Gender relations are changing along with climate

IRIN: A changing climate will inevitably have an impact on gender relations in rural communities, but not enough is being done to boost the resilience of women - already disadvantaged by traditions of inequality.

The UN International Strategy for International Risk reduction (UNISDR), has been arguing for  mainstreaming gender in disaster risk reduction programmes for over a decade. "Disasters don’t discriminate, but people do," the agency noted. "The potential contributions that women can offer to the disaster risk reduction [DRR] imperative around the world are often overlooked and female leadership in building community resilience to disasters is frequently disregarded."

The need for gender awareness in programming became apparent after the Asian Tsunami in 2004, in which more women than men were killed. Research by Oxfam in parts of Indonesia and India after the wave struck found that women were more vulnerable partly because they were more likely to be unable to swim, and many were in harm's way because they were standing on the shore waiting for the men to bring in the fish they would process and sell.

The development agency CARE, along with Kulima Integrated Development Solutions, a South Africa-based consultancy, is trying to develop a methodology to conduct gender-sensitive vulnerability analysis. “Most NGOs have longstanding gender commitments, and are beginning to incorporate them in their climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction,” says Kulima’s Katharine Vincent, who is working on the methodology using Mozambique as their testing ground… 

A girl running along the road in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, shot by Damien Halleux Radermecker, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license