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Governments are responding to today’s economic and environmental crises with a raft of policies designed to pull in private finance by being business-friendly. These include transitioning to industrial production based on biomass rather than fossil fuels, and creating new markets that allow the private sector to trade in the world’s ecosystem functions.
However, these novel approaches are fraught with risk. They are largely untested and look set to have significant social and environmental impacts of their own, especially because of the way in which they will ramp up demand for natural resources and land. Women are likely to be impacted particularly severely, mainly because of their involvement in managing and using natural resources, their role in small-scale agriculture and the production of food, and their lack of formal land tenure and involvement in decision-making processes. Negative impacts are likely to include denial of access to resources, loss of land for farming, and exclusion from the increasingly commercialised world of ‘bioeconomies’ and ‘ecosystem services’ markets. This will in turn contribute to the feminisation of poverty.
Women’s issues and environmental issues are often considered as being separate issues, which may not be all that surprising to some, given that in today’s world a significant part of the population lives in cities. But in many countries, and especially in rural areas, gender roles remain differentiated, and women continue to have traditional responsibility for supplying their families with food and water, and providing overall care for them, often without economic compensation. Thus most rural women’s activities relate to small-scale, subsistence farming, whereas men tend to dominate those areas that relate to commercialisation, throughout marketing and distribution chains. In Africa for instance, 70% of the agriculture is in the hands of women and 90% of women manage household water and fuelwood.
The growing worldwide interest in bioeconomies and ecosystems services markets, means that a small number of people — mostly men, many of whom have experience working with agribusiness companies and banks — are taking over more and more of the world’s farmlands, and the water and other resources that go with it, leaving everyone else with access to fewer resources, or none at all.xxi This thirst for land-based wealth is increasing rapidly, especially in the Global South, where lands are known to have a higher productivity.
Measures taken for tackling climate change haven’t really solved the problem they were meant to solve; on the contrary, climate change continues to happen and its effects continue to be felt worldwide. Rural communities and especially women are highly vulnerable to its impacts. Women’s greater responsibilities for crop and food production and preparation in most of the developing world render them more susceptible to the impacts of climate change: they must adapt these activities to declining water supplies, climate variability, natural disasters, pest outbreaks, changing precipitation patterns and other impacts of climate change on crop production.
Women are the most vulnerable to the land-grabs that result from this increased demand for wood. Women are the main food producers, they’re responsible for children, they’re the first to go hungry when food shortages occur, they have less secure tenure over their lands, they have less decision- making over their lands, they have less of a role in the cash economy and are often viewed as cheap labor.
During extreme weather events, more women die than men (or die at a younger age) because of a variety of factors, including:xxxii
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Gender discrimination
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Lack of access to resources and information
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Cultural factors (in developing countries, women often don’t know how to swim, for example, and their traditional clothes can impede mobility during floods)
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The added burden of a pre-existing traditional role as caregivers in the informal economy, which is exacerbated during natural disasters
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The increased susceptibility of pregnant women to malaria and other forms of disease (according to the World Health Organization), which are becoming more prevalent as a result of climate change.