Edited by Nalin Karthik and Trisha Jawahar
Naisha Khanna is a third year student of B.A. Global Affairs at the Jindal School of International Affairs and is currently a content writer for Arthaniti – JGU’s Economics Society.
Climate change is perhaps the most momentous issue of the twenty-first century. According to the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), individuals who are already disadvantaged and marginalised would bear the brunt of the consequences. The poor, particularly in developing nations, are likely to be disproportionately affected by climatic variability and change. Both men and women working in natural resource industries, such as agriculture, are at risk. The impact of climate change on genders, however, is not the same. Women are increasingly considered more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than male because they represent the majority of the world's poor, and because of their reliance on imperilled natural resources.
Women are vastly under-represented in climate policy and financing processes, even though women's leadership increases the effectiveness of climate funding by addressing women's diverse needs and capitalising on women's agency, strengthens climate innovation, and delivers stronger environmental and business outcomes such as stronger climate policies and more sustainable business practises. Participating in women's organisations, networks, and unions may also help increase economic empowerment and climatic and environmental results for women. As a result of social norms and gendered power dynamics, women already confront challenges to employment, engaging in productive and sustainable agriculture, and obtaining economic emancipation. These hurdles are becoming more severe as a result of the uncertainty and unpredictability generated by climate change.
How Climate Change Affects Women’s Economic Wellbeing
The influence of official and informal constraints on women's economic empowerment, such as policies, laws, social norms, and workplace practises, impact women's ability to adapt to changes induced by climatic variability and climate shocks. Norms that limit women's mobility imply that during climatic shocks, women tend to stay at home while men relocate, leaving women with increased care loads and diminishing food and water security . Thus, climate shocks have a disproportionate influence on women's access to employment and livelihoods due to effects on unpaid workload and time. Women perform a disproportionate amount of unpaid labour at home and in the community. Water scarcity, forest depletion, and rising temperatures can increase women's workloads related to care and household work, expose them to sexual violence, lead to productivity losses, and pull girls out of school to assist with these tasks. For example, when climate change increases the scarcity of water and firewood, women, particularly teenage girls, are likely to need to devote more of their time to obtaining these.
A net zero economy can be defined as one in which a balance is attainted between the amount of greenhouse gases emitted, and the amount removed from the atmosphere. Existing impediments to economic empowerment for women are expected to endure during the transition to a net zero economy[NK1] . Women earn less than males and are under-represented in some jobs and industries critical to the green economy and net-zero transition. Women make up merely 32% of employees in the renewable energy sector, where the number of employment might expand from 10.3 million in 2017 to approximately 29 million by 2050. (IRENA 2019).Women are more likely to work in low-wage, high-risk jobs amid climate shocks and the transition to net zero energy. Informal sector jobs typically have poor working conditions, low pay, and limited access to social safety (ILO, 2017c). The absence of labour standards and health and safety laws and regulations is exacerbated by a lack of collective bargaining chances to fight for better wages and working conditions .
Gender disparities in access, control, and use of assets (such as cattle, crops, and machinery) are ubiquitous in agriculture, resulting in gender-differentiated consequences from climate change and adaptation. Although there are changes depending on the nation, a variety of studies have indicated that women are more responsible for harvesting and food processing than males, own less animals and have smaller farms, and focus on subsistence cultivation rather than cash crops .Climate change may influence these obligations differently, but gender variations may also affect the adoption of adaptation solutions, such as climate-smart agriculture. A World Bank investigation in Bolivia[s2] , for example, discovered that males prioritise large-scale community interventions such as irrigation, but women prioritise practical improvements such as planting new crop types or augmenting conventional earnings with other output activities.
Women have a lower access to credit, which may be used to stabilize income in the face of climatic fluctuation or a climate shock. Moreover, women are less likely than males to own a bank account, save, or borrow in nations where women suffer legislative limits on their rights to work, lead a home, select where to live, and inherit. Women also have lower levels of education, lower levels of digital access for mobile money transfers, and lower ownership of physical assets such as land that may be used as collateral for loans. When a climate shock occurs, access to credit, microfinance, or insurance can be utilised to compensate for lost agricultural product or to invest in climate-resilient solutions such as new agricultural technology or alternative livelihoods.
Conclusion
We may explore the ways in which we can mitigate the challenges faced to women’s economic agency by climate change and increase their participation in the climate policy sphere. Social protection strengthens women's resilience to climate-related shocks, removes obstacles to economic involvement, and has a long-term beneficial impact on household productivity and labour-force participation. Moreover, social protection can supplement climate adaptation and disaster risk management programmes by reducing vulnerability and reliance on negative coping strategies in the face of shocks, serving as a stepping stone to climate-resilient livelihoods, or supporting inclusive disaster response .
Gender responsive social protection mixed with environmental, eco-system strengthening, or natural resource management goals can boost women's resilience, particularly among indigenous women, and yield significant environmental results. Given the uncertainty about how climate change will affect each individual, social protection is a low-risk investment that reduces poverty while addressing climate change vulnerability.
The following proposals could strengthen women's adaptive ability worldwide, particularly in underdeveloped countries. Climate change adaptation efforts should identify and address gender-specific implications, particularly in sectors such as water, food security, agriculture, energy, health, disaster management, and conflict. Furthermore, important gender concerns related to climate change adaptation, such as disparities in access to resources such as loans, extension and training services, information and technology, should also be considered.
Funding organisations and donors should also consider women's specific circumstances when developing and introducing climate change adaptation technologies, and they should do everything possible to remove the economic, social, and cultural barriers that may prevent women from benefiting and using them. Involving women in the creation of new technologies can help to guarantee that they are adaptable, suitable, and long-lasting. Efforts should be undertaken at the national level to incorporate a gender perspective into national policies and strategies, as well as associated sustainable development and climate change plans and actions.
Gender-sensitive climate funding can enhance both environmental and economic results. GenderSmart, a gender and climate investment working group established in February 2020, identifies five reasons for gender-smart climate finance: to mitigate reputational, social, and operational risks; to fulfil fiduciary duty and meet investors' expectations that capital is put to uses that deliver financial and societal returns; to drive long-term value by accessing new markets, new lines of business, new customers, and attracting and retaining talent; and to find new investees .While adopting a gender lens to examine climate finance is becoming more recognised as critical to achieving successful climate outcomes, it remains difficult for women's organisations to engage in climate finance processes or acquire money . For a climate funding instrument, a written gender policy or gender action plan is rarely sufficient. What is required is the systematic incorporation of gender equality into a fund's governance structure as well as its public participation mechanisms, including a dedicated role for gender-focused organisations and women's representative groups, for example, in determining funding priorities as participants in coordinating mechanisms or through roles in project design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation, particularly through participatory monitoring approaches.
As we conclude, it is essential that we recognise the several ways in which women suffer disproportionally due to the impact of climate change. In order to remedy the current paradigm and the skewed manner in which climate action processes are carried out, we must adequately comprehend the prevailing scenario in which there is a varied dependence of men and women. In order to ensure the effectiveness of climate action mechanisms, it is imperative that a gendered lens is adopted. To achieve a semblance of gender parity in our future, as we embark on adopting the aforementioned solutions, we must continue to explore and analyse the different socio- economic processes and how they differently transform for men and women. One must add a caveat here and acknowledge the mammoth task this is. It is challenging to make generalisations regarding the way different economies and systems will be affected by climate change, which is why bottom-up processes, grass roots leadership and inclusivity must be incorporated in this process. As daunting a task it may, it is one which warrants a sincere attempt, and has the fate of several lives resting upon it.
CITATIONS
1. Ajani, E., Onwubuya, E., & Mgbenka, R. (2013). Approaches to Economic Empowerment of Rural Women for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation: Implications for Policy. Journal of Agricultural Extension, 17(1), 23. https://doi.org/10.4314/jae.v17i1.3
2. Andrijevic, M., Crespo Cuaresma, J., Lissner, T., Thomas, A., & Schleussner, C. F. (2020). Overcoming gender inequality for climate resilient development. Nature Communications, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19856-w
3. Awiti, A. O. (2022). Climate Change and Gender in Africa: A Review of Impact and Gender-Responsive Solutions. Frontiers in Climate, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2022.895950
4. Gender, labour and a just transition towards environmentally sustainable economies and societies for all. (2017, November 7). ILO. https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/equality-and-discrimination/publications/WCMS_592348/lang--en/index.htm
5. Nwogwugwu, N. (2019). Women, Climate Change, and Sustainable Development in Africa. The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77030-7_133-1
6. United Nations. (n.d.). Women. . .In The Shadow of Climate Change. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change#:%7E:text=Women%20have%20limited%20access%20to,able%20to%20confront%20climate%20change.
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