Inaction on climate change is holding women back

Sophie Rigg is ActionAid UK’s senior climate and resilience adviser and leads their climate policy and research work focusing on the intersection of gender justice and climate justice.

The climate crisis is drastically changing Amina’s world. With each passing year and every delayed or reduced rainy season, the grazing land her animals depend on disappears further.

Meanwhile, the riverbanks in her pastoralist community, in Isiolo, Kenya, have run dry, turning a lifeline into cracked earth.

Women and girls are the backbone of many communities across the world, yet continued gender inequalities mean that they are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis.

This is putting women’s rights further at risk and is holding whole communities back from being able to effectively adapt to climate change and address its impacts.

2022 alone has seen climate emergencies impact countries on an unprecedented scale, with every region in the world being affected by droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, and hurricanes.

Across pastoralist communities in East Africa, 90% of all open water sources have dried as successive rainy seasons have failed, making eking out a livelihood on this parched land a challenge.

Everyone in Amina’s community feels the strain when the rain fails, but the impact is always felt harder by women and girls. Climate change is putting women and girls – already disproportionately on the frontline of the climate crisis – at further risk of marginalisation.

Small-scale farmers like Amina are the backbone of the world’s food supplies, with one-third of food produced by women like her. When drought hits, they need to walk further to find water for their animals and when harvests fail, they can struggle to feed their families.

As ActionAid research has shown, women and girls in Amina’s community are at further risk of rape, domestic violence, and child marriage, which is increasing as the climate crisis worsens.

ActionAid research in 2022 in Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia and Nigeria found how climate change is increasing gender-based violence and putting girls’ education in danger. Climate impacts are pushing women and their communities from resilience to risk.

But women are not only survivors. They are powerful agents for change.

Women and girls have a unique and critical role to play in leading the fight against climate change and unleashing their potential is vital.

When disasters strike, women are often the first responders and play a critical role in rehabilitating their communities.

Amina is driving that change, helping to reshape farming so her local community can work with, rather than against, the soil.

That includes things from zero grazing, which prevents the overgrazing of depleted grasslands, to tree planting to prevent further soil erosion, to agroecology practices that enable her community to grow tomatoes, collard greens, and maize in the changing climate.

Unleashing the potential of women like Amina and creating space for their leadership could boost agricultural output, decrease global hunger by 17%, and help the world move towards a just and climate resilient future.

While these women-led initiatives are helping communities adapt to climate change, the tidal wave of climate impacts is overwhelming the resources available to communities to be able to address climate losses and damages.

Industrialised countries that have done the most to cause climate change have a responsibility to support women like Amina to recover, rebuild or even relocate in the aftermath of climate shocks.

With each passing U.N. climate negotiation, or COP, the unfulfilled promises accumulate as the planet warms faster and faster.

Countries in the Global South were promised £100bn a year by 2020 to help mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. The world is still waiting for this to be delivered.

And far too often, women’s voices are not at the forefront of discussions that would make this financing truly gender transformative.

At COP26, developed countries promised to double financing for adaptation, but we are yet to see a concrete road map on how this will be delivered.

These pledges are not only overdue but are a drop in the ocean in terms of the support that is needed to enable communities on the frontlines of climate change to adapt, let alone to enable them to address climate loss and damages and rebuild in the face of current climate disasters.

Adaptation costs are likely to reach $500 billion per year by 2050. Meanwhile, the economic costs of loss and damage in developing countries is estimated to reach between $1 trillion to $1.8 trillion annually by 2050.

Women like Amina need more than words. The time for inaction is gone and the time to deliver is overdue.

We cannot tackle climate change unless women are more meaningfully involved in its solutions and involved in ensuring that climate policies have gender equality at their heart.

The climate crisis is a gendered crisis that is putting women’s rights in danger. The failure to listen to those on the frontline of the climate crisis will hold us all back.