Commiphora wightii - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

/Commiphora_wightii

  • Women Turn Drought into a Lesson on Sustainability | Inter Press Service
    http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/03/women-turn-drought-into-a-lesson-on-sustainability

    Tanveer Arif who heads the NGO Society for Conservation and Protection of Environment (SCOPE) tells IPS that women not only have to look after the children, they are also forced to fill a labour gap caused by an exodus of men migrating to urban areas in search of jobs.

    With their husbands gone, women must also tend to the livestock, fetch water from distant sources when their household wells run dry, care for the elderly, and keep up the tradition of subsistence farming – a near impossible task in a drought-prone region that is primed to become hotter and drier by 2030, according to the Pakistan Meteorological Department.

    The promise of harder times ahead has been a wakeup call for local communities and policymakers alike that building resilience is the only defense against a rising death toll.

    Women here are painfully aware that they need to learn how to store surplus food, identify drought-resilient crops and wean themselves off agriculture as a sole means of survival, thinking that has been borne out in recent studies on the region.

    Conservation brings empowerment

    The answer presented itself in the form of a small, thorny tree called the mukul myrrh, which produces a gum resin that is widely used for a range of cosmetic and medicinal purposes, known here as guggal.

    Until recently, the plant was close to extinction, and sparked conservation efforts to keep the species alive in the face of ruthless extraction – 40 kg of the gum resin fetches anything from 196 to 392 dollars.

    Today, those very efforts are doubling up as adaptation and resiliency strategies among the women of Tharparkar.

    #femmes #Pakistan #climat #résilience #agriculture

    Mukul myrrh tree
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commiphora_wightii