NEWS

Climate change is not ‘gender neutral’

05/12/2008

Lauren Morello, ClimateWire reporter

In the late 1970s, Wangari Maathai helped start the Green Belt Movement in her native Kenya. The idea behind it is simple: By planting trees, women in Kenya help improve the environment and make their own lives easier by ensuring a steady supply of wood for cooking.

Now, after 30 years and 40 million trees planted, Maathai—who in 2004 won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts—is warning that climate change could erase those gains. "Women, especially in the developing world, are dependent primarily on natural resources," she told reporters last week in Washington. "The land, the forests, the mountains."

In times of trouble, that often means poor women don’t have the resources to move away and start anew. "Men are who we usually see at borders," Maathai said. "When there is drought, when there is crop failure, it is the women and the children who are the most adversely affected."

Wangari Maathai. Photo by Mia MacDonald, courtesy of the Green Belt Movement.

It is an idea that is starting to gain a toehold with international aid and sustainable development organizations thinking about how to help developing countries adapt to global warming. Among the groups now examining the climate-gender link are ActionAid, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, Church World Service and the National Wildlife Federation, experts said.

"A lot of adaptation work is done by economists, and then people say, ‘Oh, we need to look at social issues,’" said Kate Raworth, a senior researcher on climate change for Oxfam GB. "But they are not separate."

Last year’s U.N. Human Development Report noted that climate change is already affecting women and girls in the Horn of Africa, where rising temperature over the last century has shifted water patterns. They now have to walk farther to collect water for their families, the report found.

A more dramatic example, experts said, is the emerging link between climate change and AIDS in Africa.

Growing link between climate and AIDS

In many African countries, women grow food crops like sorghum and millet using simple rain-fed agriculture techniques, while men raise cash crops like cotton or cultivate livestock. In times of drought, when crop failures loom, that pattern changes. Men looking for money migrate to urban areas to trade or find low-wage jobs. Women have fewer options.

"They can’t sell off goats, get a loan or get a higher-paying job," Raworth said. "They are forced to sell the only asset they have, their bodies."

The end result can be a spike in HIV infections when drought looms. This effect has been documented in the African nation of Zambia, which has experienced sustained drought in recent years.

"Many girl-children are married off early, usually to older men who have had numerous sexual partners," reads a recent report by Energy and Environmental Concerns for Zambia, a nongovernmental organization. "Selling illicit sex for money is not an uncommon occurrence in rural Zambia anymore. Many rural folk migrate to urban centers where they engage in trading to earn a living and are more likely to get infected [with HIV], bringing the virus back to the community upon return."

It is a problem that could spread in coming decades, said Ilana Solomon, a food rights policy analyst with ActionAid USA, who noted that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that by 2020, yields from Africa’s rain-fed agriculture could fall by half, thanks to a pattern of rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall.

For groups examining climate change’s gender divide, the challenge now is to spread their message to policymakers as the world develops a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Increasing the risks to the most vulnerable

"The challenge of climate change is unlikely to be gender-neutral, as it increases the risk to the most vulnerable and less empowered social groups," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted in a January report.

But at U.N. climate negotiations last December in Bali, main-table discussions on adapting to climate change focused on "the poorest countries, the most vulnerable communities," said Solomon, who attended the negotiations in Indonesia. "But there was no mention of women specifically. They really didn’t break down who the most vulnerable communities are."

A handful of governments and NGOs are starting to take matters into their own hands.

The Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) is working with the governments of Ghana, Senegal, Trinidad and Nepal on a series of case studies that will examine the interplay between gender and climate adaptation and mitigation.

"We want to figure out where the money is going," said Cate Owren, WEDO’s sustainable development program coordinator. "Where is adaptation funding coming from? Who’s getting the money? And who’s benefiting? We want to come out of this with some lesson learned we can use to influence policy at the international level."

Meanwhile, the British government has commissioned the U.K.-based Institute of Development Studies to write a paper on gender and climate change as part of a £100 million climate research effort.

And Oxfam is finishing a documentary examining how climate change is affecting women. Called "Sisters on the Planet," it is intended to have a global reach. "We want those videos to be used with middle-class voters around the world," Raworth said. "I’m very keen to take it away from an expert, niche issue."