The climate crisis is already happening, and it’s having a disproportionate impact on marginalized groups such as racial and ethnic minorities and those with low socioeconomic backgrounds. As a marginalized group, women experience some of the most detrimental effects of climate change. It is therefore imperative to understand why climate change is of feminist concern.

For some time now, feminist researchers have begun inquiring into the relationships between gender and the climate emergency. They ask questions such as: Are women and men impacted by climate change in the same way? Have gender hierarchies been part of the social causes and consequences of climate change? How does gender intersect with class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in a changed climate? Is climate governance gendered? What can be done to ensure political and social action on climate change does not reinforce gender inequality?

The studies that have resulted from such questions cast a grim light on this issue: there are indeed integral connections between gender inequalities and vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change. Meaning that the climate emergency has a disproportionate impact on women around the world, for example. Researchers and development practitioners interpret these vulnerabilities, not as the result of intrinsic or ‘natural’ characteristics of women, but rather as expressions of existing gender inequalities and power relations in societies across the world. Research shows that people of varying intersecting identities experience crises differently. These differences are based on cultural norms and practices, on work roles and access to resources, on safety and security and on different levels of vulnerability resulting from a combination of these factors.

The disproportionate impact of climate change is particularly visible in the case of poor women of colour. Voracious consumption and fossil fuel-fuelled lifestyles in the global North are the engines of climate change. Climate justice spotlights how the people least responsible for climate change—poor people of color, especially in the global South—suffer its gravest consequences, in part, because they are proportionally more dependent on threatened natural resources. As such, attention to these considerations pertaining to women’s specific vulnerabilities is essential in mapping pathways to address climate change.

Although the following are not close to painting a complete picture of the issue at hand, here are two of the main reasons why women are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis:

1.    Women are more likely to have low socioeconomic power and less access to basic human rights and resources.

Studies found that that women tend to be more at risk in situations of natural disasters than men. This is because they are more likely to experience poverty and are more likely to work in natural resource sectors, such as agriculture, which tend to be the most affected by climate change.

Women make up 70% of the world’s poor and are responsible for 50 to 80% of the world’s food production. Yet, they own less than 10% of the land. This disproportionate access to land causes their incomes to be more unpredictable and increases their personal and economic vulnerability to lost harvests, which result from changes in temperature, floods and droughts.

As such, during extreme weather events, women tend to work longer hours to ensure financial stability and to secure household livelihoods. In this way, women spend less time in education, lowering their chances at a fairer and more stable life. In many countries, women also bear primary care responsibilities for families and communities, and when resources become scarce, the burden of this (mostly unpaid) care work increases. Because women often have less access to basic human rights like the ability to freely move, as well as lesser access to sustenance resources, they tend to be the last to leave when a natural disaster occurs, which leads them to be more likely killed by natural disasters than men, as concluded by a 2007 study by the London School of Economics. 

The resulting dislocation, instability and increased poverty make women and girls particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse. According to a report by the United Nations Environment program, human trafficking increases significantly during natural disasters.

As seen then, in many societies, socio-cultural norms, child and elderly care responsibilities, economic marginalisation and so forth, prevent women from migrating or seeking refuge in other places or working when a disaster hits. Such a situation is likely to put more burden on women, such as travelling longer to get drinking water and wood for fuel. Women, particularly in many developing countries, suffer gender inequalities with respect to human rights, political and economic status, land ownership, housing conditions, exposure to violence, education and health. Climate change is an added stressor that aggravates women's vulnerability to situations of crisis.

2.    Women are underrepresented in governing agencies and have less access to knowledge-creating and decision-making structures.  

Women and girls around the world are demanding more climate action at the local and global levels and have received increasing recognition for their leadership. However, in the climate decision-making process, women’s voices are not yet equally represented. Gender inequalities are evident in formal institutional responses to climate change, women being underrepresented in governing agencies and in policy-making decisions – circumstances that can be traced back to the systematic marginalisation of women from political and economic power.

From early on, feminists have taken a critical eye to the institutions and policy responses to climate change. For example, in 1995, at the first United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiation session in Berlin, only around 18 percent of all delegates sent by parties to the convention were women. Minu Hemmati and Ulrike Röhr showed that women’s representation in government delegations to the UNFCCC has remained historically low. Only between 15-29% of members in delegations, and between 8-19% of delegation leaders have been women between 1996 and 2007. They have also observed that women’s organisations are less likely to attend UNFCCC forums than they are other UN processes.

A report by UN Women and the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice reveals that the proportion of women in the composition of party delegations declined from 36% during both COP 19 and COP 20 to 32% during COP 21. Furthermore, only 20% women participated as heads of delegations for COP 21.

The world’s leading climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also has to meet the challenge of the underrepresentation of women. This study analysed trends in IPCC female participation and results indicate that in 2013, when the IPCC’s fifth report was published, only about 22% of authors were female – a total of 182. Although this is an increase by 20% compared to the 2% of female authors in 1990 for the first report, there is still a long way to go until gender representation is reached. A similar trend can be seen, when analysing the number of women holding the highest positions of the IPCC – that of Chair and Vice-Chair of a working group. Currently, 8 out of 32 Chairs and Vice-Chairs are women. The highest number so far.

There is also evidence that women are minimally present on the boards of major energy companies. In their study of 464 companies based in Sweden, Germany, and Spain, Carlsson-Kanyama et al. found that 295 (65 %) companies had no women on their boards. Only 22 (5%) had 40% or more women board representations.

Likewise, women are substantially underrepresented in key disciplines of climate science. A study from 2018 reveals that of all doctorates awarded from 1973 to 2016 in all geosciences in the U.S. only 27% of them were women. A severe gender gap can be also recognised for the DEEDS scientific expert database: Of all the experts who registered for the database until 13 April, only 16.4% indicated they were female. An overwhelming 80.3% male and 3.3% chose to not disclose their gender.

According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, in the European Union, women only hold around one quarter of climate-change-related decision-making positions. This chronic underrepresentation exacerbates the gender gap in vulnerabilities to climate changes since policies and interventions are being designed and implemented without consideration for the specific challenges women face. Despite women being disproportionately affected by climate change, they play a crucial role in climate change adaptation and mitigation. Women hold important knowledges and understandings of what is needed to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to come up with practical solutions, making it imperative to have them at the discussion tables.

Women and girls as agents of Change and Resilience

The future of environment is daunting, but it’s not all grim. Women are consistently showing remarkable resilience around the world. They’re leading climate action movements, championing clean sources of energy, and building alternative models of community that focus on sustainability and cooperation. It’s really important to emphasise that women aren’t merely helpless victims when it comes to climate change, but extremely important agents of transformation in their countries and communities.

While we should not lose sight of the structural nature of gender inequalities and vulnerabilities to negative climate impacts, we cannot overlook how these impacts are not simple reproductions of existing patterns of gender inequality. These developments can and have, in many cases, included in them disruptions to personal and economic ways of life that lead to new forms of gender relations and possibilities for resistance and resilience.

Women do not lack agency in this space. According to Balgis Osman-Elasha, the Principal Investigator with the Climate Change Unit of the Higher Council for Environment & Natural Resources in Sudan, “For a long time women have historically developed knowledge and skills related to water harvesting and storage, food preservation and rationing, and natural resource management. In Africa, for example, old women represent wisdom pools with their inherited knowledge and expertise related to early warnings and mitigating the impacts of disasters. This knowledge and experience that has passed from one generation to another will be able to contribute effectively to enhancing local adaptive capacity and sustaining a community's livelihood.” An example of this can be found in Sara Gabriellsson and Vasna Ramasar’s study in West Kenya, which provided evidence that widows and divorced women (due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic) have become agents of change, collectively organising and leading the way in innovations such as rain-water harvesting.

For women with partners away for work, the results often mean a larger workload on farms, and difficulties accessing finance and equipment due to historical lack of social power and access to markets. In some circumstances, however, women may experience increased economic autonomy and opportunities to set up small enterprises in the absence of their partners.

Climate change represents the most complex challenge of our time – it requires a concerted, proactive and holistic response. Gender inequality may dramatically limit the resilience and adaptive capacity of women, families and communities. It may also restrict options for climate change mitigation. Evidence shows that women’s empowerment and advancing gender equality can deliver results across a variety of sectors, including food and economic security and health. It can also lead to more environmentally-friendly decision making at household and national levels. Women hold critical local knowledges that can enhance climate adaptations and assist the development of new technologies to address climate change in areas related to energy, water, food security, agriculture and fisheries, biodiversity services, health, and disaster risk management. It is, in this way, absolutely necessary to adopt a feminist perspective on the climate crisis, so we can start to confront this emergency from a standpoint that can offer a more holistic understanding of where our problems lie and, as such, some of their solutions.

Article by Helena Leonardo

Helena is a freelance educator and writer, trained in the fields of sociology and cultural studies. Her current mission is to take part in the advancement of the regenerative development paradigm through theoretical, empirical and active investigation on the transformational potential of intersectional ecofeminism, cooperativism, community-building and the ecovillage movement.

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