“The biggest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.”
Climate change is not neutral, and it will not affect us 'equally.'
We have all heard about the climate crisis and how it is one of the biggest threats that our generation faces, the impacts of which are felt by each and every person on this planet. But what if I was to say that this misery does not strike everyone equally as has been claimed by people for decades? Bear with me, your local environmental preacher, as I take a few minutes of your time to debunk this myth.
For starters, let me just put it out there- CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT NEUTRAL!
It's not going to affect us all equally. Who you are, where you live, how much money you make, the strength of your community- many different factors determine how you’ll be impacted. And climate change is definitely not gender-neutral and neither are some of the solutions to climate change.
Gender inequality is a global problem steeped in long-held cultural attitudes, laws, and institutions. And it is many of those ideas and structures that contribute the most to environmental impacts. So it isn’t that surprising that there is a strong relationship between gender and climate change.
Gender inequality has a lot of ramifications but looking at agriculture is one of the easiest ways to see how impacts of climate change are gendered. Despite making up 51% of the population, women only make up a mere 13% of landholders and they often have less access than men to the cash and credit to buy necessary tools, fertilizers, and seeds. Compounded with reduced access to educations, outside funding, or cooperatives- women are more vulnerable than men to environmental and climatic changes. According to the FAO, women make up about 43% of the agricultural workforce in developing countries. But because of all the issues I mentioned before, women produce less from the same amount of land as men. Improving the livelihoods of women farmers and closing what is often called the “agriculture gender gap” will not only provide deeply needed support for women- it may also reduce emissions. Providing women farmers with access to the same resources as men will increase their yields by 20-30% providing food to up to 150 million people and utilizing areas that could provide plenty of resources like- food. Part of closing that agriculture gender gap will rely on women having access to better education.
A study by the London School of Economics, in natural disasters in 141 countries, gender differences in deaths correlated to women’s economic and social rights in those countries. When women have fewer rights and less power in society, more of them die due to climate change. Educating women is the “single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.” The number one thing that reduces the impact of disasters is education. And not just the impact of disasters on women, but on everyone! That’s a huge deal.
Furthermore, the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report concludes that there is ‘robust evidence’ for an increase of gender inequalities as a result of weather events. For example, girls often face more serious risks than boys due to the unequal distribution of scarce resources within the household. Climate change also results in an increase in the out-migration of men. This leaves women with an increased workload at home, resulting in the feminization of responsibilities.
Now if I put on my SJW hate for a second and say that gender is essentially made-up and how we present and move through the world is essentially determined by our upbringing and if the whole world recognized that individuals are individuals and that or sex does not determine our value to the world…well then, we wouldn’t be having this problem. But as it is in many cultures, men and women are treated very differently. A quick shoutout to all my non-binary and transgender folks out there. The research in this field looks exclusively at gender as binary. So even though equality is preached for, a lot of people are falling through the cracks.
So, to wrap this all up, environmental impacts around the world are gendered because of societal and cultural structures. To change that, we need to provide women with better access to education and resources so that they get to make decisions themselves about how they make money, how they feed themselves and their families, and what their families look like. This also means including women when structuring climate or environmental policies. But it also means we should more often be looking at the problem of global climate change in a gendered way. One possible framework for answering those questions is ecofeminism, which uses a feminist lens to examine the relationship between the natural world and the oppression of women. It can definitely be a useful lens to understand how misogyny and the destruction of the natural world are connected.
And now I would like to end my sermon in the words of Verona Collantes, an intergovernmental specialist with UN Women- “There has to be a realization at the global level that climate change impacts men, women, and other genders differently, so the responses will [need to] take into account gender inequalities at the same time as climate actions.”
This article has been written by Ms. Shweta Nair, a fourth-year student of the Army Institute of Law, Mohali.