While climate change is a threat for everyone, it does not affect everyone equally–it is not “gender neutral.”
As we’ve covered elsewhere, the impacts of climate change perpetuate and magnify structural inequalities, including those between women and men. This is especially true in many parts of the world where women rely on climate-sensitive work like agriculture and manual labour to make a living.
The truth is that the climate crisis, just like nearly every other humanitarian and development challenge, has a greater impact on women than men. This is due to the unequal sharing of power between women and men, the gender gap in access to education and employment opportunities, the unpaid care burden, prevalence of gender-based violence, and all other forms of deep-rooted gender-based discrimination.
Thus women and girls experience the greatest impacts of climate change, which amplifies existing gender inequalities and poses unique threats to their livelihoods, health, and safety.
The majority of the world’s poor are women, compounding the risks and burdens women face from the impacts of climate change.
Research shows that female leaders take more decisive action on climate change than their male counterparts. Yet women’s unequal participation in decision-making processes and labour markets compound inequalities and often prevent women from fully contributing to climate-related planning, policy-making and implementation.
Gender Equality as Climate Action
All of this is a shame, since when empowered to lead, women are not just victims of climate change, but agents of change in climate mitigation and adaptation. Involving women in decision-making can help drive the adoption of climate change policies and strengthen mitigation and adaptation efforts by ensuring they benefit the needs of women.
In the words of Stephanie Holthaus, who leads The Nature Conservancy’s Women in Climate Initiative, “Crucially, women take an intersectional approach, building inclusive, trust-based, and resilient networks that centre the knowledge and perspectives of diverse community-led and structurally excluded groups.
“The impacts of climate change require the intersectional and wholistic approaches that women use to solve problems. Research shows us that in a variety of crises, including the COVID pandemic and the many natural disasters caused by climate change – women leaders respond more effectively, leading global climate governance and local climate resiliency.”
It is no coincidence that across 130 countries, women in government positions were more likely to sign on to international treaties to reduce global warming than men.
And even at the organizational and household levels, research underscores women’s willingness to invest more than men in environmentally friendly practices. From transportation, to eco-friendly products, they exhibit greater awareness of energy conservation and natural resource preservation. Moreover, women leaders across industries are already demonstrating a commitment to sustainable business practices with positive societal impacts. This change can occur at all levels, spanning households, communities, businesses, and politics.
Reproductive Justice and Climate Change’s Impact on Future Generations
We can’t discuss gender equality and climate change without some mention of reproductive justice. Defined as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities,” reproductive justice considers the implication of climate change on reproduction and the birth of new generations of our species.
All around the world, the climate crisis is worsening the inequities surrounding who gets to have a healthy pregnancy and baby. And we cannot hope to raise children safely in a world with an unstable climate, unpredictable weather events, limited access to clean drinking water, famine-induced food shortages, and increasingly unsafe and inaccessible housing, all caused and exacerbated by the changing climate.
What’s more, pregnancy and birth-giving are endangered by pollution and climate change. Environmental factors like exposure to fuel residues, intense car traffic, and burning fuels have been found to have a direct link to fetal malformations, pre-term births, and miscarriages.
Extreme heat–Pregnant people are more at risk for heat-related illnesses than others, and a growing pile of studies indicates that exposure to extreme heat during pregnancy is associated with higher rates of premature birth, low birth weight, and stillbirth. Other studies suggest links between high temperatures and poor maternal health, as well as dangerous complications like gestational diabetes, which develops during pregnancy, or preeclampsia, which, if left untreated, can lead to serious complications or death for both the woman and child.
Air pollution is another issue that affects pregnancy and newborns. Worsened by wildfires and heat, air pollution has long been linked with poor birth outcomes and childhood intellectual and developmental problems. More recently, studies have linked air pollution with higher rates of gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia.
Flooding–Pregnant people and newborns are both also especially vulnerable to stress and the illnesses that flooding can heighten. In many areas, the risk of malaria increases after floods because it is spread by mosquitoes that breed in stagnant water. Vector-borne diseases like malaria are more likely to kill you if you’re pregnant or a newborn. And prenatal care, support for birth itself, newborn checkups, and vaccines cannot be provided when facilities are shut down or overstretched by disaster.
Finally, exposure to toxic and underregulated chemicals also increases the dangers to pregnancy and childbirth.
The realization of reproductive justice is essential for girls, women, and people of underrepresented groups to exercise their agency, to make choices about their bodies and their lives, to access services and opportunities, and to participate in political life—all essential elements of gender equality. And it is crucial to the persistence of the human race as species.
Gender-responsive Approaches to Climate Action
According to the NAP Global Network, gender-responsive approaches to climate action must:
- Recognize gender differences in adaptation needs and capacities
- Ensure gender-equitable participation in adaptation decision-making processes
- Design funding mechanisms that secure gender-equitable access to finance and other benefits resulting from investments in adaptation
The needs are quite the same whether we look at mitigation or adaptation, technology or finance–women, as well those underserved in our societies today, need their needs better understood, their concerns more actively listened to, and the leadership recognized and funded.
To take action on gender justice, check out the movement for gender and climate justice in the Caribbean.
Author: Alicia Richins
Sustainable Impact Strategist | SDG Champion | Climate Justice Advocate | Climate Futures Writer
