COPENHAGEN, May 20 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Carla Lopez remembers the first time she heard a suggestion that climate change was a factor leading to the rape of young girls.

“I was in Santa Maria Xalapan of Guatemala when a group of women said young girls were being kidnapped and raped because there was a water crisis. It was a revelation,” said the executive director of the Fondo Centroamericano de Mujeres, a women’s fund based in Central America.

In the indigenous Xinca society of Xalapan, men often kidnap and rape young girls before marrying them, Lopez said, and for about a decade, the local women’s group had been campaigning to end this trend.  Continue reading…