Gender Equality & Climate Change
What Is Happening
Nearly 85% of the world’s population inhabit areas that have been impacted by climate change, and have experienced environmental degradation.1 As these effects are projected to worsen in the coming years, mitigation and adaptation efforts have been increasingly prioritized in climate policy debates.2 However, such efforts, both at international and domestic levels, continue to largely overlook one critical aspect of climate readiness: how gender inequality exacerbates the effects of climate change, leaving women more vulnerable to climate-related developments than men. Considering that a majority of resilience strategies around the world have been devised without significant attention to the interaction between gender roles and environmental degradation, this gap in policymaking will entail significant consequences going forward.
The interplay between gender and climate is multifaceted, extending to social, political, and economic spheres. To begin with, women make up nearly 43% of the world’s agricultural workforce.3 In developing nations, this percentage soars: 2 out of 3 women are employed in farming, especially in crop production, to generate income for their families or close communities.4 Outside of the workforce, the majority of these women are disproportionately tasked with household maintenance and management as well, which often include tending to livestock, growing vegetables and fruits, and harvesting crops.5 Due to women’s widespread employment in the agriculture sector, the effects of slow-onset climate change, such as increasing temperatures, desertification, and land degradation, affect them disproportionately, both in the workforce and outside of it. In these contexts, disruptions to seasonal harvests lead a significant majority of women to lose both their incomes and their main sources of nutrition.6 As crops become less available and prices rise, women’s ability to grow or purchase food decreases.7 In addition, research by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) shows that, in times of food shortages, the sufficient food consumption of men and boys tends to be prioritized.8 In 2021, for example, out of nearly 830 million people affected by hunger, two-thirds were women.9 This means that women and girls experience disproportionate declines in health at times of drought or otherwise affected harvests. In these ways, as climate change aggravates disruptions in the agricultural sector, women’s income and health are affected to different degrees than their male counterparts, which requires more extensive and targeted policy attention.
A decrease in biodiversity is another outcome of slow-onset climate change that affects women in a particular manner. Nearly 2.5 billion people across the world are dependent on biomass for their energy needs, including heating, cooking, and lighting.10 Significantly, research shows that women are often responsible for collecting or fetching biomass, such as wood, charcoal, and livestock wastes, in order to meet these needs.11 The World Bank estimates that women in developing regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, spend around 20 hours a week in this pursuit, and have to carry up to 23 kilograms to supply their families or communities with fuelwood.12 Due to deforestation, and the subsequent loss of biomass, however, women need to spend increasingly more time and travel further distances in acquiring fuel for household energy needs. Girls have also been at risk of not being able to attend school for this reason, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.13 Women’s labor in this sphere, which is deemed a component of household maintenance and is thus unpaid, inhibits both their involvement in the formal workforce and the education sector.14
Women are 4 times more likely than men to be displaced because of climate-induced factors.15 Globally, women tend to live in rural areas that are more susceptible to climate change due to land-based sources of income and the lack of infrastructure, which means that socioeconomic migration pressures are more prominent in their lives. Moreover, in cases of climate-induced migration, the security networks that have been organically established in communities tend to break down, causing women and children to be separated from their families or to travel unaccompanied.16 In such circumstances, women become more vulnerable to physical violence and organized crime, specifically to human trafficking networks in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia.17 The United Nations have found that human trafficking increases by 30% after disasters, and the primary victims of this are women and girls.18 Women are also significantly disadvantaged in climate-related disaster readiness, and are 14 times more likely to lose their lives in climate events than men.19 The Indian Ocean Tsunami, for instance, caused the deaths of 230,000 people in South and Southeast Asia, 70% of whom were women.20 Unfortunately, this trend persists. Without having learned life-saving skills due to assigned gender roles in different societal contexts, women continue to face a greater risk factor in disaster conditions.21
These particular effects, stemming from the interaction between existing gender inequalities and climate change, are not given enough attention in national climate agendas and multilateral resolutions. This lack of recognition fails to bring attention to the gendered roles and tasks that result in specific vulnerabilities for women in this sphere.
Why Is It Happening?
Climate change functions as a “threat multiplier” for gender inequality, exacerbating the systematic marginalization of women in both the sociopolitical and economic realms.22 This is because deep-seated gender disparities reduce women’s access to relevant information, resources, and training for climate readiness, as well as their mobility in disaster times.23 Women also occupy limited roles in decision-making processes for mitigation and adaptation strategies in different regions.24 In these areas, their capacity as agents of change in the climate sphere is not fully realized, on the one hand, and their specific vulnerabilities in the face of climate change are not widely recognized, thus addressed, on the other.
Overall, this dynamic causes women to face greater risks to their income, security, and lives due to climate-related impacts.25 As women constitute a large portion of the world’s economically disadvantaged population, they are especially susceptible to the socioeconomic impacts of climate change.26 The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates that, by the end of 2022, 388 million women and girls will be living on less than $1.90 a day, which is defined as extreme poverty, compared to 372 million men and boys.27 Without notable purchasing power, women are disproportionately reliant on natural resources for generating income and for household needs.28 Research by UN Women, for instance, shows that women are more likely than men to use natural resources to increase family welfare, reduce child malnutrition, and improve family food consumption.29 When the availability or the quality of resources diminishes due to climate change, however, women, and the children they provide for, become more vulnerable to malnutrition, disease, and even death.
One such resource is fresh water. For example, the Pacific island nation of Kiribati has witnessed significant sea level rise due to global warming, averaging 3.2 millimeters per year since the 1990s.30 This has led to severe degradation of freshwater resources on the island, as frequent floods have resulted in the contamination of the island’s aquifers and groundwater. The effects of this have been twofold. For one, water-related illnesses are a major cause of infant and child mortality on the island, as well as decreased maternal health.31 These diseases cause nearly 60 deaths per 1000 children under the age of 5 in Kiribati.32 Additionally, resource restrictions inhibit women and girls’ involvement in schools and the workforce, as well as endangering their health, more prominently than that of men. Considering that nearly 400 million women globally live in extreme poverty, such setbacks, no matter how minimal, can have significant impacts on women’s socioeconomic position. As the negative effects of climate change on resource availability are set to increase in the coming years, women are projected to continue to face such hardships unless more targeted action is taken by both governments and multilateral institutions.
Climate disasters also interact with existing gender inequalities to make such incidents more deadly and harder to recover from for women. Cultural norms around proper public conduct limit women’s mobility in disaster times.33 These dynamics mean that, at the moment of impact, women are generally slower to take action, which can constitute the difference between life and death. As women’s position in the workforce is more precarious than that of men, it is harder for them to recover from climate disasters that significantly damage infrastructure and housing.34 Globally, women are less integrated into the formal workforce and are more likely to occupy need-based employment without the protection of labor laws and social security schemes.35 This means that, in the aftermath of disasters, women tend to lack the right safeguards that can reduce the impacts of climate on their livelihoods.
As such, climate change exacerbates women’s existing vulnerabilities, causing them to both be more susceptible to its negative effects and less able to recover in the long term. A widespread acknowledgment that climate change is a gendered process is the first step to adequately addressing gender inequality in the climate sphere.
What Is Being Done About It?
Although the gendered impacts of climate change are not yet adequately addressed, certain strides have been made to try integrating a gender lens into climate change frameworks. A notable initiative on this front is the Lima Work Program on Gender (LWPG), developed under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The program was introduced during COP20 in Lima, Peru, in 2014 to advance “achieve gender-responsive climate policy and action.”36 It set a gender action agenda under five priority areas: knowledge management and capacity-building, gender balance and women’s leadership, coherence, gender-responsive implementation, and monitoring and reporting.37 In this vein, the UNFCCC decision that established LWPG urged parties to “promote gender sensitivity in developing and implementing climate policy, and achieve gender-responsive climate policy in all relevant activities under the Convention.”38 Additionally, the decision recognized “gender mainstreaming” as a crucial contribution to meeting the targets set out under UNFCCC.39 Then, in 2015, gender equality was further prioritized in the Paris Agreement, which states in the preamble that climate actions should promote the empowerment of women and gender equality.40 Article 7 of the Agreement acknowledges this need more explicitly, highlighting that climate adaptation should follow a “country-driven, gender-responsive, participatory, and fully transparent approach.”41
This is exemplified by the development of the country-specific Climate Change Gender Action Plans (ccGAPs) with guidance from the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA).42 Under the Alliance’s umbrella and with funding from the government of Finland, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) devised the ccGAPs methodology to produce “innovative, multi-sectoral, and multi-stakeholder plans of action spanning each government’s designated priority sectors.”43 It is employed by 16 national governments including Mozambique, Jordan, Haiti, Costa Rica, Liberia, Bangladesh, and Mexico.44 Recognizing that each country operates in unique social, governance, and environmental circumstances, the methodology provides guidelines “for training and building the capacity of women and women’s organizations, as well as environmental and climate change institutions and ministries, on the links between gender and climate change.”45 As a context-specific yet replicable structure for advancing gender and climate integration, the ccGAPs demonstrate increasing state-level awareness of the relationship between gender inequality and the impacts of climate change.
A few regional organizations have also made notable progress in developing gender-sensitive strategies for climate mitigation. One example is the Montevideo Strategy of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).46 Adopted in 2017, it provides a 13-year roadmap to achieving gender equality in the region as per the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.47 It recognizes that the gendered division of labor and dominant cultural patterns exacerbate the effects of climate change on many households.48 Moreover, the strategy acknowledges that women’s disempowerment in environmental policymaking prevents them from developing adequate adaptation and response capacities. Recognizing the need to undo these patterns, it states, “It is important to consider women’s contribution to [climate change] mitigation as producers, workers, and consumers, as well as researchers… and public policymakers.”49 A similar partnership that addresses the relationship between gender inequality and climate change is the Asian Development Bank’s regional technical assistance project, Harnessing Climate Change Mitigation Initiatives to Benefit Women, which was first launched in 2011.50 The project aims to assist policymakers in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam with integrating gender into national or subnational climate strategies and climate action plans.51
More recent efforts to amend the disproportionate effects of climate change on women include the Enhanced Lima Work Program on Gender, which was launched at COP25 in Madrid in 2019.52 The program emphasized the priority areas of its predecessor, and encouraged all parties to include their gender action efforts in their national reporting under the UNFCCC process.53 One example is Cambodia, which, in 2020, submitted an updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) plan under the UNFCCC that included a section on gender inclusion.54 In accordance with the updated strategy, Cambodia’s Ministry of Women Affairs started a Gender and Climate Change Committee, tasked with conducting research on the effects of climate change on women and children, and capacity-building in the ministry’s departments.55 The country’s National Council for Women was also mandated to respond specifically to climate change impacts on rural women’s lives and to guide policymaking to mitigate these impacts.56
Despite these strides, there is still a lot of work to be done on these fronts. Although awareness and monitoring campaigns are increasingly prominent, the development of concrete initiatives to abate the impacts of slow-onset climate change or of climate disasters on women remains few and far in between. It is important to recognize that policymaking in this sphere is ripe with opportunity, and the international community need not wait for another drought or hurricane to take a more decisive and inclusive approach to these developments.
What’s Next?
Through COP26, the United Kingdom further emphasized the need to advance gender equality in climate action.57 The conference invited all member states to map the progress of their efforts on the gender action plan, and the International Labor Organization was mandated to prepare a report on “the linkages between gender-responsive climate action and just transition,” that is, the equitable distribution of the costs and benefits of climate action.58 These outputs are set to be reviewed in COP27, which will take place in Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh this coming November.59 In the last months of the run-up to COP27, countries have also been asked to provide a national “synthesis report on the implementation of gender-responsive climate policies, plans, strategy, and action.”60 COP27 will feature a Gender Day for focused discussions as well.61 The coming months will show what concrete initiatives will be proposed on this front. COP27 is also an opportunity for Arab states to acknowledge the disproportionate impacts of climate change on women in the region. Although significant progress has been made in addressing the role of climate change in exacerbating the region’s development challenges, the specific focus on gender and climate remains overlooked.
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