What is the relationship between gender and climate change? This literature review explores the gender dimensions of climate change, focusing on the differing climate change needs and priorities of men and women. It highlights the need for a people-centered approach to climate change responses, and advocates for an approach in which women and men have an equal voice in decision-making on climate change and broader governance processes, and are given equal access to the necessary resources. Gender-aware approaches already happening at the local level and the realities from those who deal with the consequences of climate change every day needs to inform global policy.
Climate change is often viewed as a purely scientific and technical issue. However, it is also a social, economic and political with profound implications for social justice and gender equality. Many climate adaptation policies fail to account for the role and agency of women, despite women often having expert knowledge on the environment.
In contexts where economic constraints and cultural norms restrict women’s access to paid employment, women’s livelihoods are particularly dependent on climate-sensitive sectors. For example, subsistence agriculture or unpaid care work including water and fuel collection. The effects of climate change are often felt most acutely by women and girls responsible for unpaid tasks around the household who find themselves travelling further to collect food, fuel and water. Men too, particularly when poor, may experience deep anxiety and stress when their rural livelihoods are undermined as a result of climate change and they are no longer able to fulfill their socially expected roles as providers.
There have been some positive steps but for the most part climate change policies and processes are either gender blind or, where gender issues are considered, an addition rather than integrated. Market-based policies around mitigation and low carbon development, such as REDD, are the most gender blind. The commercialisation of natural resources has lead to increased exclusion of the poor and landless, often women, whose livelihoods depend on forests products.
Climate adaptation policies too often ignore the agency, skill and experience women can contribute. Further, women are underrepresented in decision-making processes. At COP 16, they accounted for as few as 30 % of all delegation parties and under 15% of all heads of delegations.
Initiatives are emerging at global and national policy levels and local organisations are responding to women’s and men’s needs, promoting gender-aware, transformative approaches. Stronger links between global policy and local level realities and innovations are imperative. The report recommends:
- changing the framing of climate change and its responses. This will involve: acknowledging the linkages between mitigation and adaptation; moving responses beyond technical analysis to focus on social dimensions; and ensuring all climate change interventions and processes are gender aware from the outset.
- creating gender-aware politics and institutions. This involves: addressing underlying causes of gender inequality; finding alternatives to market-based approaches; promoting rights-based approaches to climate change; and learning from local -level, people-focused and gender-aware approaches.
- creating an enabling environment for gender-aware, people-centered climate change responses that contribute to social and gender transformation. This involves: continuing to build the evidence base of social and gender dimensions of climate change; developing methodologies for measuring gender impacts of climate change at all levels; and funding civil society at all levels to hold policymakers to account on their commitments to gender equality.
