Women in rural areas suffer substantially greater economic losses from the impacts of climate breakdown than men in developing countries, finds a new research by the Food and Agriculture Organization.
The study said: The gap between economic losses of women and men is likely to widen further.
The report, The Unjust Climate, Measuring the impacts of climate change on rural poor, women and youth, said: Households headed by women in rural areas lost about 8% more of their income to heat stress than male-headed households, and their reduction in income when floods struck was about 3% greater than the loss to men.
HEAT, FLOOD AND WOMEN’S LOSS
According to the data released by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Tuesday, the difference, taken across the world’s low- and middle-income countries, adds up to about an extra $37bn lost to women from heat stress and $16bn extra from floods each year.
The “report assembles an impressive set of data from 24 low- and middle-income countries in five world regions to measure the effects of climate change on rural women, youth and people living in poverty. It analyses socioeconomic data collected from 109 341 rural households (representing over 950 million rural people) in these 24 countries.”
The report said:
“These data are combined in both space and time with 70 years of georeferenced data on daily precipitation and temperatures. The data enable us to disentangle how different types of climate stressors affect people’s on-farm, off-farm and total incomes, labor allocations and adaptive actions, depending on their wealth, gender and age characteristics.”
The scientists estimate a 1C increase in long-term average temperatures is associated with a reduction of about a third in the incomes of female-headed households, compared with those of male-headed households.
CHILDREN AND WOMEN WORK MORE
Children and women also tend to have to work more when extreme high temperatures strike, with children working nearly an hour extra a week in rural areas on average, according to the report.
A report by the Guardian said:
‘Lauren Phillips, the deputy director of inclusive rural transformation and gender equality at the FAO and a co-author of the report, said governments were failing to take into account the factors that disadvantage women, and climate aid was not targeted in ways that would address the gender gap. She said the report was the first to quantify this clearly.
IMPACT ON GDP GROWTH
‘“This gender gap can have a very dramatic impact on GDP growth,” she told the Guardian. “We could increase GDP by 1% globally if we could reduce food insecurity for 45 million people, by focusing on women.”
‘Less than 2% of climate finance globally is estimated to reach small-scale food producers. Women are hit harder than men by the climate crisis in part because the impacts exacerbate existing inequalities, such as unequal rights to land tenure and a lack of economic opportunities for women. Women also tend to bear more of the burden of providing water, fuel and food. Governments and donors could address these problems with better targeting of assistance, Phillips said.
‘“Targeting women in ways that ensure their empowerment has greater benefits,” she said. “There are multiple gains and benefits from targeting climate finance at women. We need to intentionally focus on this, to get much higher returns on investment.”’
The scientists analyzed socioeconomic data from more than 100,000 rural households, representing more than 950 million people, across 24 low- and middle-income countries. They cross-referenced this with 70 years of daily precipitation and temperature data to build a detailed picture of how changes to the climate and extreme weather affected people’s incomes, labor and lives.
OLDER PEOPLE
The report by the Guardian said:
‘The study adds to a growing body of research that shows women and vulnerable people suffer disproportionately from the impacts of the climate crisis. The report also found that older people tended to be more affected than the young, who may have more opportunities to move to escape the impacts of extreme weather, and the already poor were more vulnerable than those on higher incomes.’
Maximo Torero Cullen, the chief economist at the FAO, wrote in the foreword to the report: “Climate change is widening even further existing income gaps in rural areas, pushing vulnerable people towards maladaptive coping strategies and ultimately making it harder for these groups to escape cycles of poverty and hunger.”
POORER HOUSEHOLDS
Poorer households were hit by losses about 5% greater on average than their better-off neighbors when flooding or extreme temperatures struck, the report found.
Phillips said: “What we found was that climate change was making the rural poor more dependent on agriculture. Agriculture will become more difficult as the climate changes further.”
MAIN FINDINGS OF THE STUDY
- In an average year, poor households lose 5 percent of their total income due to heat stress relative to better-off households, and 4.4 percent due to floods.
- Floods widen the income gap between poor and non-poor households in rural areas by approximately USD 21 billion a year, and heat stress by more than USD 20 billion a year.
- Long-term temperature rises lead to an increase in poor households’ dependency on climate-sensitive agriculture relative to that of non-poor households. A 1° C increase in average long-term temperatures leads to a 53 percent increase in the farm incomes of poor households and a 33 percent decrease in their off-farm incomes, relative to non-poor households.
- Every year, female-headed households experience income losses of 8 percent due to heat stress, and 3 percent due to floods, relative to male-headed households.
- Heat stress widens the income gap between female-headed and male headed households by USD 37 billion a year, and floods by USD 16 billion a year.
- A 1° C increase in long-term average temperatures is associated with a 34 percent reduction in the total incomes of female-headed households, relative to those of male-headed households.
- In an average year, households headed by young people see their total incomes increase by 3 percent due to floods, and by 6 percent because of heat stress, relative to older households.
- Heat stresses cause young rural households in low- and middle-income countries to increase their annual off-farm income by USD 47 billion relative to that of other households.
- Extreme temperatures push children to increase their weekly working time by 49 minutes relative to prime-aged adults, mostly in the off-farm sector, closely mirroring the increase in the work burden of women. ½ Rural people and their climate vulnerabilities are barely visible in national climate policies. In the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs) of the 24 countries analyzed in this report, only 6 percent of the 4 164 climate actions proposed mention women, 2 percent explicitly mention youth, less than 1 percent mention poor people and about 6 percent refer to farmers in rural communities.
- Of the total tracked climate finance in 2017/18, only 7.5 percent goes towards climate change adaptation; less than 3 percent to agriculture, forestry and other land uses, or other agriculture-related investments; only 1.7 percent, amounting to roughly USD 10 billion, reached small-scale producers.
