The climate crisis has and will continue to impact everyone. However, this impact is not evenly distributed. Instead, the impacts of the climate crisis fall across already existing lines of inequality.
Women and girls suffer some of the most severe consequences of climate change. Reduced ability to access fewer resources, combined with historical and cultural gender stereotypes, norms, and expectations, leaves women and girls less able to adapt and cope with abrupt changes brought on by the climate crisis. Gender inequality increases women’s vulnerability to climate change, while the impacts of the climate crisis serve to further entrench and worsen gender inequality. This means women are forced into a seemingly inescapable and unbreakable cycle that sustains itself. Women and girls living in low-income countries are particularly vulnerable to being forced into this cycle.
Nepalese women working in agriculture, particularly in remote areas, are substantially more vulnerable to climate change risks and are experiencing the seemingly unbreakable gender inequality and climate injustice cycle. In Nepal, more than 80% of women work in agriculture, which accounts for over 60% of the agricultural economy, whereas only 56.3% of men contribute, accounting for 39.5%. On top of this, women are also expected to be responsible for their ‘family’s health, nutrition, and food security’ even though on ‘every continent, women are more food insecure than men’. Most women in Nepal must bear this double responsibility, and globally, more than 75% of women carry out unpaid care work. This double responsibility is increasingly difficult for women to fulfill when faced with extreme weather events and disasters catalysed by climate change, such as floods, fires, and droughts. Women’s wages are estimated to be 25% lower than men’s, and their jobs are typically informal, insecure, vulnerable, and low-paid.
Furthermore, women have limited access to educational information about adaptation technologies and to essential assets and services, such as land, water, farming resources, and the market. Only 10% of arable land in Nepal is either solely or jointly owned by women. A lack of control and limited access to resources means that women receive only 10% of the total aid for agriculture, forestry, and fishing globally.
Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 2024, ‘Can climate finance move the needle on gender equality?’.This preexisting gender inequality in Nepal for women working in agriculture leaves women more vulnerable to experiencing climate change impacts, which, in turn, deepens these inequalities.
Image from The Borgen Project, 2014, ‘Gender-Based Inequality in Nepal’.This complex relationship between gender inequalities and climate change requires a transformative and gender-inclusive climate justice policy to ensure ‘no one is left behind’. Education and equal access to resources on the environment, human rights, and location-specific climate change impacts are necessary. There needs to be transparency and inclusion in all climate negotiations and plans, enabling women and girls globally to participate in decision-making that impacts them, alongside budgetary allocations that take into account the gender-specific impacts of climate change. For Nepal, this will contribute to closing the gender gap in the agriculture sector, challenge harmful gender norms and stereotypes, and create opportunities for women’s empowerment and resilience in the context of the climate crisis. Globally, achieving gender equality enables a transformative approach to addressing the climate crisis, ensuring a just and sustainable future for all.
