---

Over the last couple of decades, it has become common fact that the ongoing natural resource degradation is desperately affecting the majority of the rural poor whose livelihood is entirely dependent on these resources. Men and women are exposed to different environmental stresses in different ways. In rural areas, women are largely responsible for survival tasks that are essential for daily life. This work provide a tangible evidence that Women are doubly affected by environmental degradation, first because of poverty, and second because of their role and status in the traditional patriarchal society. In such a setting, women employed varieties of coping mechanisms to cope with the problem they encountered. This book, therefore, provides a new insight that the facts of environmental degradation are more than exaggerations: shockingly, it has an adverse class and gender effects.

---

Teshome Beyene,MA in Gender studies from Addis Ababa University and working as Gender Equality Specalist at Rural Capacity Building Project,Addis Ababa.

---