The Discourse of Climate Change and Womens Health: Some Insights on Gender Mainstreaming

Abstract

Climate Change has an overwhelming health impact on all, especially on the women, constituting around 49. 58% of the global population. There is ample literary evidence in support of the claim that a changing climate has a differentiated impact on humanity and that it is not “gender neutral”. Climate driven food scarcity, poor air quality, rising temperature and extreme weather events (floods, droughts, heat waves etc. ), acute water shortage, increasing incidence of vector borne diseases make the situation all the more dreadful for women in particular. And this vulnerability gets even more critical because of various biological, political, social and cultural factors that historically contributed against women and their empowerment. Though women are reservoirs of indigenous knowledge about how to deal with the aftermath of climatic changes, yet they remain largely untapped. However the importance of gender based climate action plan was long absent in arena of international climate negotiation. It was only in COP7 (2001) where women’s involvement in climate action had first caught global attention and subsequently nodal international bodies are working on formulating programmes and appropriate policies for promoting gender balance. However, the progress on this has been limited in comparison to the magnitude of impacts of climatic changes on women’s health and hence much more needs to be done on the policy front so as to promote gender equity and women’s participation in various adaptation and mitigation policies.