Abstract
The nexus of gender-agriculture-emissions reduction is one of the least explored areas related to agriculture and climate change. This nexus plays an important role in the areas where women’s participation in agriculture is high, and the contribution of the agricultural sector to total emission is significant. This study generates evidence on women’s labor contribution in rice cultivation and potential reduction of their labor drudgery, including GHG mitigation co-benefits with the adoption of direct seeding and machine transplanting technologies. Using a large number of plot-level data (11,987 data points) from the rice-growing regions of India, the study shows that changing rice production technology from conventional to direct-seeded rice (DSR) and/or machine-transplanted rice (MTR) offers huge potential to reduce women’s labor in rice planting (745 million labor-days for DSR and 610 million labor-days for MTR) and greenhouse gases (GHG) emission (34 MtCO2e for DSR and 7 MtCO2e for MTR) at the same time. This potential differs from the agro-ecological region, the level of input use, and women’s involvement in rice cultivation. The realization of this gender-responsive GHG mitigation strategy depends on the adoption of these technologies, which rely on several social, economic, and political factors. At the same time, the immense potential for negative implications for some specific groups should not be ignored, but focused on addressing and mitigating those challenges.
Highlights
The global community is looking for new approaches to integrate gender considerations in emission reduction options across the agricultural production systems that can help reduce women’s drudgery as well as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IUCN 2015; UNFCCC 2019)
Since information on rice transplanting methods is not available, we assumed that all rice production lands in India are currently under the conventional transplanting method
Our findings indicate a huge potential for substantially lowering GHG emission under machine-transplanted rice (MTR) and direct-seeded rice (DSR) compared to conventional transplanting (CTR) (Figs. 4, 5)
Summary
The global community is looking for new approaches to integrate gender considerations in emission reduction options across the agricultural production systems that can help reduce women’s drudgery as well as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IUCN 2015; UNFCCC 2019). Women’s significant role in rice cultivation, transplanting, is well documented (Paris 1998; Datta and Rustagi 2012; Mohanty et al 2012; Kumar et al 2018, Khatri-Chhetri et al 2020). The rice transplanting and associated activities account for up to 22% of the total time spent by women family members and 46% of women wage laborers (Mohanty et al 2012). Combining the reduction of women’s labor-burden and GHG emissions from rice cultivation could have significant social, economic, and environmental implications in ricegrowing areas
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