Gender-Inclusive Legislative Framework and Laws to Strengthen Women’s Resilience to Climate Change and Disasters

Part 1

Gender Differences in the Context of Disasters and Climate Change

To appreciate the critical role of legislation in supporting women’s resilience, it is important to understand how disasters and the negative impacts of climate change can be experienced differently by women compared to men. These experiences are further influenced by other factors such as poverty, health, ethnicity, and locations in rural or urban environments. While the available statistical data has many gaps, it reveals several common trends and issues that are highly relevant to the development of good law.

Gender Differences in Disaster Situations

Much is understood about the gendered impacts of disasters, largely based on post-disaster needs assessments (PDNAs), evaluations of response efforts, and country case studies. This evidence presents gender differences in survival, access to relief and recovery assistance, sex discrimination, and gender-based violence (GBV), and economic impacts and recovery exist and disproportionately affect women more than men. This section presents evidence on the gender differences in disasters with examples from Asia and the Pacific.

The relative lack of equality between men and women in social, economic, and political spheres influences the differentiated impact of disasters. A meta-analysis of reports on disasters in 141 countries found that higher death rates for women were directly linked to their level of economic and social rights as compared to men.² In societies where women and men enjoyed equal rights, there were no significant differences in the number of deaths based on sex (footnote 2). A recent analysis of 85 less developed countries found that improving women’s economic standing both directly and indirectly reduced the human cost of disasters.³

Many factors affect people’s survival in sudden-onset hazards such as cyclones. In terms of disaster preparedness, these include the quality of buildings and infrastructure, the extent of household preparedness, and the effectiveness and reach of early warning systems. Women are often excluded from decision-making on disaster preparedness and information on early warning systems is often shared in ways that are inaccessible to women.⁴ In terms of immediate disaster response, people’s location in relation to the hazard and their autonomy, capacity, and means to evacuate are important. In Bangladesh, male heads of household are typically responsible for evacuation decisions and the purdah system restricts women’s independent movement.⁵ If male heads of household are not present during disaster warnings, marginalized women’s evacuation may be delayed, putting them at greater risk.⁶ The efficiency and scope of initial rescue response and medical treatment, and the provision of and access to emergency relief and resources to facilitate quicker recovery are key and also differentiated by gender as this section presents.

Women’s limited access and control over resources and the gendered division of labor in families create barriers to women’s coping with and recovering from disasters. This is supported by some studies of large-scale sudden-onset disasters in Asia, which have shown that a higher proportion of women and girls died than men and boys. For example, women and girls represented 55% of deaths in the 2015 Nepal earthquakes.⁷ This was attributed to a range of factors, including the prior migration of more men than women away from the affected areas to seek work, that women were more likely to be inside their homes at the time due to gender roles in families, and that many women with care responsibilities delayed their escape to rescue children, older family members, and family valuables (footnote 7). Similarly, women died at much higher rates than men in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. In two regions of Aceh, Indonesia, women represented between 77% and 80% of all deaths. In Cuddalore in India during the same tsunami, women comprised 66% of all deaths.⁸ In these cases, men and women were predominantly in different locations at the time the disaster struck due to their different work routines and locations (footnote 8). These examples demonstrate that gender roles and prior inequalities can play a key role in disaster mortality rates.

Differentiated disaster impacts may also be affected by sex discrimination and/or a lack of a gender perspective in humanitarian response and recovery operations. After a disaster, women often face difficulties proving their land and property ownership, which can magnify and exacerbate the preexisting inequalities and disadvantages they face in relation to men. For example, following the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, women heads of households experienced direct discrimination when local government officials insisted that distribution would be through male heads of household only.⁹ Other women experienced indirect discrimination through a lack of access to key documentation. For example, some assistance was conditional on showing a marriage certificate and identity documents, which few women held. Some housing support for women whose husbands had died required proof of title to marital property, which in some regions were only registered in the man’s name, making women’s ownership difficult to prove (footnote 9). These discriminatory barriers deprived some women of urgent support, and contributed to the loss of some women’s homes and property, causing longer-term impoverishment.¹⁰

Sexual violence and GBV is another significant form of gender discrimination that impacts women in disasters. Evidence from across Asia and the Pacific demonstrates that disasters are associated with increased rates of GBV.¹¹ A 2015 study by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) revealed that in some settings, both domestic violence and sexual violence increase following disasters¹² and a 2018 IFRC publication of research in Indonesia, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), and the Philippines confirmed that risks of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) are exacerbated during disaster situations, a trend that is applicable to other disaster contexts in other countries.¹³ IFRC also identified several main characteristics of GBV in disasters:

(i)     while domestic violence was present in affected communities before the disaster, it increased following sudden-onset disasters and during prolonged disasters, such as droughts;¹⁴

(ii)    rape and sexual assault were higher in emergency shelters and disaster-affected communities, necessitating an increase in the capacity of specialist support and justice services to meet the needs of victims and survivors;¹⁵ and

(iii)   impoverishment due to disaster increased the risk of GBV, including through economic coping strategies such as child or early marriage, transactional sex, and trafficking.¹⁶

Further research by IFRC in 2017 explored effective legislative frameworks on gender equality and GBV in disasters and concluded that systems for prevention, access to support and justice for GBV victims and survivors tend to be under-resourced in normal times and are not adapted to provide services in emergencies.¹⁷ Another recent in-depth qualitative analysis examines how GBV emerges and impacts women following cyclones and uses a case study of a coastal region in Bangladesh shortly after Cyclone Roanu in 2016. It sheds light on the mechanisms linking GBV to cyclones through the eyes of victims and survivors, which are described as slow violence and layered disasters.¹⁸ Moreover, emergency shelter that is not designed and organized with local cultural norms and women’s safety in mind can expose women to additional risks of harassment and violence.¹⁹

In terms of economic impacts of disasters on women in comparison to men, much of what is known comes from qualitative and narrative reports, especially PDNAs. However these are not always followed by analysis of longer-term gendered economic impacts. Some approaches to the concept of building back better after a disaster apply this principle only to physical reconstruction, leaving out the social dimension and, therefore, also the gender lens. This is unlikely to change unless women’s organizations and women play a greater role in reconstruction planning and implementation. A negative example in this respect is the composition of the Nepal Reconstruction Authority, established by a special law following the 2015 earthquake, with a national committee including only two women (the statutory minimum) among 96 members, and no women on the technical or executive committees.²⁰

In Fiji, following Tropical Cyclone Winston in 2016, housing and shelter was considered the most affected social sector. For women whose livelihoods were home-based, such as mat and basket weaving, the destruction of their homes and raw materials had a significant economic impact.²¹ Women are extensively engaged in the informal sector, in microenterprises that are agricultural-based. In Fiji, for example, these comprise mainly food processing, handicrafts, and weaving. The PDNA notes that these are precarious livelihoods without the protection of insurance or access to finance, resulting in greater disaster losses and increasing women’s economic dependence.²² In the formal productive sector, primarily agriculture, women’s overall economic losses were lower due to their lower rates of employment and lower wages. The PDNA notes that women are poorer, earn less income, are more dependent on subsistence economies, and, therefore, have fewer options to cope with the disaster impact than their male counterparts.²³ This fits with a wider trend in developing economies, where women-owned enterprises often face difficulty accessing disaster risk financing and reconstruction loans, due to their concentration in micro and small businesses, their operation in the informal sector (especially in agriculture), and direct or indirect discrimination in access to financial services.

This section presents the gendered impacts of disasters. It is notable that hazards such as temperature extremes (hot or cold), drought and water shortages, storms, heavy rains, and floods will become more extreme, prolonged, or frequent due to climate variability caused by climate change. In turn, this will cause more extreme impacts on human lives, health, livelihoods, housing, infrastructure, and natural ecosystems.²⁴ For example, in the project countries, the Lao PDR has recently experienced drought and major floods and faces the risk of increased intensity of rain, flash floods, landslides and river flooding, dam operation, and safety, as well as longer dry periods. Fiji has recently faced more extreme cyclones and storms, floods, and landslides. Mongolia now has an increased risk of floods, drought, and the harsh winter conditions of blizzards and the weather pattern known as zud, which causes the death of many livestock. The magnification of disaster risk due to climate change is likely to also magnify the gendered impacts of these types of hazards—making action on these issues critically important.

Gender Differences in the Context of Climate Change

There are major information and data gaps on the gendered impacts of climate change, due to the limited collection of sex-, age-, and diversity-disaggregated data.²⁵ However, climate change is a clear cause of environmental and socioeconomic disruption across diverse sectors and activities. Women’s relative lack of equality in social, economic, and political spheres all influence the differentiated impacts of climate change. By addressing underlying gender inequalities and sex and gender discrimination, climate change mitigation and adaptation actions can also promote gender equality.

Due to gender inequalities, women are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Worldwide, across all family and household types, women spend significantly more time on household work than men: by United Nations (UN) Women’s estimate, two and a half times more.²⁶ The impacts of climate change have made many of these tasks, such as fuel and water collection, more time-consuming. In both rural and urban environments, climate change-induced drought can increase the daily distance women and girls are expected to travel to collect water by up to 15 kilometers (km), reducing their available time for livelihood activities, education, and leisure.²⁷ For example, water shortages due to climate change in Nujiang, Yunnan Province, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) caused women to spend more time managing water resources, and threatened the sustainability of women’s livelihoods more than men’s.²⁸ In many communities, women’s livelihoods are also more affected by climate change than men’s, as they are more dependent on natural resources. For instance, in Viet Nam, the adverse impacts of climate change affect women farmers most, as they must plant additional crops and replant rice crops to replace lost