Adaptation to climate change from the gender perspective

Project description

The Human Development Report 2007/2008 stresses five central problem fields in which climate change may intensify poverty: 1. declining crop yields (up to 50% anticipated for Africa); declining water availability (with up to 1.8 billion additional people affected): 3. rising sea levels and exposure to climate disasters (leading to the migration and flight of an estimated several hundred million people); 4. danger to ecosystems and food security; and 5. spread of diseases and infections (with up to an additional 400 million people exposed to malaria). Looked at from the gender perspective, this concrete list of anticipated direct impacts of climate change makes it readily evident that women will be disproportionately affected. On the one hand, women are highly vulnerable in that they bear the main responsibility for the health and survival of their families, and in Africa women, who continue to be chiefly responsible for providing their households with water, fuel wood, food, and fodder, are directly affected by the destruction and growing scarcity of natural resources. Climate change and its dramatic effects, extending from the spread of diseases and the loss of house, farm, and land to the destruction of (economic) communities and the outbreak of armed conflicts, thus inevitably raises the question of gender equity or of existing legal inequality and women’s continuing lack of decision-making power in developing countries (right to own land, control over resources, etc.). And – at all levels of society – women still lack equal rights and adequate participation when it comes to political decision-making processes concerned with measures to mitigate to adapt to the effects of climate change. Far from halting ongoing anthropogenic changes to the world’s climate, even stepped up efforts on the part of international climate policy will be able only to mitigate their impacts. The international community must for this reason come squarely to terms with the complex challenge of linking vigorous climate protection with both effective poverty reduction and the right to development. Over the years to come, there is every reason to expect large-scale financial transfers keyed to efforts to adapt to climate change. To what extent will these new transfers adopt, in addition to a climate perspective, a socio-ecological perspective of the kind needed to adapt to climate change? And to what extent will these efforts factor in specific questions bearing on gender equity and gender equality?Even though this debate occupied the international community – above and beyond academic circles and non-governmental organisations – as early as during the 1990s, the problem complex of gendered rights and responsibilities has received little attention in the climate debates currently underway. The result is that that very few empirical studies have appeared that seek to embrace the broader issue of: the gender perspective in the measures and policy instruments adopted by development policy to meet the challenge of adaptation to climate change.

First Results:
A cross-sectional analysis of instruments of development and climate-policy, in particular those in use by German development policy (Birte Rodenberg, freelance expert/consultant) has been published as Discussion Paper 21/2009 (German), respectively 24/2009 (Englisch)

Planned output:
One more study in this thematic field, an analysis, from the gender perspective, of climate-policy measures (mitigation and adaptation) in Kenya (Francis Lelo and Wanjiku Chiuri, Egerton University, Kenya) is commissioned.