Climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation: why does gender matter?

Fatma Denton

Gender-related inequalities are pervasive in the developing world. Although women account for almost 80 per cent of the agricultural sector in Africa, they remain vulnerable and poor. Seventy per cent of the 1.3 billion people in the developing world living below the threshold of poverty are women. It is important that the consequences of climate change should not lead already marginalised sections of communities into further deprivation. But key development issues have been at best sidetracked, and at worst blatantly omitted, from policy debates on climate change. The threats posed by global warming have failed to impress on policy-makers the importance of placing women at the heart of their vision of sustainable development. This article argues that if climate change policy is about ensuring a sustainable future by combining development and environment issues, it must take into account the interests of all stakeholders. The Global Environment Facility and the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol can play a role in ensuring sustainable development, provided they are implemented in a way that does not disadvantage women and the poor.

What have unequal power between women and men, and global inequality, got to do with an environmental crisis as monumental as the possible negative impacts of climate change – which are predicted to have far-reaching implications for women and men? The answer to this question is not immediately obvious. Hurricanes, floods, and other incidents related to climate change affect whole communities, and should presumably therefore affect the lives of women and men equally. Moreover, ecosystems and extreme climate events are oblivious to boundaries. The planet is a global concern incorporating a multitude of ecosystems, peoples, and cultures. As such, it requires collective input in its management, protection, and ultimately, its sustainability. Yet climate negotiations could be seen as a parody of an unequal world economy, in which men, and the bigger nations, get to define the basis on which they participate and contribute to the reduction of growing environmental problems, while women, and smaller and poorer countries, look in from the outside, with virtually no power to change or influence the scope of the discussions.

More than a decade since it began, the climate debate continues to be fraught with difficulties. Protagonists have gradually awakened to the fact that the underlying capitalist and market forces are too important to ignore. The debate has swayed from an initial commitment to greenhouse gas mitigation to trying to get recalcitrant countries such as the USA to toe the line and ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Climate change negotiations such as those leading to the Kyoto Protocol reflect Northern priorities and interests. Issues facing people living in poverty – such as the question of how they can adapt to climate changes have been side-tracked or omitted.

Whilst delegates dwell on the 'shoulds' and 'woulds' of the Kyoto agreement, poorer communities in Mozambique and other developing countries know that it will take more than semantics to reverse some of the most catastrophic outcomes of climate variability and environmental degradation. Most less-developed countries (LDCs) feel that their need for adaptation strategies has not been met or received sufficient attention. In the interim, whilst international agencies haggle over who is best able to oversee adaptation projects, rich industrialised countries keep a steady eye on the costs. Endless discussions ensue over what some see as a miserly adaptation fund, but which others, in the North, consider to be generous. Ordinary people in rural Africa and other parts of the developing world are left to find their own ways of cultivating their land and resisting further environmental degradation, as ecosystems become more fragile and affected by climate variability.

Climate change is likely to accentuate the gaps between the world's rich and poor. It is widely accepted that women in developing countries constitute one of the poorest and most disadvantaged groups in society. A number of human practices are likely to worsen the current scenario of environmental degradation, and increase the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Among these are energy intensity, deforestation, burning of vegetation, population growth, and, ultimately, economic growth.

Women's contribution and participation can help or hinder in all the above scenarios. It has been well documented that rural women in particular play a key role in environmental and natural resource management. Women's active involvement in agriculture, and their dependence on biomass energy, makes them key stakeholders in effective environmental management. Hence, women and their livelihoods activities are particularly vulnerable to the risks posed by environmental depletion (Denton 2001). The need to diversify energy resources and introduce alternative fuels for household use constitutes an essential part of adaptation strategies.

Taking preventive measures well in advance has more benefits than reacting to unexpected catastrophes. To plan these, it is important to consider sectors of production, such as agriculture and fisheries, in terms of the division of labour between women and men, and to identify the different degrees of vulnerability of women and men to the negative effects of climate events. Building this analysis will require more research, but this would enable policy-makers to put measures in place to combat environmental degradation, with the aim of minimising the vulnerability of the women and men affected by them. In planning such measures, much can also be learned from existing mechanisms for drought control by regional groupings such as the Permanent Inter-States Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS). These...