The consequences of climate change are not experienced evenly, and women – who are less likely than men to own productive assets and are more dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods – are likely to be disproportionately affected.
The effects of climate change, such as changes in temperatures, precipitation and biodiversity loss, are affecting human health, food security and livelihoods,1 as well as the quality and availability of land, water and other natural resources. As individuals are intrinsically linked to their environment, climate change poses a serious threat to every aspect of human life. It has been long recognized that the consequences of climate change are not experienced evenly, and women – who are less likely than men to own productive assets and are more dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods – are likely to be disproportionately affected.
Social norms often put women in charge of gathering food, collecting water and fetching fuel for cooking and heating – chores that are increasingly time-consuming as climate change affects the availability and quality of these resources. Women’s capacity to cope with the effects of climate change is also hindered by their overall disadvantage: they are overrepresented among the poor, face barriers to decision-making, experience disproportionate mobility challenges and face unequal access to resources.
RELEVANT SUSTAINABLE GOALS
To put in place inclusive strategies that increase the resilience of women and men in all their diversity, there is an urgent need to better understand the gendered effects of climate change across countries. To achieve this, this paper explores the connections between phenomena related to climate change and gender related outcomes in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, the Philippines and Timor-Leste. In particular, it tests these associations by utilizing random forest machine learning techniques and binary logistic regression analysis, on a data set that integrates data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and geographical information systems (GIS).
Findings suggest that climate-related factors are statistically associated with gender related outcomes in all five countries, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables such as wealth, education and age. As expected, the clearest connections are found with the availability of clean water and fuel in households, thus highlighting that increases in relative aridity, temperatures, the risk of floods and the frequency of droughts may impact women’s fuel and water collection burdens across all countries considered. Strong associations were also observed between these climate related variables and child marriage and adolescent births, particularly in countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal or Cambodia, where social norms support these practices overall. Connections between climate related variables and the prevalence of intimate partner violence were milder and differed across countries.
These findings demonstrate the potential consequences that climate change may have on gender equality and women’s empowerment. They are a warning sign that the two issues cannot be addressed in isolation, and they shed light on the important data gaps hindering further analysis in this regard, including intersectional and multidimensional analysis that truly captures the complexity of these relations.
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