It’s well-documented that the world is at a precipice when it comes to the climate. Studies have time and again proven that global climatological shifts are poised to push the world into a spiral from which its unlikely to recover from, with devastating and as-yet-unexplored consequences set to become the new norm.
What’s perhaps less spoken about, however, is the imbalance in the levels of impact that climate change has across the gender divide. Women, and those that identify as female, are often impacted more severely than men. But why exactly is that?
At Tariff, we’ve long been committed to exploring the ugly truth of climate change, and its far-reaching and often catastrophic effects. As a diverse workplace ourselves, it’s incredibly disheartening to learn of these inescapable gender divides, but by shedding light on them with articles of this nature, we’re hoping for to grease the wheels of change.
This International Women’s Day, we’ll be taking an uncomfortable deep dive into why women are often subject to unforeseen and underreported consequences as a direct byproduct of climate change. We’ll also posit some potential solutions, alongside what could happen if these issues are left unchecked.
While the wider effects of climate change are the subject of much focus, concerted efforts and yearly COP summits, there’s far more subdued a fanfare for how climate change affects society’s more marginalised or subjugated peoples.
That’s especially true for women and those that identify as female. We’ll explore 3 key issues that women across the globe face as direct or indirect consequence of the changing climate.
Childbirth and the maternal process are an exceptionally important aspect of any society. Not only is there the obvious benefit of continuing families and communities, but raising children requires a level of care that’s often attributed to the mother in societies across the world, and especially so in developing nations.
With climate change, though, comes an invisible and almost imperceptible risk to both expectant and new mothers globally. One of the more widely documented problems with changing climatological conditions across the world is a rising baseline temperature.
NASA’s Earth Observatory estimates that temperatures planetwide have risen by around 1.1° Celsius since climate records began in 1850, with much of that rise occurring in the last 50 years. While this is naturally a concern on a wider scale, and government’s across the globe are striving to keep that rise below the oft-touted “point of no return” at 1.5° Celsius, women are disproportionately impacted.
That’s especially true when it comes to maternal health, childbirth, and pregnancy, with issues spanning the full gamut of the pregnancy and birthing process. A recent quantitative study from Environ Health Perspect (Ha, S et al., 2017) irrefutably linked a rise in ambient temperature to a huge number of stillbirth cases across the US, with more research advised to gain a clearer picture.
A further paper from the Environ Reserve of Public Health (Kuehn & McCormick, 2017) appears to correlate with those results. The study found direct correlations between extreme fluctuations in temperature with a huge number of foetal and maternal issues, inclusive of:
This isn’t confined to more rural or underdeveloped countries, either. That same study from Kuehn & McCormick (2017) found that urbanised areas are at an increased risk of those rises in temperature with what’s referred to as the “urban heat island”, where large buildings and closely-compacted cities reflect back the heat to create microclimates and self-contained climatological issues.
Sadly, that only represents the tip of the melting iceberg for the dangers posed towards women, especially new and expectant mothers. Rising temperatures give rise to greater populations of viral and bacterial development, as well as offering a breeding ground for illness, especially those transmitted by insects that thrive in warmer conditions.
A paper from The Lancet found strong connections between climate change and an increased presence of vector-borne illnesses like malaria, Dengue fever, and Zika virus, all of which have well-documented histories in causing huge issues throughout the pregnancy process, and with birth defects and medical conditions.
Couple that with the scarcity of medical care in less-economically-developed countries, and the climatological issues that face women go far beyond the surface level we’re exposed to in news stories and at summits like COP28.
Climate change, while it undoubtedly has massive detrimental effects on both the environment and the global populace, is yet to be fully understood. That’s especially true of the wider reaching consequences of the insecurities and anxieties it leads to, all of which warrant focus in their own right.
One of the more heartbreaking of these is the intrinsic rise in domestic and gender-based violence (such as sexual harassment and violence, forced marriage, and witch killing) that the uncertainty and stresses of climate changes indirectly causes. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, but the mounting evidence points towards a distinct and indisputable link between the two.
A recent article from The Lancet’s Planetary Health division (van Daalen et al., 2022) was among the first to collate the data from more than 26,000 reports of gender-based violence, discovering the distinct parallels between climatological disasters (including flooding, wildfires, extreme heat, and storms) and a rise in gender-based violence.
That study posits several key causes that have their roots in climate change, including:
There are, of course, no excuses for these violent acts, but it’s clear to see that climate change acts as a key stressor in these scenarios. That’s especially true in more rural communities, and those nations that have less-developed local and national economies. It’s not always the case, though.
A 2021 study into the correlation between climate change and gender-based violence in Australia (Whittenbury, 2012) found a distinct impact on women’s wellbeing as a direct result of the suffering water supplies in more rural communities and areas across Australia (namely the Murray-Darling Basin in NSW and Victoria).
As explored in 2018 by The Guardian, the Murray-Darling Basin, despite a sizeable investment of $13 billion AUD (around £6.7 billion), has dried and salinised to almost unserviceable levels, displacing and failing the communities that relay on the basin and its interconnected network of tributaries and off-shoots.
It’s clear that we’re on the cusp of huge climatological change, and the drying up of the Murray-Darling Basin and the directly associated instances of gender-based violence are just the early stages of issues that are only likely to worsen.
Of course, this isn’t a gender-specific issue – labour is, for the most part, indiscriminate in the genders that undertake those practices. However, there is a definitive divide in countries that are less developed, or that are classified as a lower income country, meaning that women take on much more of the responsibility.
For instance, many poorer communities are predominantly female-led or have a disproportionate amount of women in their population, meaning that many of them are relied upon for livelihoods, water, food and even shelter. That’s inclusive of collecting water in villages and areas that don’t have immediate access to wells, and gathering materials for cooking and heating.
That’s inversely proportional to the amount of natural resources these women have access to, and climate change only serves to exacerbate the issues they face in regards to the work they do to look after their families.
Agriculture is often the hardest hit, and the UN postulate that a disproportionate amount of the workforce are female. That’s particularly true across the Near East and in African nations, where there’s a substantial amount of pressure placed on women.
An industry that’s undoubtedly dependent on key environmental factors, climate change disrupts those working processes, displacing women and making them more vulnerable to some of the factors we’ve already discussed in this article, as well as further, equally harrowing consequences such as human trafficking, forced labour, and sexual assault.
While that may sound consequence enough, it’s also worth noting that women typically tend to work harder, with the UN’s Women division finding that, globally, women spend 2.8 more hours than men on unpaid or domestic tasks.
This is further intensified by a lack of fundamental education and an increasing scarcity of educational resources for women. Statistics from the UN illustrate that all too well, with female illiteracy rates (55%) being far higher than those of men (40%) across the whole of Africa.
Without access to those resources, mobility for women is significantly limited, meaning those issues and the pressures placed on women are cyclical, and aren’t likely to end without the investment placed in the right places.
This is difficult to say. The sincere hope of everyone involved at every level of the fight against climate change, including us here at Tariff, is that the situation will change for the betterment of women and those that identify as such. Without concrete evidence, however, it’s difficult to predict whether or not things will change.
What we do know is that the UNFPA (the UN’s agency for sexual and reproductive health) has outlined 3 key steps for creating a more equal and fair society for women worldwide. These involve:
These encompass much of what we’ve already discussed in the article above, as well as offering a safer future for those who have children. Each of those steps are, as yet, a long way away, with the connections between gender-based violence and climate change still at an embryonic stage.
Similarly, the UN’s Framework for Action on Feminist Climate Justice outlines a rosier view of a future beyond climate change, campaigning for a “world in which everyone can enjoy the full range of human rights, free from discrimination”.
They opt for a four-pronged approach to combatting the threat of climate change for women. Those include:
These are robust documents, and while it will be a long time before we begin to see any tangible benefits from those documents. They do herald a new era, but it’s one that’s still a long way away, especially with so much change needed, and – as we’ve seen – so far across the globe.
There is a silver lining, however. The United Nations Development Programme determines the global levels of gender inequality with its Gender Inequality Index (GII). It takes into account three key factors – reproductive health, empowerment, and the labour market.
Since the records began in 1990, the world as a whole has seen year-on-year improvements across all 3 factors. The chief among these is a substantial increase in worldwide levels of both the women educated to at least secondary level (up to 64.2% in 2021 from 36% in 1990) and the percentage of women in parliamentary roles (up to 25.9% in 2021 from 11.5% in 1990).
Of course, there’s still much to do. Countries like Papua New Guinea and Yemen fall far below those averages, and represent the work that still needs to happen, especially in conjunction with the UN’s continuing work across the globe, in order for us to achieve equality across the planet.
Ultimately though, the seeds of change have been sown, and while we’re still yet to see the sprouts of growth and development show through, there is some element of positivity to the reports we’re seeing from the UN.
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