Gendered vulnerabilities to climate change: insights from the semi-arid regions of Africa and Asia (original) (raw)
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Nature Climate Change, 2019
There is growing concern about sustainable and equitable adaptation in climate change hotspots, commonly understood as locations that concentrate high climatic variability, societal vulnerability, and negative impacts on livelihood systems. Emphasizing gender within these debates highlights how demographic, socioeconomic and agro-ecological contexts mediate the experiences and outcomes of climate change. Drawing on data from 25 qualitative case studies across three hotspots in Africa and Asia, analysed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, we show how and in what ways women's agency, or the ability to make meaningful choices and strategic decisions, contributes to adaptation responses. We find that environmental stress is a key depressor of women's agency even when household structures and social norms are supportive, or legal entitlements available. These findings have implications for the effective implementation of multilateral agreements such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable, equitable, and effective adaptation is critical in climate change hotspots, locations where climatic shifts, social structures, and livelihood sensitivity converge to exacerbate vulnerability 1,2. Entrenched social structures create power relations that shape women's and men's experiences of vulnerability through access to resources, divisions of work, and cultural norms around mobility and decision-making, all of which determine adaptive capacity 6,10-21. Involving trade-offs at every level 12,22-24 , these contextual factors not only shape vulnerabilities but also create possibilities for adaptation 25. When examining gendered vulnerability and the way in which it is manifest in unequal patriarchal systems, women's agency has emerged as key to realising adaptive capacity, but remains understudied 11. Drawing on feminist arguments to move beyond simplistic framings of actors in terms of active or passive, victims or perpetrators 7,26,27 , we conceptualise agency as the ability to make meaningful choices and strategic decisions 28. It can take multiple forms, from bargaining and negotiation to subversion and resistance 29 , varying across institutional sites and scales, and drawing differentially on available material or social resources 28. Institutions, ranging from the micro (household) and meso (community) level, to the more macro-levels of markets and states 30 , interact and intersect with each other, often intensifying or reproducing inequalities. The rules and norms they establish, can be formal or informal, complementary or competing 31 , giving specific meaning to particular activities, resources and relationships. In the context of climate action, while some research explores the role of social capital, especially women's groups, for instance, in supporting women's agency 32,33 , a nuanced institutional analysis, linking women's agency and its implications for adaptive capacity remains missing 11,34. Driven by multiple factors across these institutions, acting in combination with each other 7 , outcomes in terms of women's agency are not uniform across contexts. Here we explore how women's agency contributes to adaptation responses in different climate hotspots. We use gender as an analytical framework, with its focus on power relations, to inform our theoretical conceptualisation of the possible individual and relational conditions that combine to strengthen or depress women's agency. The evidence draws on 25 qualitative case studies (See Figure 1, Table 1 and the Supplementary Table 1 (provided as an additional excel file) for details of cases) in three distinct agro-ecological regions: 14 in semi-arid regions, 6 in mountains and glacier fed river basins and 5 in deltas. Predominant livelihoods are agriculture, livestock pastoralism, and fishing, supplemented by wage labour, petty trade or business, and income from remittances. These areas face a range of environmental risks including droughts, floods, rainfall variability, land erosion and landslides, glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), heatwaves, salinity ingress, coastal erosion, cyclones, amongst others. As
The Gender Dimension of Vulnerability to Climatic Shock in Low Income Countries
Gender mainstreaming within policies and programs has remained a big priority among government and non-governmental organizations. In all societies, in all parts of the world, gender equality is not yet realized. Men and women have different roles, responsibilities and decision-making powers. Many people, however, find it difficult to understand in what way gender might be a factor in climate change (CC) or how it should be addressed. The prevailing gender power differences in terms of command over different capital endowments have significant impact on being disproportionately vulnerable to climate variability and its negative consequences. This article attempts to uncover the gender difference in vulnerability to the occurrences of climatic extremes with a survey of 452 households conducted in the central part of Ethiopia and time series data of climate variability and its impacts on livelihood. Trend analysis and statistical measurements were used to analyze the data. The study found out that there is a gendered vulnerability. Therefore, there is a need for gendered intervention in terms of policies and actions to reduce women’s vulnerability and build their resilience.
What about Gender in Climate Change? Twelve Feminist Lessons from Development
Sustainability
Adaptation and mitigation are two key responses to climate change. In the global South they prompt many questions: what is the direction and degree of change needed? How can new climate change policies be aligned with existing development initiatives? How are core social relations such as gender understood and prioritized in relation to technical and other solutions? In search of synergies between adaptation, development and mitigation, this article asks a pertinent question for sub-Saharan small-scale agriculture in particular: what can adaptation and mitigation learn from development debates on social goal setting, institutional change and gender equality? From the perspective of sustainability science and feminist literature, three main findings emerge. First, as regards social goal setting, adaptation and mitigation should, like development, support the escape out of poverty, ill-health and food-insecurity. Second, as regards institutions, adaptation and mitigation should address how gender regulates access to, use of and control over resources in terms of labor, land and strategic decision-making power. Third, as regards gender equality, adaptation and mitigation should learn from how development in theory and practice has addressed gender, women, nature and the environment. At its core, the analysis contributes twelve salient themes that can significantly inform adaptation and mitigation in research, policy and practice, thus serving as inspiration for a critical debate on much needed synergetic trajectories.
Explaining Gendered Vulnerability to Climate Change: The Contextual Conditions
Climate change is an urgent and inescapable global concern. Rising temperatures are leading to changes in environmental processes, making rainfall and soil moisture content less predictable. Contemporary events have shown that a change in climate conditions poses a serious threat to the human race, particularly in the light of challenges to life and security. The poor, who frequently rely on ecosystem services, are significantly impacted. Climate change has varying effects on different demographics, such as age groups and genders, and it has important consequences for women due to differences in social responsibilities and access to economic resources. The most vulnerable citizens of developing nations, women, in most cases, face enormous challenges due to climate change (UN Women, 2022). Women, particularly young girls, constitute one of Africa's most vulnerable populations, providing a regular supply of domestic labour similar to many contexts around the globe. Studies (Lambrou & Piana, 2006; Neumayer & Pluemper, 2007) have shown mounting evidence that climate change effects are gendered, and women are highly prone during and after climate events, especially in locations subject to climate variability and disasters. According to some of these studies (e.g., Neumayer & Pluemper, 2007), households react to the negative shocks of climate change by inequitably redistributing the available resources to women and girls.
Gendered Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change
Promoting Climate Change Awareness through Environmental Education, 2016
Climate change is a critical global issue with the potential to cause social, political, environmental and economic hardships. Women and the poor are disproportionately affected by climate change because of cultural norms, their dependence on natural resources; responsibility for water, fuel, food procurement and household care; their greater exposure to risk in crisis and severe weather events and the predominant presence of low technology in agriculture and their lack of resources and power. This chapter concentrates on vulnerability and adaptation responses at the community level and the context or factors that influence adaptation at this level. In particular, this it focuses gender based vulnerability and adaptation and the factors that influence they respond to climate change. It also highlights the importance of collective adaptation efforts in order to guide the design of more inclusive and effective adaptation projects and programs.
The role of rural women in eradicating poverty and ending hunger has been recognised by both scholars and practitioners. There is an acknowledgement that women serve a critical role in the agricultural labour force, subsistence farming, and rural development in sub-Saharan Africa, yet their central role in food security has been largely ignored, particularly in policy (Govender, 2012). Although much of the labour of rural women is not nationally defined as economically active employment these women still spend long hours in undervalued productive and reproductive work to ensure the well-being of their households. Linked to this role is the challenge of dealing with rapidly changing climatic conditions. Women assume primary responsibility in fetching water and wood for meal preparation, and in tilling the ground. They are among the most vulnerable groups to climate change as a result of their precarious environmental livelihoods. Using data from a workshop with rural women to discuss climate change and qualitative interviews with rural women in selected rural communities in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal we explore the meaning of climate change. We report on the way climate change is understood, its effects on rural livelihoods and some responses to climate change problems experienced by the women in the communities. The women in the rural communities highlight that there are also social problems that have arisen from water scarcity. As a result of the household division of labour, rural girls confront particular challenges as they need to search further from home for water and are exposed to the risk of gender violence.
2006
Global changes in weather patterns and environmental processes are bringing the climate change discourse from the abstract to the concrete. Through the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention, the global community has highlighted three key areas of urgent action. These are vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation. This thesis focuses on the area of adaptation, framing it within the contexts of gender and justice. The analysis is drawing on sources mainly from critical ecofeminism together with sources of gender and development and aspects of justice to consider the impact and aspects of processes, power and place within the climate change discourse. Through a critical reading of the National Adaptation Programmes of Action, an instrument for vulnerability and adaptation needs assessment of the Least Developed Countries, it is argued that gender issues, and especially women's positions, must be more explicitly illuminated and put in the context of power asymmetries and of the feminization processes of poverty and survival. In this course of action, notions of the relationship between women and the environment must be critically and carefully applied.