CHAPTER 1
Climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation: why does gender matter?
Fatma Denton
Gender-related inequalities are pervasive in the developing world. Although women account for almost 80 per cent of the agricultural sector in Africa, they remain vulnerable and poor. Seventy per cent of the 1.3 billion people in the developing world living below the threshold of poverty are women. It is important that the consequences of climate change should not lead already marginalised sections of communities into further deprivation. But key development issues have been at best sidetracked, and at worst blatantly omitted, from policy debates on climate change. The threats posed by global warming have failed to impress on policy-makers the importance of placing women at the heart of their vision of sustainable development. This article argues that if climate change policy is about ensuring a sustainable future by combining development and environment issues, it must take into account the interests of all stakeholders. The Global Environment Facility and the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol can play a role in ensuring sustainable development, provided they are implemented in a way that does not disadvantage women and the poor.
What have unequal power between women and men, and global inequality, got to do with an environmental crisis as monumental as the possible negative impacts of climate change – which are predicted to have far-reaching implications for women and men? The answer to this question is not immediately obvious. Hurricanes, floods, and other incidents related to climate change affect whole communities, and should presumably therefore affect the lives of women and men equally. Moreover, ecosystems and extreme climate events are oblivious to boundaries. The planet is a global concern incorporating a multitude of ecosystems, peoples, and cultures. As such, it requires collective input in its management, protection, and ultimately, its sustainability. Yet climate negotiations could be seen as a parody of an unequal world economy, in which men, and the bigger nations, get to define the basis on which they participate and contribute to the reduction of growing environmental problems, while women, and smaller and poorer countries, look in from the outside, with virtually no power to change or influence the scope of the discussions.
More than a decade since it began, the climate debate continues to be fraught with difficulties. Protagonists have gradually awakened to the fact that the underlying capitalist and market forces are too important to ignore. The debate has swayed from an initial commitment to greenhouse gas mitigation to trying to get recalcitrant countries such as the USA to toe the line and ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Climate change negotiations such as those leading to the Kyoto Protocol reflect Northern priorities and interests. Issues facing people living in poverty – such as the question of how they can adapt to climate changes have been side-tracked or omitted.
Whilst delegates dwell on the 'shoulds' and 'woulds' of the Kyoto agreement, poorer communities in Mozambique and other developing countries know that it will take more than semantics to reverse some of the most catastrophic outcomes of climate variability and environmental degradation. Most less-developed countries (LDCs) feel that their need for adaptation strategies has not been met or received sufficient attention. In the interim, whilst international agencies haggle over who is best able to oversee adaptation projects, rich industrialised countries keep a steady eye on the costs. Endless discussions ensue over what some see as a miserly adaptation fund, but which others, in the North, consider to be generous. Ordinary people in rural Africa and other parts of the developing world are left to find their own ways of cultivating their land and resisting further environmental degradation, as ecosystems become more fragile and affected by climate variability.
Climate change is likely to accentuate the gaps between the world's rich and poor. It is widely accepted that women in developing countries constitute one of the poorest and most disadvantaged groups in society. A number of human practices are likely to worsen the current scenario of environmental degradation, and increase the build-up of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Among these are energy intensity, deforestation, burning of vegetation, population growth, and, ultimately, economic growth.
Women's contribution and participation can help or hinder in all the above scenarios. It has been well documented that rural women in particular play a key role in environmental and natural resource management. Women's active involvement in agriculture, and their dependence on biomass energy, makes them key stakeholders in effective environmental management. Hence, women and their livelihoods activities are particularly vulnerable to the risks posed by environmental depletion (Denton 2001). The need to diversify energy resources and introduce alternative fuels for household use constitutes an essential part of adaptation strategies.
Taking preventive measures well in advance has more benefits than reacting to unexpected catastrophes. To plan these, it is important to consider sectors of production, such as agriculture and fisheries, in terms of the division of labour between women and men, and to identify the different degrees of vulnerability of women and men to the negative effects of climate events. Building this analysis will require more research, but this would enable policy-makers to put measures in place to combat environmental degradation, with the aim of minimising the vulnerability of the women and men affected by them. In planning such measures, much can also be learned from existing mechanisms for drought control by regional groupings such as the Permanent Inter-States Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS). These help to build resilience, identify warning signs to give advance warning of problems, and create a sense of preparedness among women and men.
Ignoring women's contribution to environmental resource management
Women's absence from decision-making processes
Women are patently absent from the climate change decision-making process. The climate debate has not sought to address the existing marginalisation of women, nor their need to be integrated in environmental policies. Nor have the immediacy of global warming, the magnitude of such a phenomenon, or even extreme events such as the floods in Mozambique, succeeded in impressing on decision-makers the importance of placing women at the heart of sustainable development.
Increasing participation of women in UNFCCC bodies and the Kyoto Protocol is essential if policies are to promote rather than hamper gender equity. At the Seventh Conference of Parties (CoP7) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) held in Marrakech, Morocco from 29th October-10th November 2001, the delegate from Samoa called for a more equitable representation of women within the organisational and decision-making structure of the UNFCCC (UNFCCC 2001). Consequently, and as a result of other dissenting voices, the CoP7 thought it necessary to improve the representation and participation of women in bodies established under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. However, ensuring women's participation in these debates will not guarantee that the many issues faced by women in poverty will be addressed.
Poverty is linked in a complex way to exclusion and marginalisation, and this results in the absence of people living in poverty, and a lack of analysis of the issues they face, in macro-economic policymaking. Poverty leads to poor women and men being unable to make choices that might improve their socio-economic conditions, and protect natural resources. Hence, reducing poverty must be about ensuring that the poor have access to reproductive resources, control over and access to fertile land, adequate information, sound technologies, relevant skills, adequate sanitation, good irrigation strategies, and access to clean water. All of these are crucial to resource management and conservation of biodiversity.
In many cases, international debates have sidelined the priorities of the poor – particularly women – in favour of 'highbrow' discussions on technicalities including fungibility and certified emissions reductions. In addition, decision-makers, policy-makers, researchers, and development planners alike claim to represent the interests of 'the people', but use language that is seldom understood by the very people they intend to serve or represent. If addressing the negative effects of climate change is a prerequisite to sustainable development, then it is imperative that the debate is given a people's perspective.
The United Nations Conference on Population and Environment recognised the value of women in natural resource management, and their intrinsic importance was reflected in the Agenda 21 documentation. However, women are for the most part not well-represented in environmental policy formulation. The climate debate is perpetuating the under-valuation and misunderstanding of women's contribution to environmental management. While a great deal of lip-service has been paid to women's indigenous knowledge of environmental management and soil preservation, little is being done to integrate this local knowledge into mainstream policy. The African Women Leaders in Agriculture and Environment (AWLAE) came together partly to ensure that women's contributions in agriculture do not go unrecognised by policy-makers, researchers, and development planners.
Mainstreaming gender perspectives within conservation and natural resource management
As highlighted earlier, poor women are generally on the receiving end of the effects of increasing environmental degradation and depletion of natural resources, because of their involvement in, and reliance on, livelihoods activities which depend directly on the natural environment. For example, environmental degradation surrounding rural communities may increase the distances that women have to walk in search of clean water and firewood in order to perform their daily household chores.
The development sector as a whole, from energy to agriculture, seems to 'mainstream' gender issues as an afterthought. In addition, mainstreaming is done in small doses, with considerable time elapsing between times at which different development sectors adopt a gender analysis. In such an environment, policies which evolve from a gender perspective tend not only to be minimal and unenforced, but are also created in isolation from other key development sectors, and therefore offer little potential for poor rural women to optimise their skills and make significant gains.
For example, the 1980s witnessed a new form of green revolution in Africa, including within the Sahelian countries. Here, environmental management is hampered by the existence of fragile ecosystems and natural hazards such as drought and desertification. Policy-makers have particularly advocated reforestation projects. However, in addition to the wealth of services provided by forests to the rural poor, forests are known to be huge depositories of methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide.
There is little logic in involving women in environmental conservation and tree-planting schemes when only a small percentage of women have control over land. Development policy has still not addressed the structural constraints that curtail women's access to control and ownership over resources. Nor has it been able to ensure that women's expertise in land or resource management is recognised, or their effort compensated, through ownership of that land or resource.
Of course, it should be pointed out that while some analysts have emphasised the importance of women owning their own land as if land ownership in itself is a guarantee of economic prosperity, this is not the case in Africa. The majority of farmers in Africa are poor and getting poorer, mainly due to declining terms of trade, their inability to control prices on the world market, and ineffective national policies that seek to make profits from agricultural earnings. While the relationship of land ownership to productivity, and its potential for economic development, cannot be underestimated, efforts should be made to understand and ultimately address the causes of environmental degradation from a holistic standpoint, rather than conflating the single issue of lack of land ownership with women's growing poverty. To return to the example of tree-planting projects, scant attention tends to be given to other gender issues important to the success of these interventions. For instance, while women have often been used as promotional agents for tree-planting schemes, little attention has been given to the primacy of education in ensuring good resource management and environmental conservation. Minimal work, if any, is undertaken to hone women's indigenous knowledge and expertise. Through close interactions with forest and other ecosystems over many years, women have developed a wealth of indigenous knowledge of plants and their medicinal value. Sadly, this component of local knowledge has not widely been tapped into by policy-makers, and could be lost if it is not used (Agarwal 1992).
Peeling through different layers of vulnerability: potential impacts of climate change
Climate change is a threat to human security in general. A key priority in the current climate-change discussion is to ensure that decision-makers and key stakeholders alike understand the different types of vulnerability to climate change that women and men face, and their gendered implications.
According to Robert Watson, chair of the IPCC, 'vulnerability' can be defined as:
'... the extent to which the natural or social system is susceptible to sustaining damage from climate change and is a function of the magnitude of climate change, the sensitivity of the system to changes in climate. Hence, a highly vulnerable system is one that is highly sensitive to modest changes and one for which the ability to adapt is severely constrained.' (Olmos 2001, 3)
Vulnerability and adaptation to the adverse impacts of climate change are the most crucial environmental concerns of many developing countries, and particularly of those in the Sahel region. Different regions and countries face differing levels of vulnerability to climate changes, with commensurate differences in the vulnerability of communities and services affected by the changes. It is envisaged that climate change will affect a whole host of areas, including habitats, wildlife, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and hence the production of goods and services which depend on these natural resources. Climate change will result in severe adverse changes in soils, arid-lands, coastal zones, and tropical and boreal forests (Downing et al. 2000). In addition, wetlands and vulnerable species would be under severe threat.
The greenhouse gas emissions of African countries are insignificant in global terms; the major sources of emissions that exist arise from land-use changes and deforestation. However, West Africa, and particularly the Sahel, is one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change, due to its propensity to drought and desertification, and its dependence on subsistence agriculture. Vulnerability to poor rainfall is the most striking feature of the Sahelian countries in West Africa (Denton et al. 2002). Climatic uncertainty and rapid population growth mean that the Sahel region is continually under threat of a breakdown in natural balances. This poses a threat to Sahelian peoples' access to the basic human rights of food security and access to safe water, a sustainable livelihood, minimal exposure to health hazards, and education.
