surviving in a dignified manner, with quality of life.

A very important issue is gender equality: poverty is closely related to gender. An anecdote: Gandhi was once introduced to a man of the lowest caste: “You are meeting the poorest man in India,” and Gandhi replied: “No, the poorest person in India is this gentleman’s wife.” In all these aspects women are still in a greater degree of difficulty, so the issue of gender equality also has a lot to do with quality of life.


The Women’s Summit and other meetings with a gender focus have changed the perspective on the SDGs. When did Women’s Summits begin to be held? Are they already part of international policies or they still lack recognition? 
Women’s Summits are realted to the issue of women’s participation in science. Gender issue is very broad, it has many edges and these summits do not necessarily focus on other fundamental points of it, instead, they focused on participation in science and arose when the European Community began to design economic support programs in science. A feminist movement that denounces the lack of support for women in this area appeared, and Portia, an Europe-based organization, took the lead in these actions that began spreading around the world. 

The first summit I attended was held in the United States; it was the first in North America. I was later part of the organization committee of one of these summits in Mexico City. Gender focus on SDGs was discussed in Korea. These summits have been multiplying around the world. In Portia’s website (https://portiaweb.org.uk/) you can find the memories of all of them; they have very interesting documents accessible there.

Summits always include workshops. In Mexico, there was a whole series of workshops for indigenous women who received scholarships from the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT, Spanish initials) at the time, and it was very interesting because many of these women had never been to Mexico City. It was a truly exciting and important event. These summits are all about gender in science. They have addressed the issue of the gender dimension in research. In social sciences, for example, everything must be differentiated and reported with gender data; in natural sciences, there are many medical topics where gender matters: gender dimension tells us that equality must prevail, but there are differences to be considered and these differences can enrich our research. 


How does gender perspective addresses sustainability? 
In Korea we took the UN document on the SDGs and rewrote it, incorporating the gender dimension in each point. Take any case you want; climate change, for example. Climate change is generating gender-differentiated impacts. Its impact on communities has to do with gender differences; likewise poverty, we can ask about gender differences relative to poverty because, indeed, women suffer more from poverty, they carry more of poverty’s burden in the family. Talking about education, are we educating girls well? Much of the women-in-science theme is focused on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and encouraging girls to choose scientific and technical careers, to study careers that are normally considered masculine. There is a whole movement there closely linked to sustainability because, at the same time that the 2030 Agenda and the 17 SDGs were written in 2015, at that very moment, February 11 was defined as the day of girls and women in science. This means that women and girls are crucial in the quest for sustainable development because the challenges we face cannot be met without involving and giving weight to half of society, that is, women. 

There has been a struggle for research calls to be equitable because the possibilities for women in science are not. With the gender dimension, it is requested that the calls explain how each research will support the gender issue. You may study, for example, planetary nebulae; it would seem that this has nothing to do with gender, but perhaps what becomes relevant is how I am going to transmit this knowledge to girls to motivate more of them to approach physics and astronomy. You can always give things a twist in which gender is included as a perspective.

My husband likes to tell an anecdote: he once bought my granddaughter a Meccano set; when it was being packaged, he mentioned who it was for and the saleswoman said, “This is a boy’s toy.” He replied: “I just want my granddaughter to be an engineer.” There were women in the paying line and they applauded him. Toys play an important role in children’s development. The famous Barbie dolls, for example, the ones which have handled the male and female stereotypes of the distant past, are now selling a series of science dolls, one of them based on the figure of Sara Gilbert, the Oxford academic behind the AstraZeneca vaccine… This is very important for many reasons; this is a woman scientist who is now in her fifties—women generally start research careers a little later because of family reasons—so the fact that a doll is a mature woman and a scientist is really a cultural shift. Toys are important, as are behaviors at school, and in the family; many times we have behavioral biases without realizing we have them because they are cultural issues. And it certainly has to do with sustainable development because it is based on equality; we want equal opportunities, and that makes gender issues closely related to sustainable development. 


How do you promote on a societal level what the STEM movement is doing, that girls and young women can choose careers that until recently had been seen as men’s careers (in some places they are still considered as such), while women are the ones taking care of others?
Services are a whole issue because they are very female-based. The pandemic has exacerbated this problem, which has been noted to have a more severe impact on young women. Girls who would have studied before, have stayed at home supporting their families. Women are always expected to assume the tasks of care and service. There are many studies on this, on the gender gap between women and men, and how it may still take a long time to close. We can do workshops for girls and motivate them; there’s a group called Pauta, in which I participate, that provides workshops to encourage girls to follow careers thought of as being for men only. Of course, this discrimination does not only affect girls but also boys because they also want to pursue careers that they are not allowed to because they “seem feminine.” We are seeking equal opportunities for both. All these science workshops should be for both genders. It is very important to focus on this issue also concerning sustainability. 

UNAM is doing a lot, it has many activities and a new gender coordination (the Coordination for Gender Equality, CIGU-UNAM, Spanish initials). There are more women in managerial positions. UNAM has very relevant work in the area of gender equality. 


Sustainability in Spanish
Translation into Spanish of the English terms “sustainability” and “sustainable” has produced two different words, sostenible and sustentable which have generated some debate on which one is correct. Is this a relevant discussion? 
There is a subtle difference between both Spanish words. We could use them as synonyms, many people do. English term is “sustainable”, which would seem to mean sustentable, but Spanish is a language with much more synonyms than English; we have two words that seem to mean the same thing. You hold (sostener) an argument that is already given, and you sustain (sustentar) it by giving more information. It is a subtlety, but it has to do with the definitions given by the Club of Rome, what Victor Urquidi did when working on sustainable development. He was the first Mexican to work on these issues; sustainable comes from that United Nations meeting, where the definition was given. When we speak of sustainable development, we speak above all, of inheritance, of the fact that we must protect the planet; we cannot “waste” it, because our children and grandchildren have no other; we must preserve it for them. 

The Club of Rome opened the discussion about preserving the planet, not only for those who will come after us but also for our fellows so that they can live well in this generation. Some people say that sostenible refers to future generations and sustentable also includes contemporary generations. It’s a very subtle thing, in general people use them more as synonyms.

At the Institute for Renewable Energies, all subjects are defined using sustentabilidad. There are subjects such as “Sustainability and Society,” “Sustainability and Energy,” and “Sustainability and Environment.” The SDGs use sostenibilidad. The challenges we face in reaching sustainable development are so great that discussing the word becomes irrelevant. I believe that they can be handled as synonyms, with a few subtleties in this regard.

Thinking about sustainable development goals in the 2030 Agenda, is progress being made to achieve the goals outlined seven years ago?, Are we going to be able to deliver? 
Of course not, but we have made progress in some areas. It is also true that the SDGs did not contemplate the pandemic or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These types of events inevitably destroy planning. The pandemic brought about a serious change. The war affects the use of renewable energy, which has continued to increase because you also have to use fuels that maybe you weren’t using anymore. These events are tremendously disruptive. The SDG document also includes specific targets that can be quantified. They are very ambitious; for example, the equality goal states that by 2030 there should be no poverty in the world. It is not going to be achieved, but it is very important, and I believe that in 2030 all these goals will be evaluated and we will plan again from there. 
The SDGs are a legacy of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to move from the MDGs to the SDGs, much had been learned and, in many ways, positive decisions were made based on what had been lost. I believe that in 2030 there will be a review; yes, there will be progress, but it is almost impossible to achieve all the goals.
Now, there is an important difference concerning climate change because climate change will not spare us: if we do not manage to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, human species will be in danger; that is a fact.
We must also refer to the Conferences of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and agreements such as the Paris Agreement. The COP has just passed in Scotland and now another one is coming up in Egypt, where a commitment is being made to control the temperature increase so that it does not rise more than 1.5 degrees because, if it rises more than that, it will be catastrophic. We already have changes that we cannot reverse, that is why in climate change we talk about mitigation, of course, but we also talk about adaptation, since there are things that we must adapt to because they are going to stay that way.
We have been successful in some issues; we have to talk about Mario Molina’s Chemistry Nobel Prize (1995), when he discovered that certain compounds were depleting ozone layer and that was how they could be controlled: by limiting aerosols, we were able to control the effect they were having on the ozone layer. There are things that we can do, things we know how to do and that we can fulfill, and I believe that this should be the goal: to have this understanding and to assume commitments.
But we need to assume that we must live differently: one of the SDGs contemplates responsible consumption, something that each one of us could do: we could all recycle, we could all reuse, so there are things that we can do, things that are in our hands. Other things depend on a broader scope, they are in politics and not in our hands.


What the situation of Mexico as a country? Have we met the objectives, are we working to reduce environmental degradation? 
The first thing we should ask for is for this analysis to be done because at this moment it is not being done. Of course, there are very important groups, such as the group that is looking at the SDGs at UNAM and all the research that the university is doing, but we do not have an official document from the government thet lets us know exactly where we are. It would be great if there was an analysis of how Mexico is doing concerning all the SDGs and if there were data. We know that many things are wrong and we do not have the precise data to be able to plan adequately. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI, Spanish initials) provides us with very reliable reports but, to include them in the topic of sustainability and the SDGs, it would be necessary to analyze all these data together. I would say that the problem now is that we don’t quite know where we are.

We have the issue of renewable energies, we have to move towards them, and we have a series of projects in this regard, but we do have to make the transition, with increasing enthusiasm, to be able to control carbon dioxide emissions.

 
Renewable energies
Could you mention some areas where renewable energies are growing?
One area where they are a total success is solar cells. Photovoltaic panels are based on a principle of quantum mechanics, the photovoltaic effect, which makes it possible to extract an electric current. The first cells were made for outer space because it was necessary to solve the problem of capturing energy without depending on Earth. People can’t even imagine how their lives are marked by things that were designed for space exploration; the list is huge, starting with Teflon. The first solar cells were made for outer space and were extremely expensive, but now the costs have dropped dramatically and there is a great variety of materials that can be used to make solar cells, organic cells, and even very thin cells that can be glued to roofs. There has been a change there: solar cells are spectacular and also allow what can be called a local and distributed solution because there are places where a cable will never reach, but instead, you can put your photovoltaic panels. The panels, if placed somewhere isolated, must be accompanied by a good storage system and batteries have also had a very important development in recent years as storage technology. Well, there is a solution with solar cells that is so simple and so easy to do—I have it in my house and so do many people: you put cells on your roof and you make an agreement with the Federal Commission of Electricity; you become part of the system and they put a device that measures electricity being fed into the grid in one direction during the day. Then, at night, when you use electricity, the device counts in the other direction, and in the end, you pay the difference: if you produced more electricity than you received, you are not getting paid (you are not an energy seller), but you are completing. So, if you haven’t spent, your bill comes for a ridiculous amount, basically the tax caused by being connected to the grid. Solar cells are an absolutely proven and technologically safe solution that is also affordable. If you make a solar cell farm you can produce a lot of electricity.

There is a government project to build a huge solar cell farm in the Sonora desert because we have a lot of land to do this. Some countries do not have as much solar energy and some do not have as much territory. We can do these kinds of projects: we have sun, we have desert, we can put up a gigantic farm. Solar technologies are highly developed and technologically accessible, as is wind power.


In the case of wind power, hasn’t it also generated some social controversy? There have been negative social impacts.
I think it is important to keep in mind that there are no perfect solutions, everything has pros and cons. It is very important that communities become part of the solutions. If we don’t do community work in order to allow people to get hold of a technology, we will be far from solving the problem: it has to be done in a participative way. Yes, there have been problems, but these problems are about land ownership or other factors that need to be addressed. Any energy solution you propose for a community becomes a social problem and therefor it has to be solved based on ethics and in close relation to the community: people needs to hear complete explanations. Once again: as a country Mexico has the conditions needed to seize wind power, a very mature technology which we understand perfectly. 

Geothermal energy is also a great solution, but it depends on whether you have the potential as a country. Mexico has it, geothermal energy has been in use for many years and in correct forms. Renewable energies have obvious advantages. They are not clean in the carbon dioxide sense because there is no such thing as total cleanliness. Everyone should be clear that just by existing you are already polluting. If you take remediation measures, it somehow pays off; renewable energies are technologies that have great potential. Oceanic energy is perhaps one of the least developed, but we also have potential along our coasts. It consists of taking advantage of tides and waves (both versions are possible); as the tide rises and falls, it moves a turbine. It has to be a well-thought-out process, done intelligently and calmly. It is not something that can be done overnight.

On the other hand, fossil reserves continue to have other very important applications, such as in the petrochemical industry, and it is not advisable to stop them. The difference between renewable and non-renewable is clear. Renewable energy, for our scale of life, will always be here: the sun will go out in a few million years, but that will not be our problem; we have much more immediate problems. For us, the sun is eternal and is what is called a renewable energy source, and the wind comes from the sun. Geothermal comes from reactions in the center of the Earth that are not going to end, so all of that is renewable. As for non-renewables, fossil resources took millions of years to form: a dinosaur was left dead in a swamp—well, I’m simplifying and using dinosaurs as an example because people like dinosaurs—and that organic material eventually turned into oil, but it took millions of years. So in a few seconds, we burn up what cost nature so much: they are non-renewable resources: those we really cannot renew. Minerals are not renewable either, they must also be treated with great care.

What is very important is that we don’t have another planet, there is no other place where we can go to live, so we must solve the problem here. There is a lot of searching being done, for a planet that could hold life, and some very distant systems have been located. But we will never reach them, so this is the only planet for us, and we must take care of it.


They talk about Mars colonization in certain business circles… 
We can travel to Mars, but we can’t live there, it’s a completely wild environment. If you want to live forever with a mask and in an oxygenated little place, then yes, you could go to Mars, but life as we know it only exists on this planet, for the time being. There may be habitable planets far, far away, but we can’t get there because we can’t move faster than light, and they are thousands of light-years away; there is no way to reach them as we are.

Caring for the planet, then, is very important. There are several studies around this: planetary boundaries, and how we have to take care of the planet. Good planets are very hard to find and Mars is not a good planet, not to live in. It has other advantages but not for living. 

---