Women Will Suffer Worst Effects of Climate Change Sarah Milner-Barry - Quartz
go to original April 25, 2015

Surviving the Storm: Women and Natural Disasters tells the story of four women who lived through Cyclone Sidr, the worst cyclone to hit Bangladesh in over a decade. Through their dramatic accounts, the film explores the special challenges facing poor, rural women when natural disasters hit, and asks what more can be done to ensure their survival. (Naser Sohel)

Environmental researchers have made it clear that climate change will affect the world’s poorest more severely, and more imminently, than those of us in the more developed Western world. It is a particularly unpleasant reality of climate change - that those societies that have emitted the most greenhouse gases are not going to be the ones to bear the brunt of its destabilizing effects.

What is often missed in these analyses and forecasts however, is the fact that women make up more than half of the world’s impoverished population. Which means, generally speaking, that women will be more affected by climate change than men in coming decades.

The majority of these women work on the land, and are providers of food and water for their families. These practices are disrupted by obstructed access to natural resources caused by climatic changes - leaving women more susceptible to food insecurity than men, who are more able to work, and eat, outside the home.

...Studies have shown that women are at increasingly greater risk of gender-based violence due to higher temperatures, and shortages of natural resources. When women are less able to fulfill their duties as managers of the household, they are more vulnerable to domestic violence, and in the aftermath of disasters there has been a marked increase in the rates of sexual and domestic abuse towards women.

This is not to say though that women in the developing world should be seen primarily as victims of climate change. There are countless examples of women in the world’s poorest communities who have recognized their specific vulnerabilities in these instances, and subsequently taken action, challenging restrictive gender norms in the process.

...In central Mexico, where heavy drought has begun to affect the growth of subsistence crops, local farming women have pooled their knowledge of edible weeds, which are free to pick regardless of land rights, in order to fend off hunger. Their profound knowledge of the natural landscape helps fellow farmers determine which plants are more likely to thrive in increasingly dry conditions, which can replace unadaptive crops as environmental conditions deteriorate.

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