Vibhuti Patel
(Second part of the paper ‘Gender Concerns in Climate Change Discourses’)
Limited Ownership and Entitlements:
Women possess a unique capacity and knowledge to promote, and to provide for adaptation to, and mitigation of climate change, but often have insufficient resources to undertake such initiatives.
Women are constrained by a lack of economic freedoms. property and inheritance rights, as well as access to financial resources, education, and new tools, equipment, and technology. Women are underrepresented in the development and formulation of policy and decision-making in regards to adaptations and mitigation of climate change.
Political Inequality:
Compounding this reality is the widespread gender inequities existing throughout the policy and decision-making spheres, leaving women to struggle against restricted access to information and education, restricted mobility, and in many cases laws restricting or prohibiting land ownership.
Women are producing 60% of food in Asia and 80% in Africa, yet women have access to 1% of agricultural credit worldwide. (Source: WEDO). In India, for example, where women have seen their crop yields cut in half and the quality of grain diminishes because of climate changes, women’s health is impaired from the double whammy of inferior crops and inequality.
Acute survival struggle
Climate Change has made the search for livelihoods tougher, created greater food insecurity, caused sharp declines in the quality of life, and triggered mass migrations. Food insecurity due to disasters affects women the most as they eat last, least and left over food. The Economic Survey, Gol, 2024 has also highlighted micro-level studies which had revealed that adverse impact of climate disasters on girls’ education and nutrition, food security and livelihoods of communities facing multiple marginalities.
Indian women born during floods in the 1970s were 19 per cent less likely to have attended primary school. So clearly the vagaries of climate change have the potential to make life a high-risk venture for those whose capacity to manage these risks, in terms of both personal choice and personal income is minimal.
Lessons of Chipko and Appiko
The women of Reni village in Chamoli district took on the forest mafia through their Chipko movement in the mid-70s, and the Bhil tribal women of Madhya Pradesh’s Sondwa Block, are today patrolling their forests to defeat the designs of those intent on denuding them. With able- bodied men searching for livelihood opportunities in the cities, more women than ever are left to do low paying agricultural jobs, including activity earlier prohibited to them, like ploughing.
In the current times, landslides and unseasonal foods due to melting of snow have become regular features in the Himalayan regions devastating hundreds of thousands of people. Such disasters also make vulnerable women and children the targets of traffickers and predators of sexual violence and slave labour.
Testimonies at public hearing
Gouri Bai belongs to a small hamlet in Bundelkhand. Being a part of the farming community, her life and livelihood depend on agriculture. But changing weather and decreasing water for irrigation are threatening her survival. The vagaries of nature have left her steeped in debt and poverty. Shyamali Das from the Sundarbans in West Bengal has been witness to many cyclones that have struck the area in recent times. Cyclonic storms flooded vast tracts of farm land, which remained inundated for a long time. As member of a fishing community, she suffered losses of 20 fish species. “Accept us and our knowledge as a base to adapt and mitigate climatic changes.”.
Hundreds of women have reported increased burden of care giving due to climatic disasters. As primary care givers, women may see their responsibilities increase as members of family suffer increased illness due to exposure to vector borne diseases such as malaria, water bome diseases such as cholera and increase in heart stress mortality. Increased malnutrition and stressful life enhance morbidity levels among women.
Global Success Stories
Wangarai Maathai, Winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize successfully implemented The Greenbelt Movement in Kenya, one of the leading worldwide climate change projects. Sahena Begum spearheads community efforts in her village in Bangladesh and focuses on preparing women for disasters, giving them tools and basic skills to survive and prepare for the floods and cyclones that frequent her village and that are getting increasingly worse and more unpredictable.
Women are pivotal to the efforts to control erosion due to land degradation in the rural community of Keur Moussa, Senegal, under the framework of the Agrobio Niayes Program by ENDA Pronat. Women are also involved in building vegetation fascines, infiltration ditches, and open trenches to slow water speed. This has not only helped to save the agriculture but also reduced the time women spend getting water and women have been able to trade herbal plants. Adaptation programs like these that specifically target and involve women allow women to develop capacity as well as increase the capacity of the communities these women support.
Respect collective wisdom of women
Gender economists firmly believe aggregating local knowledge and recent breakthroughs in agricultural and environmental R&D, and using the insights so gained for better management of natural resources. The sharing of information as efficiently as possible emerged as an urgent and pressing requirement. whether it was in the form of advance bulletins on weather patterns or timely data on market trends.
Farmer Sita Debi says in blog Find Your Feet, “When there is no rain, we women have to work really hard in the fields to try and grow crops. Our nutrition also suffers because we are the last to eat at the family table. A lot of us are and emic as a result. Women have to walk long distances for potable water, Fodder becomes scarce and Fuel wood cannot be availed.”
Women Farmers Response to the Corporate World
Food is a human right and not a corporate commodity for speculation. Mother nature does not operate on a boardroom profit. Corporate profit will merely lead to more food crisis.
An inspiring experience of Indian women to mitigate the effects of Climate Change merits attention. In Zaheerabad, Dalits (the suppressed) women forming the lowest rung of India’s stratified society, now demonstrate adaptation to climate change by following a system of interspersing crops that do not need extra water, chemical inputs or pesticides for production. They grow 19 types of indigenous crops in an acre, on arid, degraded lands that they have regenerated. A collective of 5,000 women spread across 75 villages in this arid, interior part of southern India is now offering a chemical-free, non-irrigated, organic agriculture as one method of combating global warming.
Vast Renewable Energy Potential could help in responding to this scenario. provided “policy and finance measures quickly scale-up proven technologies for the poor, including small hydro and solar power. Promotion of Rain water harvesting, decentralised water bodies, recycling and reusing resources must become our way of life. Efforts such as Green Belt movement in Africa and Bhoogyan in South Asia need to be universalized. Bhoogyan as an Integrated Knowledge System on Climate Change Adaptation by Oneworld.org is designed to cater to the needs of communities vulnerable to the dangerous impacts of climate change.
This web-based technology solution provides contextual knowledge on local and indigenous coping strategies to grassroots communities through multiple delivery channels, including the mobile, internet and radio. Communities in turn access on-demand knowledge through mobiles, based on geographical specifics and in local language, on crucial adaptation and risk reduction measures.
Vibhuti Patel is a distinguished Visiting Professor IMPRI and Former Professor, TATA Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai.
Part 2 of Gender, Climate, and Development: An Ecofeminist Perspective on Women’s Vulnerabilities
The article was first published in People’s Reporter as Gender Concerns- In Climate Change Discourses- Acute Survival Struggles on August 25, 2024.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
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Acknowledgment: This article was posted by Bhaktiba Jadeja, a research intern at IMPRI.
