Climate change will not affect people equally. Those living through its most adverse effects will have contributed least to the problem and have fewer resources to adapt to its impacts. For adaptation to succeed, the social drivers of vulnerability have to be tackled head on, argues Babette Resurrección.
The consequences of climate change reverberate through society differently for rich and poor, powerful and marginalized. Many families already live with the knowledge of the damage that droughts, floods, and salinization of soil and water bring. For the poor and marginalized, decisions about how to adapt to climate change are conditioned by insecure homes, communities, food supplies and incomes. And often it is girls and women who are especially exposed to new climate-related insecurities or are burdened with the strain of responding to disaster and adapting to chronic impacts.
For example, girls’ schooling and climbing literacy rates are a development success story, but climate-related stresses can curtail that success. In some climate-vulnerable countries, girls may be taken out of school to reduce the drain on household resources, while boys continue their education during the crisis period.
As a coping strategy, parents may also consider early marriage – placing their daughter in a less insecure home. But marriage does not necessarily offer protection. As ecosystems degrade from climate extremes, household burdens on women and girls can increase, forcing them to search for resources in unsecured areas, increasing their exposure to violence and sexual assault. Such threats are even higher if families are displaced by disaster.
Even adaptation initiatives that aim to address inequalities can carry risks if not carefully implemented. For example, many adaptation programmes inadvertently build on earlier models of interventions that simply add adaptation activities to the already long list of women’s responsibilities. Such an approach doesn’t empower women to exercise their rights over the use of their time and resources or benefit from these adaptation activities. Such programmes may also assume women to be a homogeneous group, ignoring vital intersections with class, ethnicity, age, sexuality and (dis)ability that compound their capacities to adapt.
So how can we effectively adapt and empower? By placing equity front and centre when designing policies, practices and interventions. This would make adaptation to climate change a transformative agenda, not just an instrumental act. As the first step in a successful transformation, planners and decision-makers need to understand the underlying drivers of inequity and how they make specific groups of women, men, poor, ethnic and disabled groups vulnerable to climate change. Research on gender and climate adaptation has identified three underlying drivers.
Adaptation measures that do not take into account drivers of inequality are likely to exacerbate social injustice and inequalities, which in themselves make adaptation less effective or even counterproductive. Nonetheless, there are examples of initiatives by NGOs, communities and governments that apply an equity lens to enable women, youth and ethnic groups to lead efforts to adapt to climate change.
What existing research and these examples show is that decision makers cannot sidestep social injustices and their root causes when planning and implementing adaptation interventions. It is social, political, economic and cultural factors that drive vulnerability: women’s limited access to and control over agricultural resources, such as land and capital, is not directly an effect of climate change but of social, political and economic practices and norms that discriminate on gender grounds. Guidance on applying a gender equality and social equity lens in sustainable development and tools for carrying out gender analyses can help decision makers understand the equity landscape and make efforts to programme accordingly.
At the moment, gendered roles, responsibilities and practices risk being taken for granted, remaining silently accepted and unaddressed in adaptation programmes. Delay in dealing with these inequalities and unjust conditions is likely to worsen the impacts of climate change.
Design and development by Soapbox.