As it will impact where people can live and whether they will have food, water, and energy, climate change is one of the most threatening issues of the 21st century. Even though there is widespread agreement that climate change will increase the vulnerability and suffering of many in the Global South, with unequal impacts across different levels, certain effects of climate change remain under-acknowledged. There is limited focus on gender as a vital component in understanding its impacts and forming adaptation strategies, Men and women have different ways of experiencing, understanding, and adapting to climate change owing to power hierarchies and socio-political complexities. As a consequence, women are often disproportionately affected by climate related issues, making it crucial to understand the changes that are currently taking place with regards to this phenomenon from a gendered perspective.
Water is one of the most sharply-affected resources by climate change. As of today, more than two billion people reside in countries that are experiencing stress on their water resources. As impacts of climate change intensify, this is likely to worsen owing to a rise in world population and a consequent increase in the demand for water. The UN reports that by 2030, water scarcity in some arid and semi-arid areas will be responsible for displacing between 24 and 700 million people.
Those that rely most heavily on natural resources or have the weakest capacity to cope with strained resources will be the worst affected by climate change. The reality is women are often the most vulnerable depending in part on where they live and how they earn their livelihoods—but mostly this is due to socially-constructed inequalities.
The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that those that are socially and economically-disadvantaged are disproportionately marginalised by the effects of climate change. A complex mix of social, economic, and political factors makes women, on average, more vulnerable than men. Climate change is expected to worsen these inequalities. According to the World Survey on Women:
Climate change and the food and energy crises pose serious and growing threats to sustainable development. Given their important productive roles, women are particularly vulnerable to the effects of drought and erratic rainfall, which can further exacerbate inequalities in access to and control over resources.
CASE STUDY OF INDIA: AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS
India exemplifies what the World Survey reports. Water problems related to climate change have already begun to surface in many parts of the country. According to Niti Aayog, a policy think tank for the Indian government, India faced the most debilitating water crisis in its history in the summer of 2019, affecting 600 million people who dealt with extreme water shortages. The situation has not improved much. Women bear the brunt of water scarcity simply because they are responsible for finding water for their family’s everyday needs. They often have to stand in long lines to wait for water, walk long distances to collect it, and even pay exorbitant amounts of money to secure water. In Chennai, news reports describe long queues of women with colourful plastic pots waiting for the next tanker to arrive. One woman described how her wait for water begins in the dark at 4 a.m. and how she spends her mornings first looking for water and then rationing it for washing, bathing, and cooking. This hinders her ability to get to work on time. Additionally, water scarcity affects women disproportionately with regards to sanitation needs. Not having access to water in schools may mean girls drop out upon reaching puberty. In India, 23% of girls drop out of school when they start menstruating due to lack of proper toilet and sanitation facilities, often owing to water shortages. When they do not have access to water at home either, girls and women are often forced to limit their intake of food and water and spend days without relieving themselves or waiting until dark for privacy.
The disproportionate effect of water scarcity on women is intersectional. Social relations such as class, caste, and age influence how biological difference translates into sex-based inequality. The public water system in India works in a way that continues to marginalise the poor in urban areas. Just like the woman in Chennai mentioned above, women—especially slum-dwelling women—across India are forced to scramble for water starting in the early hours of the day, affecting their sleep, productivity, and health. Therefore, the intersection of gender and class is extremely important in influencing hydrosocial relations and exacerbating inequality.
Women at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder face constraints with regards to access to water in stark contrast to how water scarcity affects their middle-class counterparts. These higher income women are in a position to hire household help (usually lower-class women) to manage their water responsibilities, such as collecting water, washing clothes, or checking storage tanks, while these domestic servants have to simultaneously manage their own households’ water needs.
Furthermore, disparities by caste and gender are also consistently reproduced vis-à-vis water relations. For a long time, water has been used as a medium of exclusion. Collecting water is a burden that women in both urban and rural areas have to bear. For Dalit women, this burden is augmented owing to their lack of ownership and restricted access to shared water sources. In rural areas, a large proportion of Dalit households are dependent on shared water resources or those provided by the state due to their lack of ownership of such. Due to various water access problems, Dalits are forced to collect water from various sources after travelling long distances. Rural women complain that upper caste men and women use physical violence in order to restrain them from using communal water sources, while sometimes they need to ask upper caste women to fill their pots for them by pouring water in from a distance.
Nikhil Anand, in his book Hydraulic City, writes that in Meghwadi, a recognised slum in Mumbai, water issues are rampant. During one of his interviews, a woman remarked, “water comes out of the pipe like a child’s piss,” while “gesturing with her little finger to indicate the fickleness and inadequacy of the service”. Anand points out that this requires many residents to spend their time “laboring” for water. The use of the word “laboring” here points to the fact that the work done by women in collecting water is indeed a form of labour, which goes unrecognised and counts as unpaid work. It is estimated that Indian women and girls spend 16.4 billion hours in unpaid care work daily, and with the onset of climate change and increase in water scarcity this is only likely to increase.
Difficulty accessing water makes it hard for women to earn their living, which in urban slums is generally essential for the functioning of households. There is evidence that suggests that women’s abilities to benefit from urban prosperity is significantly hampered by gender-inequitable division of labour as a result of unpaid work. Anand writes that, ironically, one interviewee, Kamla Tai, resigned from her position as a women’s rights activist to collect water. He writes, “her work on matters of gender equality were proscribed by domestic duties in the home”.
More thorough, gender-responsive research in this area could prove extremely useful in climate interventions and in strategies for adaptation and mitigation in urban and rural areas. However, it is important, when analysing women’s experiences here, not to see women as mere victims of climate related issues. Women can be community leaders and are often natural resource managers who can help develop strategies to cope with climate-related risks. Examples of women everywhere leading the way to a sustainable future are abundant, be it tribal women in Rajasthan becoming green entrepreneurs or colleges in the city creating female solar engineers or women-led self-help groups in Tamil Nadu, mobilising funds for water and sanitation. Integrating women in the planning and decision-making processes of climate policies and coping schemes would enhance resilience and adaptive capacities.
Mansha has an MSc in Emerging Economies and International Development from Kings College London and currently works in the renewable energy sector as an Analyst. She has experience working in both public and private sectors and is particularly interested in areas of gender and sustainability.