Unsurprisingly to those closely following the links between climate change and displacement, women and girls are at greater risk to extreme weather, displacement and once displaced, are at greater risk to the perils of displacement like illness, increased farm work and sexual violence in camps. CARE International’s new report documents scientists and expert warnings that climate change exacerbates underlying gender inequalities, something we have also written about previously.
CARE reports that displacement linked to climate change was already a “harsh reality for millions of people today” but if global warming trends continue, millions more could be forcibly displaced.
Of those displaced, many are unable to return due to continued climate shocks, while those women and girls already climate displaced, continue to face harsher impacts. Women and girls displaced by Cyclone Idai, which impacted Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi in 2019, continue to face serious health threats due to lack of access to healthcare. The women among the 200,000 displaced last year in Ethiopia by drought and floods face higher levels of sexual violence in shelters and are vulnerable to attacks on longer and more frequent trips to fetch firewood and water.
In displacement - climate-linked or otherwise - women and girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence is heightened, as noted in our Perspectives Feature: The Gendered Impacts of Climate Displacement, where one of our earliest cases was a young woman in a female-headed household who revealed she was raped and became pregnant, while fetching water outside the displacement camp.
CARE echoed the same point we raised of how climate change indirectly impacts women and girls with the additional burden of having to earn money and tend to their families when men are forced to seek income elsewhere. This is particularly acute in remote, rural areas where women are the primary persons to fetch water, firewood and tend to subsistence farming.
We noted that following Cyclone Aila in the Indian Sundarbans, when the men left in search of income after the cyclone destroyed livelihoods, some women were forced into brothels, where a 20-25% uptick in migratory sex workers was noted, following the cyclone.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, government and aid agencies need to fund and gather more data on how women and girls are affected by climate-linked displacement and migration so as to better inform policy and programming, but even more importantly, women need to be at the forefront of the decision-making that responds to climate threats, especially where it impacts their own communities. (Reuters)
