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Gender
OpinionComment
Stephen Minas
Stephen Minas

Opinion | How climate action and gender equality are linked in the pursuit of justice

  • While climate change affects everyone, existing gender inequalities often mean it has a disproportionate impact on women
  • Climate change and gender equality are everyone’s business, and we can do much more to achieve these equally necessary and mutually reinforcing goals

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A Somali girl drags bundles of firewood for use as fuel for cooking near Jowhar town, north of the capital Mogadishu, in October, 2015. Clean tech can help reduce the drudgery that disproportionately burdens women, such as collecting water or fuel. Photo: AFP
Stephen Minas
The movements for gender equality and climate action are two of the great contemporary struggles for progress. The changes they both demand are long overdue. What is less often acknowledged is that they are also closely linked.
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While climate change affects everyone, it has a disproportionate impact on women. Existing gender inequalities are often to blame. For example, women on average face a higher risk of energy poverty than men because of lower average incomes, with lower financial capacity to switch to cleaner energy options.

With less access to land ownership in many parts of the world, women are more exposed to the economic disruptions of climate change. Agriculture is one example. In sub-Saharan Africa, women have accounted for around half of the agricultural workforce while owning or managing less than a fifth of the land. There is also research suggesting women are more likely than men to die in natural disasters.

Despite mounting evidence of disproportionate impacts, women remain under-represented in many of the rooms where key climate decisions are made. In 2015, just 12 per cent of the world’s environment ministers were women.

The flip side to dire statistics such as these is that empowering women is also a massive opportunity to accelerate the climate transition. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in 2018, gender equality is a climate “co-benefit” that can help enable “rapid and transformational change”.

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Indonesia’s female forest guardians fight illegal poaching, logging and gender stereotypes

Indonesia’s female forest guardians fight illegal poaching, logging and gender stereotypes

Studies cited by the European Capacity Building Initiative indicate countries with more women in parliament are “more likely to approve environmental agreements” and have stronger climate policies. That greater gender equality tends to correlate to lower per capita carbon dioxide emissions.

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