Thank you for this opportunity. In my modest view, in relation to the changed context of recent decades, climate change merits special attention. Kindly find some points suggested for your consideration.
Q1
In all regions of the world, women play a paramount role in the management, conservation and use of natural resources. Their responsibility for growing food and collecting water and fuelwood has made them profoundly aware of their environments and the devastating impacts of deforestation, desertification and other forms of environmental degradation. The evidence is clear: climate change is having gender-differentiated impacts, and in many cases is intensifying the constraints that already place women, especially those that are reliant on agriculture for their livelihoods at a great disadvantage. Social, economic, political and cultural factors influence vulnerability and adaptive capacity and may render specific groups more susceptible to adverse change. For example, an empirical study conducted in Malawi (Asfaw and Maggio, 2015) established that weather shocks significantly reduce consumption and nutritional outcomes with more pronounced effects where the share of land area owned by women is higher, which suggests that in the context of high climate variability, women involved in agriculture are much more vulnerable than men and less able to cope with shocks.
Rural women rely more on biomass than men (such as wood, agricultural crops, wastes and forest resources) for their energy and livelihoods and ecosystem services for food security (through agricultural production and/or natural resource harvesting). This places them at greater risk to the negative effects of climate change. These gender differences in the use of natural resources and ecosystem services also explain gender differences in exposure to risk and vulnerability to biodiversity loss and changes in access to and management of natural resources and in their adaptive capacity. In many contexts, women also have more limited access to agricultural advisory services and formal rural institutions, further reducing their opportunities to gain knowledge and information about adequate coping strategies and climate-smart approaches.
Increasingly, research is documenting that the workload on women left behind is multiplied many- fold because the nature of migrant work being uncertain, remittance from migrant males is often sporadic. Agriculture remains critical for the family remaining at home to survive. Not only must the women do household work and child and elderly care, but also generate income usually by taking on their husbands’ role in agriculture. This too without access to capital or credit, while negotiating existing agricultural services dominated by men, where the women have to overcome several cultural barriers. In many areas these single women called drought widows or flood widows, especially in Southeast Asia, by their communities, report increased incidences of assault and violence. Environmental / disaster-driven forced migration is likely to increase further, according to IOM.
It is clear that climate change affects everyone, yet its impacts are often not gender neutral. Due to their socially constructed gender roles and statuses in society, women and men may experience the effects of climate change in very different ways. In order to design adequate solutions, a gender-responsive approach is needed for a nuanced understanding of the root causes of vulnerability and the defining factors of adaptive capacity, allowing gender-based inequalities to be redressed effectively.
Q2
In a consolidated framework developed by IFPRI, the pathways through which climate change affects well-being at the individual, household, and community levels (kindly see . It can be used to promote a better understanding of the differential impacts of climate change on men and women and, similarly their differential responses. In the context of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change, this framework emphasizes the value of information, livelihood resilience, institutions, and asset accumulation. Ultimately, the policy goal is to tackle distribution of assets and decision-making where these asymmetries are the underlying cause of women’s vulnerability to climate change and strengthening national and local institutions, fostering coherence between climate and agricultural policies, financing and investments.
The gender-climate-change-agriculture nexus is complex. However, there is convincing evidence that a deeper understanding of different behaviours, realities and capabilities of women and men in the agricultural sector (especially in relation to the adoption of climate-smart agriculture practices), and the institutions and services supporting them (e.g. extension) services will have multiple co-benefits – both for productivity and gender quality (Kristjanson et al, 2017). Designing policy frameworks which enable coherence and convergence across the gender, climate and agriculture nexus are challenging as interventions need to manage trade-offs that may result in policy contradictions and they are more difficult to cost/quantify (IFAD, 2016). To identify technologies that are affordable easy to adopt/implement (particularly for women smallholders), government advisory services and climate information provision need to be tailored to the local agro-ecological conditions and benefit from multi-stakeholder processes through which local people evaluate and make decisions. A lot of good practices and materials exist that need to be upscaled.
Q3
On a positive note, while climate change can exacerbate existing gender inequalities in agriculture, it can also tap into women’s potential, if their role in adaptation and mitigation is recognized and they are provided with equal opportunities and equitable access to productive assets, markets, climate information services information, technology and training.
Women’s asset ownership was found to be significantly and positively related to uptake of some climate-smart practices. Where women have secure and rights : greater yields and increased food security is observed. When individuals had secure rights to land, they were more likely to use soil conservation techniques.
It was also observed that small-scale farmers with land rights were 60% more likely to make investments that prevent soil erosion. A study of 90 countries found that, as land rights instability increased, natural forests decreased. Increased land tenure security, in contrast, has been linked with decreased deforestation. Findings from Latin America show that female farmers tend to plant a diversity of crops, improving household resilience to the effects of climate change (e.g. Mexico and Bolivia) noting that women are playing increasingly important roles in maintaining knowledge about different plant varieties, as well as deciding which crops to plant, particularly as many men migrate away from the farm. Therefore therie is a strong business case to investing in women for climate-resilience .
There is an important opportunity to make use of previously underused (and under-recognized) abilities, knowledge and talents. To this end, a re-evaluation of agricultural practices and innovations will be required, hence the need for gender-responsive climate-smart agriculture.
Agricultural sectors feature in over 90% Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)[1] and more than 40 percent of the NDC submissions mention gender-related issues, at least 65 countries have considered gender as part of their national priorities either within the adaptation and/or mitigation areas of work. As countries and regional economic communities aim to mainstreaming gender in climate policy in the context of agriculture, especially in the implementation of NDCs, National Adaptation Plans and National Agricultural Stategies and Investment Plans, there are wide-ranging opportunities to develop interventions linked to key gender issues. This can bring about more effective and equitable participation of women smallholder farmers in climate change adaptation efforts and effectively enhance the overall resilience of food systems.
Future efforts need to aim to strengthen country-level planning, in harmony with private investors and development partners. In the increasingly challenging context of climate change, public programmes, such as disaster risk reduction and social protection, and insurance, will become increasingly important, by giving special attention to vulnerable groups, tailoring the insurance packages to different groups of clients (men and women, with or without a guarantee).
Crucial actions that support climate-smart agriculture also include the enactment and enforcement of conducive and inclusive agricultural policies and investments ; the improvement of relevant infrastructure and the distribution agricultural incentives; the provision of pertinent weather-related information, as well as weather, climate and extension services (equitable tenure, access and control rights as well as socially and environmentally sustainable technologies and employment opportunities. THese could be successfully advocated for by development agencies or NGOs, and they can make a real difference in enabling the development of inclusive food systems where rural communities thrive.
Investments however need to be significantly scaled up. Climate change adaptation in the agricultural sector is expected have a cumulative cost of USD 225 billion to 2050 (Lobell et al, 2013). Yet only 0.01 percent of all global grants address climate change and gender equality together , despite women’s proven pronounced vulnerability. Gender-responsive climate finance mechanisms are crucial to establishing sound policies and on-the-ground interventions. The two largest climate finance mechanisms, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the Green Climate Fund (GCF) have corporate dedicated gender equality policies and action plans, carrying gender-specific conditionalities and call for “projects that produce economic, social and gender development co-benefits”. This is a most welcome trend, that needs to be met with action and commitment from all stakeholders in the way forward.
[1] Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are specific climate actions outlined by countries in committing to the international climate agreement that was achieved at the conclusion of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015, to ensure the path towards a low-carbon, climate resilient future. INDC serve to clarify the overall scope of many national climate change plans and policies, including components such as adaptation and means of implementation
Mme Szilvia Lehel