Climate Change:
Risk and Possible Effect on Women

Climate change is a major threat to sustainable development. The worst affected of this drastic change are the poor and marginalised sections of the society. Here, it would be important to note that global climate change affects both the genders in different ways. It was assumed that the negative impacts of climate change and mitigation measures are similar on both women and men. Clearly, it is not so.

Women and men experience climate change differently and the level of adaptation and coping capacity of women are also unalike. Women are an important actor of change and are more vulnerable to climate change as compared to men. Women and men face dissimilar vulnerabilities due to the different social rules and mores and not due to the fact that they are naturally weaker. The vulnerability and capacity of a social group to adapt to climate change depends greatly on the accessibility to assets, resources, knowledge, technology, power, decision-making potential, health, education and food. The more assets people have, lesser is the vulnerability that they face. In many areas of research, it has been proved that women tend to have limited access to assets as compared to their gender counterparts.

In many developing countries, women are deprived of the capacity to cope or learn about their vulnerabilities or, rather, being kept out from accessing information. In most of the rural areas in India, women are facing constraints on both mobility and behavioural restriction.

Direct and Indirect Risk of Climate Change on Women

Women and girls in developing countries face severe droughts and acute water shortage at a much higher scale because they are the primary water collectors, users and managers of water. If water availability reduces the livelihoods of their families, it will be jeopardise and increase their workloads. The decreasing water availability may have secondary effects like less attendance and lower enrollment of girl children in schools. It may also affect women’s engagement in income-generation activities because they are most of the time engaged in fetching water. Of the 115 million children of the world who do not go to school, three-fifths are girls, and women constitute 75% of the world’s illiterate population (OXFAM, 2007).

If we look at natural disasters and their subsequent impacts, on an average basis, there are more women killed than men. Climate variability plays a critical role in epidemics across the globe and as a result, vector-borne diseases are increasing at an alarming rate. Women have less access to health facilities than men and their workloads increase because they have to spend more time caring for their sick family members. Each year, approximately 50 million women living in countries afflicted with malaria epidemics across the world become pregnant. An estimated 10,000 of these women and 2, 00,000 of their infants die as a result of malaria infection during pregnancy, which contributes to more than half of these deaths (WHO, 2008).

It has been predicted that by 2050, climate change could result in plant species extinctions ranging from 18 - 35%. The potential effect will be vast reduction in the bio-diversity and traditional medicine options. Women often rely on crop diversity for any climatic changes and any variability and/or permanent reduction will impact on food security and health. Rural women in particular are responsible for half of the world’s food production and generate between 60 -80% of the food production in developing countries.

Greenhouse gas concentrations have reduced rice harvest in most of the developing countries, which is a major caloric intake of the population. Women are already more vulnerable to the nutritional problem. The data shows that 50% of the women and children in developing countries are anaemic.

Environmental changes are likely to drive migration. According to United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 80% of refugees in the world are women and children. Migration leads to extreme changes to the lifestyles of population and disasters could interrupt and limit their opportunities for education.

Livelihoods insecurity in rural areas of developing countries causes high migration rates. Men are more likely to migrate. The women and children left behind are often the poorest. The workloads of these women increase significantly as a result of male migration.

Interventions related to risk reduction of climate change and social security should pay special attention to the need to enhance the capacity of women to manage climate change risks with a view to reducing their vulnerability and maintaining or increasing their opportunities for development. There is an urgent need to adopt a gender responsive approach towards climate change policies and actions to improve access to skills, education and knowledge. Support is needed in every step to build the capacities of women to help them raise their voice and develop the potential capital to demand access to risk management instruments. q

Nibedita Phukan
nphukan@devalt.org

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