The climate crisis is not gender-neutral. Its impacts fall unevenly on women and men, not because of biology, but because of the social, economic, and legal inequalities that shape women’s lives. This is especially true in the Global South, where women face multiple risks rooted in their different roles, their relative powerlessness, and their restricted mobility.
Women perform the bulk of agricultural work in many countries, labouring in the fields where extreme heat is increasingly dangerous. When that heat destroys crops, women and girls are often first to suffer food shortages, not because they need less, but because they have less power at the table.
Heatwaves also drive spikes in domestic violence. Studies consistently show that men – particularly in disadvantaged communities with inadequate housing and no cooling – cope poorly with heat stress, directing their aggression towards women. In fact, the link between rising temperatures and partner violence is now well documented across many countries, rich and poor.
Prolonged heat often brings drought. In communities without piped water that means longer treks for women to fetch water, gather firewood, and forage for food, compounding their heat exposure and physical exhaustion.
Then there is flooding which damages clinics and severs roads, leaving women with reduced access to maternal and reproductive healthcare precisely when they need it most.
In rapid-onset disasters, like cyclones, women and children suffer disproportionately high death rates, often because early warnings never reach them in the fields.
As climate-driven disasters of all kinds push millions into migration and refugee camps, women face heightened vulnerability to violence, exploitation, and trafficking.
The answer to all this is not complicated: include women in disaster planning and climate policy. Globally, women are taking up climate leadership, from grassroots organisations, like our own Sustainable Keswick, to UN negotiating tables.
Adaptation policy and disaster preparedness are slowly beginning to reflect the insights of those who understand the risks firsthand.
Bangladesh’s Cyclone Preparedness Programme (CPP) is the clearest, most cited success story. Until 2006, the ratio of women to men in the CPP volunteer corps was 1:3, and women were receiving very little early warning information despite being at the highest risk of dying in cyclones.
The Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief set out to recruit and train female volunteers to close that gap. Today, women make up about half of the CPP’s volunteer corps, a programme that includes roughly 76,000 volunteers overall, run jointly with the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society.
Female volunteers can go door-to-door reaching women in the community in ways male volunteers can’t, especially significant where social norms limit women’s contact with unrelated men. In the Rohingya refugee camps, for instance, female volunteers focus on raising awareness directly among women, while male volunteers work at community level.
One final gender difference to ponder: women in high-income, though not low-income, countries are consistently more concerned about the climate crisis than men. Why is that, do you think?
Joe Human
sustainablekeswick@gmail.com
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