New age challenge for women

With each UNFCCC meeting, one is apprised of the galloping pace at which climate change is affecting the planet. Extremes of weather and natural disasters have become commonplace, with devastating floods in Africa and Asia, extreme cold or heat waves in Europe and the spectre of hurricanes in the Americas. But at every meeting one can see very few governments are willing to act decisively and women are not even considered in the debate. Without doubt, climate change will affect us all but the most vulnerable are women who could actually play a large role in curbing the effects of climate change. Yet they remain invisible in any decision-making effort. In every society women and men have gender roles but with climate change the gender inequality is magnified. Women’s historic disadvantages and limited access to resources and information and their limited powers in decision-making make them the most vulnerable to impacts of climate change. Women constitute the majority of the world’s poor, so they are disproportionately affected in any natural disaster. Take a look at the so called developed world. In the US, with hurricane Katrina, it was the impoverished women who were faced with deeper levels of poverty. Obviously, women living in developing nations face greater hardship. We have examples like the tsunami in Banda Aceh in Indonesia where women made up 55-70 per cent of the recorded deaths. In the 2003 European heat wave too, 70 per cent of the recorded deaths were women. With climate change, access to natural resources becomes a challenge. Rural women feel its impact the most when there are droughts and deforestation because they have to procure food, water and firewood for cooking and heating.

They have to work harder to secure these resources and have less time to earn an income or get an education. The girl child has to drop out of school to help her mother gather fuel and water. Climate change will also bring about scarcity in natural resources like water. Even in times of conflict it is women who remain alive to suffer as their husbands and sons get killed in battle mostly. In the Darfur region in Sudan where desertification has wrought havoc and civil war rages on, women are frequently abducted and raped. The vast majority of refugees in these wars, it has been noted time after time, constitute women and children. Women work the land, so they understand hydrology—the science of water below the earth’s surface. Rather than being perceived only as victims of climate change they should be viewed as positive agents of change. They can be key agents of adaptation to climate change. They understand the needs of the family (hence also the community) very well because they are the nurturers. If it was left to them to manage natural resources they would better ensure the planet did not exhaust its resources.

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