From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

4 RISK AND VULNERABILITY CLIMATE CHANGEPoor countries will be hardest hit through a combination ofdroughts, falling agricultural yields, more severe hurricanes, flooding,and storm surges. They will likewise face increased threats to health,for example from water stress leading to diarrhoea and cholera or thespread of malaria-carrying mosquitoes to new areas as temperaturesrise. The increased frequency of such incidents will leave communitieswith far less time between shocks in which to rebuild their assets andresilience.Within these communities, women will be particularly adverselyaffected. Women’s roles in rural households – providing food, fuel,water, and care – depend heavily on natural resources being reliablyavailable. When droughts, floods, or unpredictable rainfall makeresources scarce, women may be forced to spend more time caring formalnourished children or walking to collect water and fuel. Women’srelative lack of access to assets and credit leaves them more dependenton nature for a living, with all its increasing uncertainties.When women and men are pushed into extreme measures to copewith severe weather events, the consequences can be devastating. Inparts of Southern Africa, for example, researchers have found thatduring a drought the rate of new HIV infections rises. Why this correlation?Because if crops fail, many men migrate to urban areas to findwork as labourers and when they return months later, some bringback the virus with them. Likewise, parents may marry off theirdaughters at a younger age to men who have had several wives orpartners, in order to obtain cash from the dowry and to have fewerfamily members to feed. And some women, left in the village to copewith a failed harvest, resort to selling sex in exchange for money orfood for their children, because they have no other asset to cash in. 99Across continents, climate change is set to exacerbate the conditionsthat force people to cope in such extreme ways. Tropical and sub-tropicalcountries (primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia), wherepoor people have few alternatives to farming or pastoralism, willbecome hotter, drier, and more drought-prone, or wetter with moreintense rainfall and flood risks. The IPCC concludes that in someAfrican countries rain-fed agricultural yields could fall by as much as50 per cent as early as 2020, seriously threatening food security. 100259