Engendered Climate Risk Analysis: A Precursor to Gender Equality and Empowerment

Abstract

Rural and urban poor women are much more vulnerable to climatic extremes and disasters, as they have very limited resources and have to undertake multiple tasks of the household, child care as well production to sustain their families. As natural resources become scarce due to climatic changes coupled with demographic factors, the existing gender inequalities may increase worsening the situation for women. The Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC have emphasized time and again the need for gender balance and gender equity in climate action as well as negotiations. The LIMA work program on gender and consequently the Gender Action Plan have highlighted one of the priority areas, as the need for metrics to create evidence of differential vulnerability and risk to climate change. Though several climate and gender related indices have been developed from time to time, they fail to capture the climate related dimension which make women differentially vulnerable to climate change. In the present study, a new index called Gender based Climate Risk Index (GCRI) has been used to capture the vulnerability and resultant risk faced by both men and women at the sub-national (state) level in India. A combination of the IPCC’s risk assessment framework and Caroline Moser’s Gender Analysis Framework has been used to arrive at the index. GCRI has been validated and tested for reliability keeping the availability of data at the required spatial scales. The study has shown that despite facing the same climate related hazards and exposure, women faced greater climatic risk as compared to men, due to their greater sensitivity and low levels of adaptive capacity. Mapping the index at the sub-national scale has also shown different states need to examine their causes of vulnerability and incorporate targeted action in their climate adaptation plans for improving the lives of women and empowering them. It is important that climate related policy making is made more gender sensitive and gender transformative to enable women to lead climate resilient lives.