One of the effects of flooding (From Gender and the Climate Change Agenda)
With the ongoing debate (endless and ineffective) about the impact of global warming–and the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile–this report is timely. The UK-based Women’s Environmental Network has just released a report titled “Gender and the Climate Change Agenda.” The main conclusions are that “[g]lobally, women are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to different and unequal social roles and status” and that “[w]omen contribute less to climate change, are impacted more by it, and have less say in decisions about the problem.” (See treehugger.com for more analysis of the report.)
For example, 10,000 women die each year from weather-related disasters such as tropical storms and droughts, compared to about 4,500 men. And women comprise 20 million of the 26 million people estimated to have been displaced by climate change. The report says that global warming (and its impacts on such things as food production, severe storms, and drought), impact the world’s poorest nations the hardest. As a consequence, women make up 80 percent of “climate refugees.”
The report cites the recent “Human Impact Report” from the Global Humanitarian Forum, which estimated that “300,000 people are already dying each year as a result of climate change, of which 14,500 deaths are directly caused by weather-related disasters attributable to climate change, and it is highly likely that the majority of these victims are female.” The differences are most pronounced in countries that have the strongest gender inequality. The reasons for this are staggering:
Experience from recent disasters supports [the fact that the majority of victims are female]: in the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh, the mortality rate for women aged 20-44 was 71 per thousand, compared to 15 per thousand men of the same age – almost five times higher for women. Reasons for the disparity include women not having been taught to swim, clothing restricting mobility and cultural norms regarding the preservation of female honour causing many women to leave their homes too late because they waited for a male escort. In addition, men were able to warn each other of the danger as they met in public spaces, but only conveyed the information back to their families sporadically. Similarly, one factor in the higher female mortality rates following the 2004 tsunami (although not caused by climatic factors) was women being unable to climb trees.
That is really hard to swallow. More women than men are being killed in natural disasters because of not being given the same opportunity as young boys to learn to swim or climb trees. Most egregiously, they are being killed because their culture does not allow them to go out of their homes without a male escort and deprives them of normal communication with people outside of their homes so that they are not warned of an imminent disaster. Not surprisingly, the men were more concerned about themselves than they were about their families.
On the other hand, in countries in which there was more equality between men and women, studies show that there was little or no difference in the number of women and men that died.
The report goes into many more reasons for why global warming has more impact on women than men. For instance, “i]n many developing countries, increased water scarcity linked to climate change is increasing the distance women must travel to collect water and fuel, and means that children, usually girls, are increasingly being kept out of education to help with the often exhausting task.” And there were more women killed than men in heat waves in Europe in 2003 and London in 1995, with the speculated reasons being related to “poverty, deprivation, living alone, vulnerability to associated air pollution, and the increased difficulty that women above the age of 60 have in regulating their internal temperature.”
As for Hurricane Katrina, the report says:
Women were disproportionately represented among those left in the city following the storm. Despite making up 54% of the population of the city, 80% of those who were left were women. In many cases, this was because they lacked the means to leave. They did not have access to the private transport that the authorities assumed in their emergency planning, or have the resources to pay for petrol or accommodation on leaving the city.
Not a pretty picture. Global warming should certainly have a high priority among feminist issues. The 65-page report from the Women’s Environmental Network reaches this conclusion:
Climate change is the biggest challenge humanity has faced, and will only be addressed through global cooperation. Yet the world is currently trying to do so using only 50% of its intellectual and social resources. This report has exposed the injustice of environmental policy and explored how women are directly, specifically and unjustly affected.
The changes that are required to tackle climate change have the potential to radically alter global political and economic systems, either for better or worse. We must find initiatives that deal with climate change and at the same time address the injustice of the current system, bringing about a fairer and more equitable global society, rather than allowing climate change policies to reinforce and exacerbate existing inequalities. Changing existing structures and developing the capacity of women to allow their equal participation in decision-making doubles our chances of finding effective solutions. Indeed, climate justice will not be achieved without doing so.
Emily
Mike
