Why Climate Change Will Hit Women Hardest
I wrote the other day over on Change.org's sustainable food blog about the fact that women produce the lion’s share of the world’s food but own only 2 percent of the Earth’s tillable land. Considering that climate change is going to present special challenges to farmers, who depend on abundant resources and stable weather patterns, women are, as they say, in for it. And I haven't even mentioned disease or disappearing drinking water yet.
A new “Gender and Climate Change Manual” from the Global Gender and Climate Alliance rightly states that “the poor, the majority of whom are women living in developing countries, will be disproportionately affected. Yet most of the debate on climate so far has been gender-blind.”
This topic is remarkably important and almost entirely ignored. The issue pops up infrequently and peripherally, as when the 52nd session of the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women last year took “gender perspectives on climate change” as its “emerging issue.” It's only "emerging" now because no one was paying attention before, but this should have been part of the debate since the beginning.
And now, as our climate transforms in the ways we already can't stop, emerge this problem will. To whit:
- Women will be on the front lines of the increase in disease caused by heightened global temperatures and increased storm activity. The World Health Organization estimates that around 50 million women living in high malaria zones become pregnant every year, and around 10,000 of them and 200,000 of their babies die from malaria infection. The more the climate warms, the more malarial mosquitoes circulate and the more dire the risk to women.
- A 2007 study from the London School of Economics and Political Science found that women are more likely than men to die in natural disasters in places where women’s rights are not protected. Considering that women’s rights are very commonly not protected as robustly as men’s, women in countries around the world face a bleak outlook as the climate changes and the frequency of natural disasters increases.
- Women are usually responsible for maintaining their families' access to drinking water, which is less and less available to many in the developing world. According to a report by WHO, 1.2 billion people do not have access to safe water, and of those that do, most live far away from it. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, 42 percent of the population has to walk more than 30 minutes to get safe water. The more the climate warms, the farther they’ll have to go. And guess who does all that walking?
- Women’s lack of land rights and comparatively minimal access to microcredit means that they are simply less secure than men. When the going gets tough, women cannot depend on stable sources of income or external help. According to a study in the Lancet, women own less than 2 percent of all the world’s arable land. Further, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that in five African countries female small farmers got less than 10 percent of the credit that male small farmers received. Women's comparative lack of assets and education makes their insecurity all the worse.
The fact is that women already get the short end of the stick, and that end is going to get shorter and shorter as the world warms.
But it isn't just women who suffer from the world's disregard of the inequalities they face. If women aren't brought into the conversation about solutions in a meaningful way, the global community will have trouble slowing down that warming. Around the world, after all, women are heavily involved in all the tasks that use land and water resources — agriculture, animal husbandry, cooking, washing, hauling water. We won't be able to engineer effective solutions without their input and cooperation.
How's that for an emerging issue?
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