Giving Compass' Take:

• Dulce explores how climate change and sea level rise will impact a mother and daughter who are supported by a mangrove forest in Colombia.

• How can funders help communities prepare for the impacts of sea level rise? how can funders help to ensure that women are included in this process in a meaningful and beneficial way? 

• Learn about funding coalitions for climate justice. 

The story of climate change is often told in far-off and large-scale ways — global greenhouse gas emissions will someday make sea levels rise, storms more extreme, droughts more withering, and heat waves more intense. It’s also told as a story of doom, an irrevocable shift that could upend human life.

But the full picture is more complex. For many people around the world, major environmental disruptions are already being felt, and they’re also being dealt with in resilient ways.

That’s what’s happening in the coastal village of La Ensenada, Colombia, where the environmental organization Conservation International recently traveled to document how women and girls are being affected by rising sea levels. The organization is actively working to protect coastlines throughout the country.

When the team arrived, it encountered a young girl named Dulce, and she became the protagonist of a short film called Dulce produced by CI and directed by Guille Isa and Angello Faccini featured on the New York Times website.

In both the film and their time with Dulce, a central, metaphorical problem quickly revealed itself: Dulce couldn’t swim. For her mother, Betty Arboleda, that’s a frightening prospect. She’s seen sea levels rise throughout her life and knows that storm surges and floods have become powerful. Dulce’s inability to stay afloat is also a crisp allegory for the uncertainty created by climate change and the potential need for people to learn basic survival skills.

As the film explores this fraught tension, it never once mentions climate change, but the phenomenon saturates the film with a sense of dread.

“Women's roles are often related to natural resources,” Shyla Raghav, climate lead at Conservation International, told Global Citizen. “They’re usually the providers for families, so there tends to be a closer connection to impacts like sea level rise or impacts that directly affect their ability to interact with nature.”

Read the full article about the impacts of climate change on women by Joe McCarthy at Global Citizen.