Book 2 - Ebu

Guidelines on gender-ethical reporting
Special focus: The gender dimensions of climate change
To understand the different impacts of climate change on women and men, it is
necessary to consider the following issues.
• Women are traditionally responsible for care-giving in families and societies. Thus,
when a disaster occurs as a consequence of climate change, women do not have
the same possibilities for mobilizing and fleeing. In some cultures, limitations
are placed on their opportunities outside the home and on their ability to move
about—which are vital for survival.
• After a catastrophe and its consequences, displacements and increased distances
from vital resources intensify tasks performed by females. Girls and young
women are obliged to abandon or postpone their schooling or job training, with
consequences for the future.
• It is clearly documented that women’s vulnerability to sexual and domestic
violence increases when they live in refugee camps or temporary shelters
following a catastrophe.
• Migration as a consequence of climate change affects women who, in many
cases, are heads of households yet poor. Women are affected more severely than
men when forced to migrate and find new resources, while at the same time
responsibility for care-giving falls on their shoulders.
• Food crises associated with climate change have been linked to an increase in
early marriages for girls in some parts of the world, who are traded for money to
prospective husbands.
• Finding and carrying water, a vital resource for the entire community, is a task
traditionally carried out by females. When this resource becomes increasingly
scarce, the work load for females increases. School attendance and attention to the
health of women and girls drop as the physical distance to this resource increases.
• Nutritional status is a critical determining factor in the capacity to survive the
effects of natural disasters. Women are more likely to suffer food deficiencies.
When food is scarce women feed their children and other family members first, to
the detriment of their own health and nutrition.
• Weaker health generates conditions favourable to the spread of illnesses as well as
complications in sexual and reproductive health.
• Changes in agricultural production stemming from global climate change have
a crucial effect on the situation of women given their fundamental role in food
production. Women produce, harvest and prepare most of the world’s food.
Women are responsible for 75% of domestic food production in Sub-Saharan
Africa; 65% in Asia; and 45% in Latin America. 3
3. See video by Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations,
‘Closing the gap between men and women in agriculture’. http://www.youtube.com/
watchv=mpKF6e8k8MM.
11