1 Introduction
I don’t think we need to be told that something is wrong with the climate. We can see for ourselves that it is getting hotter and we get very little rain. We can no longer tell when to expect the rain because it does not come at the time we expect it. We are no longer sure when we should plant or whether we should even plant because we waste seeds and our time if the crops fail. We have been disappointed with the rain so many times, and it is painful to see our fields dry when they should be giving us food. So it is obvious that changes are there in the climate.1
These words were spoken by a female farmer from the Thelaphi community in South Africa. She is not alone in her perception that our climate is changing. There is a growing global consensus, which includes the scientific community and ordinary citizens like this female farmer, that our climate is undergoing a transformation that is bringing with it heightened extremes of temperature while rain fall patterns remain uncertain and intensity fluctuates. These changes will have impacts on global socio-ecosystems, threatening their sustainability.
These impacts will not fall evenly across the globe but are predicted to be differentiated across regions, generations, classes, income groups, and occupations, as well as between women and men. Indeed, it is considered that it will be people with low or no incomes living in the Global South who will be most affected, with Africa identified as the most vulnerable region.2 Agriculture is regarded as a highly climate-sensitive sector. The potential impacts in Africa are thus a particular cause for concern due to its reliance on rain-fed agriculture, which supports the livelihoods of about sewenty per cent of Africans, contributes about thirty per cent of the continent’s gdp and about fifty per cent of its total export value, and employs some 65 per cent of its labour force,3 of which it is estimated that women constitute more than seventy per cent.4
This chapter uses a gender lens to gain insights into the ways in which rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa are dealing with the effects of a changing climate. There is a strong equity argument for taking a gender perspective on climate change, since this recognises the different contributions that women and men make to their household’s sustainability. For instance, resources controlled by women tend to be invested (at the margin) more heavily in children than those controlled by men.5 Evidence also shows that “the greater the degree of control exercised by women over the family income, the greater the proportion of income spent on food.”6 There is some evidence to suggest that when women actively contribute to household income, they have more influence over the ways in which that income is spent. Interventions to support communities with coping strategies linked to climate change should ensure that women also have the opportunity to become involved in income-generating strategies.7
Given the role women play in ensuring their household’s well-being and hence its sustainability, it is of potential significance to recognise that the impacts of variations in weather patterns are predicted to have a disproportionately greater effect on women than men. Therefore interventions to enable individuals and communities to adapt to a changing climate need to ensure that all affected persons receive the type of support that meets their needs and circumstances. In any given community, women are often poorer and less educated than men as well as being excluded from political and household decision-making processes that affect their lives. Women also tend to have a lower level of assets than men. An individual’s assets determine the strategies that can be adopted to respond to changes in weather patterns. Migration may not be a suitable strategy for the elderly, the very young, those with limited resources, or those facing social or religious restrictions on their mobility.8 This also reminds us that a ‘community’ is not a binary divide of ‘women’ and ‘men’, but that people have multiple identities, which combine gender with age, class, ethnicity, race, religion, etc. These characteristics also shape an individual’s assets. If equitable interventions are not made, then climate change is predicted to increase inequalities, including those based on gender.9 Not addressing the diversity of needs in a community threatens its sustainability.
This chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the analytical approaches used to write the chapter; Section 3 defines the concepts of vulnerability and resilience, which currently shape thinking on how to respond to climate change; Section 4 makes some observations on the nature of the evidence; Section 5 briefly reviews, from a gender perspective, the evidence related to the impacts on and responses by communities to climate change in rural ssa; and Section 6 closes the chapter with some general observations on its findings.
2 Methodological Approach
This chapter uses a feminist political ecology (fpe) framework to review the evidence from the peer-reviewed and grey literature on the impacts that the gender–climate change nexus has on sustainable development in the context of rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa. Such an approach combines two powerful analytical tools to provide a more holistic understanding of the dynamics in rural areas that relate to vulnerability due to climate change and related threats to sustainability. First, political ecology recognises the relationships between the natural environment and political, economic, and social processes, as well as their impacts on sustainability. Rural women and men use the natural environment as their primary resource base for their goods and services. However, for rural people their relationship with the natural environment goes beyond its productive function. The natural environment is what Escobar calls the “space for being.”10 The natural world is central to one’s identity, and the elements of nature (such as mountains, lakes, rivers, plants, animals, moon, sun, and stars) are endowed with cultural significance and/or spiritual and aesthetic value.11 The ‘space for being’ is where the establishment and reinforcement of kinship-based social relationships take place, contributing to the strengthening of identity and culture and allowing for the development of social capital and ties of solidarity.12 Changes in weather patterns bring changes to the natural environment threatening to undermine the sustainability of rural communities—not only materially, but also culturally.
fpe adds gender analysis to the toolbox. In particular, fpe brings a focus on the social dimensions of sustainability and, in so doing, contributes to a more holistic understanding of vulnerability and coping strategies for responding to climate change. The alterations in weather patterns and the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events bring environmental, political, and economic changes to livelihoods, ecosystems, property regimes, and social relations. In this context, fpe provides a framework to analyse the gendered experiences of and responses to these challenges.13 fpe also draws attention to the point made in the opening section that uneven access to as well as distribution and control of resources depends not only on gender, but also on other social characteristics such as caste, class, and ethnicity.14 Gender analysis reminds us that the use of gender-neutral terms such as ‘community’, ‘people’, or ‘households’ risks a simplistic analysis with an incomplete picture of the reality of the lives of women and men in rural areas.
fpe also sees women and men not only as passive victims of climate change, but also as agents of change. Attention can be drawn to local agency and creativity, demonstrating the ways in which women (in particular) are (re)defining their situations in response to climate change impacts, often in light of—or in relation to—significant constraints.15 These constraints can be attributed, firstly, to the difference in asset levels between women and men and, secondly, to gendered power relations. Men often have a better level of and more control over assets such as access to land, credit, agricultural inputs, decision-making bodies, technology and training services, education, natural resources, mobility, equal economic opportunities, as well as information and communication systems. Access to a wide range of assets gives men more options to respond to climate change impacts. Because of their limited control over household resources, women rely on resources held in common property to fulfil their household tasks.16 The changes that extreme weather events bring to the natural resource base increase women’s vulnerability since they have more limited options than men in the same community.
The difference in asset levels has its roots in power relations. The feminist position is to reject the notion of the household as a unified entity pooling resources from which all individuals derive equal benefit. Instead, the household is seen as a place of negotiation in which women and men define their roles and relations (mediated by informal and formal institutions). Within a household there can be both cooperation among and conflicts of interest between female and male members as well as competing priorities in relation to labour allocation and the distribution of resources.17 The capacity to use these resources has important implications for individual outcomes. There are usually men in the household who make decisions about and have control over their own bodies, lives, and resources but also those of other family members. Control is a means to exercise power. The issue of power is a key concept in a political ecology framework drawing on Foucault’s definition of ‘power’ as: “[…] the ability of an actor to control their own interaction with the environment and the interaction of other actors with the environment.”18
This balance of power between men and women defines the relationship between them and operates at all levels of society: household, community, organisational, national, and international. Shifting the balance of power towards women by transforming gender relations will enable women to exercise agency,19 namely the ability to make decisions—free of violence, retribution, or fear—about one’s own life and to act on them in order to achieve a desired goal.
3 Vulnerability and Resilience
Vulnerability is an intrinsic predisposition to be affected by or to be susceptible to damage; that means vulnerability represents the system or the community’s physical, economic, social or political susceptibility to damage as the result of a hazardous event of natural or anthropogenic origin.22
This definition fits in well with a feminist political ecology analysis, since it can be applied to both social and ecological systems. Interestingly, Cardona’s definition does not equate vulnerability with poverty. This is somewhat at odds with the prevalent view in the literature that it is the poor in a community who are disproportionately affected by disasters, as their lower level of assets mean that they are the least able to rebuild their lives in the aftermath.23 Recent research in Ethiopia has found that this may not necessarily be the case depending on the coping strategies a household adopts, such as selling assets and/or reducing consumption.24
Designing interventions to support an ecosystem, an individual, a household, or a community to survive shocks and significant disturbances, such as floods, requires an understanding of vulnerability. Again, despite the widespread use of the term, there is considerable variation in definitions thereof.25 However, in reviewing this range of definitions, Vogel and O’Brien found agreement on three characteristics of vulnerability:26
- 1)multi-dimensional and differential (it varies across physical space as well as among and within social groups)
- 2)scale dependent (with regard to time, space, and units of analysis such as individuals, households, regions, or systems)
- 3)dynamic (its characteristics and driving forces change over time).
The ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions.29
Communities have a capacity for learning from past disasters to reduce their vulnerability to risk and ensure their sustainability. The degree to which a social system is capable of organising itself can be seen as an indicator of its resilience.30 However, resilience needs to exist across or be built at different, interlinked scales: individual, household, community, region, and ecosystem. Here, the concept of ‘scale’ is not meant in a Euclidian sense, but in an actor-network theory sense of relational spheres of influence, power, and connectivity.31 The political ecology approach fits in well with analysing vulnerability and resilience, since both are considered scale dependent.
4 The Nature of the Evidence
It has taken time for the interplay between gender and the impacts of climate change to be of interest to social science researchers. As a consequence, most of the available literature is self-published by international organisations, non-governmental organisations, private foundations, and aid and disaster relief organisations. There is a small but growing body of relevant peer-reviewed literature; nevertheless, the evidence currently available is limited, often anecdotal, patchy, varied, and highly contextual in nature. It also tends to be confined to small-scale qualitative case studies. These do, however, make an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which women and men experience and understand the phenomenon of ‘climate change’. They also help to underline the context-specific nature of these experiences, indicating that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution even within the same region of a country.
There is limited sex-disaggregated data available on the actual differential experiences of women and men related to climate change impacts.32 Indeed, it appears that the literature tends to focus on women’s experiences of climate change—although many of the claims are based on a priori assumptions rather than on robust empirical evidence in support of these claims. There is even less data related to children and the elderly, who are considered particularly vulnerable to the health issues exacerbated by climate change (for example, malaria and diarrhoea affect children disproportionally, while elderly people suffer during heat waves).33 This makes tracking increasing vulnerability and designing and targeting appropriate interventions to maintain and build resilience problematic. The ‘household’ appears to be the standard unit of measurement for development agencies. Taking a gender approach appears to go little beyond presenting data disaggregated by the sex of the household head. Blackden points out that the development literature has a tendency to use the shorthand term ‘household’ to cover whatever everything that exists between the level of the community and that of the individual.34 In many settings, households can be seen to share common features (such as co-residence, joint production, shared consumption, and kinship links); however, anthropologists would caution that even within communities there are possibilities for diversity. Households are also dynamic: their composition changes over time, through natural life processes of birth, marriage, and death, but also due to the temporary relocation of their members for a range of reasons such as schooling or employment.
Treating the household as a unified entity fails to capture a more holistic understanding of what is happening between and within households. Female-headed households can be ‘de facto’ or ‘de jure’—if the former are in receipt of remittances from male family members working elsewhere, such households could be in a stronger financial position than the latter. It is tempting to think that a woman at the head of a de jure female-headed household will make the decisions and, as is often presented in the literature, possess greater agency than women in male-headed households. However, this may well be a false assumption, since gender norms can dictate that decision-making responsibilities lie with the eldest son in the household.35 There is also a temptation to assume that all female-headed households are poor; yet, the empirical evidence shows that this is not necessarily the case.36
In Africa, there are also households with no family members older than 18 years of age (referred to as ‘child-headed households’).37 Again, it would be an easy assumption to make that these households are resource poor and therefore vulnerable. However, a study in a village in Limpopo province in South Africa found that the child-headed households were the least vulnerable in the village. The explanation lay in these households being de facto child-headed households rather than de jure ones. The parents were working elsewhere and sending remittances back to support their children, preferring that they remained in their home village to complete their education.38
There are climate change interventions that claim to have taken gender into account, but there have been criticisms of a number of these projects. First, there can be a tendency for ‘gender’ and ‘women’ to be used interchangeably in project documents with a focus on roles and assets. Second, women are treated as a homogenous group of passive victims. This ‘victimisation’ of women also neglects women’s capacity for responding to change. It also neglects the underlying cause of why women’s capacity in this area is constrained: gender relations.
The next section gives a brief overview of the evidence, from a gender perspective, about how rural communities in ssa are adapting to climate change and ensuring their sustainability. The available evidence on gendered impacts is limited and has focused on sectors that are obviously climate-sensitive and linked to natural resources (food security and agriculture, forestry, and water). There is a wide knowledge gap concerning those sectors where the gendered impacts of climate change are less tangible but play an important role in building resilience (for example, in transport and infrastructure, energy access, housing, and formal and informal employment).39
5 Ensuring Community Sustainability: Adaptation to Climate Change
The sustainability of communities in the face of extreme weather events can depend on their capacity to adapt to climate change. The ipcc defines adaptation as the “adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities.” The capacity of people to adapt depends on their possessing of a range of assets such as wealth, technology, education, information, skills, infrastructure, access to resources, and management capabilities.40 The importance of having access to such a wide array of assets will disadvantage women compared to men from the same socio-economic group, since women will usually have a lower level of assets. Therefore, we can assume that this difference in access to assets is likely to result in a gender-differentiated capacity to respond to climate change. This means that interventions to build resilience will need to include gender-responsive coping strategies. Experience shows that to ensure that both women’s and men’s concerns are addressed by community-level adaptation projects, gender needs to be mainstreamed at the beginning of the project cycle.41
What follows in this section are, first, some general observations about how rural communities in ssa perceive climate change. Then some evidence is presented from a gender perspective in terms of impacts and coping strategies in ssa in relation to five dimensions of rural life (health, agriculture, water, energy, and non-farm employment) as well as to climate-related disasters. The available empirical evidence, as pointed out above, is limited and betrays a tendency to predict what may happen in the future based on what has happened in natural disasters in the past. These predictions rely on mathematical models, the accuracy of which is dependent on the quality of the available data (that is, how accurately the data describes the event to be modelled). In the context of climate change, model predictions are on shaky ground, since projections of future climate change relate to a state never observed before—so there is nothing to test the model outputs against to validate their accuracy.42 Scientists working in these fields are well aware of the limitations of their work and recognise that “past experience may not be a good guide for the future.”43 Decision makers may demand greater accuracy, which comes at a cost and may only be possible at some unspecified point in the future. As a result, judgement on dealing with uncertainty is required—in this case, on how to adapt to unpredictable and changing weather patterns. As Dessai et al. point out planning does not necessarily depend alone on scientists being able to accurately predict changes in climate.44 Outcomes are dependent not only on the climate but also on many other variables (such as globalisation and migration) that cannot be easily adapted to modelling; yet, we do adapt to these processes, albeit not always smoothly or without difficulty. We also live with the threat of other natural events that are hard to predict, such as earthquakes and tsunamis. The response to the former has been to construct buildings with appropriate materials and design features in order to withstand shocks, while in response to the latter early warning systems to facilitate the evacuation of people to safer locations have been installed. My comments here are not intended to denigrate the work of climate scientists, who have done much valuable research to point out firstly, that the climate is changing at an unprecedented rate and, secondly, to prove using robust evidence that the cause thereof is anthropogenic. This has been conducted against a background of hostility from economic and political interests connected to the fossil fuel industry. However, science policy needs to look at where to strike the balance between long-term accuracy and short- to medium-term adaptation measures.
There is more than enough evidence to suggest that rural African communities are aware of changes to the climate, and the quotation which opens this chapter serves as a good illustration thereof. Rural people recognise how these changes influence the weather, which in turn impacts on agriculture,45 often with recollections showing good correlation with meteorological records. Oral histories enable rural communities to assess ‘catastrophic events’ such as droughts and to make judgements about changes over time. Rural people’s awareness about changes in weather patterns and the corresponding links to the scientific concept of climate change show variations in relation to gender and age. Men (particularly young men) are more likely to be aware of climate change than women. There is evidence to suggest that there is gender differentiation in the ways in which women and men receive information about changes in weather patterns, which can also be culturally mediated.46 A study in South Africa found that men had time to listen to radio broadcasts, whereas women preferred to attend meetings with agricultural offices, in part because this enabled them to ask questions. However, in Burkina Faso women were not invited to workshops by male community leaders, since this would reduce the number of places available for men.47
5.1 Health
The impacts on health arising from climate change are varied. Some are the direct result of high temperatures, floods, or droughts, whereas others are more indirect and act in combination with further factors (that may or may not be induced by climate change). The predicted health effects include an increase in waterborne diseases, potentially higher rates of malnutrition due to food shortages, and increases in heat-related mortality and morbidity.48 There is very limited epidemiological evidence that relates gender to the effects of climate change and even less does so specifically in relation to ssa. The World Health Organisation (who) reports in one of the few studies on gender, health, and natural disasters that the mortality of women and girls due to natural disasters is higher than that for men in countries where there is significant gender disparity in economic, social, and political status which cannot be attributed to biological factors but to socially constructed roles and relations that contribute to gendered vulnerability.49
The need for more nuanced analysis of communities is underlined not only by gender differences, but also by age and life cycle status as factors relevant to health. Pregnant women, for example, may be more susceptible to malaria and other complications related to high humidity levels and temperatures, possibly depending on their nutritional status.
Care for the sick within a household is generally a woman’s task, which adds to the daily workload. Women use the natural environment as a source of medicinal plants. When biodiversity degrades, the capacity to treat illness for little financial outlay also reduces. Rural communities in Nigeria now report on the need to go to clinics to seek treatment rather than attempt to see to their own medication.50
A less acknowledged aspect of the interplay between health and climate change are psychological impacts. In her study of three South African rural communities, Babugura found that the changes to the natural environment brought about by shifting weather patterns had psychological impacts on the women and men she interviewed.51 The men felt ashamed that they could not provide for their families and guilty about the additional workload this placed on the women. Women felt guilty about the extra time that they spent away from their children, such as when collecting water, and reported being tired when they came home. There has been a clear shift in gender roles, with men assuming responsibility for tasks that were traditionally regarded as ‘women’s work’, for instance growing vegetables in home gardens and collecting fuelwood. How these changes in gender roles will evolve in terms of masculine and feminine identity and behaviour is yet unknown.
5.2 Food Security
An individual can be considered to be living in food security when he or she has, at all times, physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that enables him or her to live a healthy and active life.52 Food security promoting good health not only removes the overwhelming reason why households move into poverty—namely illness53—but also helps to ensure household resilience to the impacts of climate change.
Agriculture in ssa is predominantly the domain of the smallholder (farming three hectares or less of cropland), with approximately 73 per cent of the rural population classified by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (ifad) as being engaged in farming.54 Nevertheless, there is a large gender difference in land ownership, although the extent of this imbalance varies between countries. In Africa, an average of 15 per cent of landholders are women—ranging from less than five per cent in Mali to over thirty per cent in Botswana, Cape Verde, and Malawi.55
Rural women and men play complementary roles in guaranteeing household food security.56 Women grow vegetables for their family’s own consumption and to sell at local markets. Women are also responsible for raising small livestock. Men are generally responsible for growing cash crops and tending larger livestock. Nevertheless, reliance on rain-fed agriculture on small parcels of land is precarious even under good weather conditions. To ensure that a household is food secure requires the input of labour, water, and agricultural resources. Food security is also threatened by a lack of options for keeping food safe for consumption after harvest or slaughter.
Extreme weather events linked to climate change can lead to crop failure and the death of livestock. This can entail reduced food intake, both in terms of quantity and quality, which affects women and men’s capacity to work and adopt coping strategies. A study in northern Tanzania found that women would go without food for a day or two.57 Lwando reports similar findings from western Zambia.58 There is some evidence to suggest that while adults recuperate from short-term loss of food intake, children’s physical development may be affected, with this effect more pronounced in poorer households.59 During the severe 1994/1995 drought in Zimbabwe, women’s body mass was found to be negatively affected whereas men’s was unaffected, suggesting that women had a reduced calorie intake while men did not. However, this did not apply to all women. Daughters-in-law were found to be unaffected.60
A study in Burkina Faso found that while women had developed management strategies for dealing with food shortages during periods of drought, there was conflict within households over food allocation, not only between women and men but also between generations. In Namibia, meanwhile, gender roles mean that dealing with food shortages is not a matter for negotiation; instead, women have the sole responsibility for finding solutions, which can range from selling the small livestock for which they are responsible to selling handicrafts.61
Women and men respond to changes in weather patterns by diversifying their crops, a strategy that requires additional investment in time. This adds to the burdens facing women in particular, who have to synchronise working with unfamiliar crops with their other household responsibilities. Gender differentiation in ownership of farming tools can also lead to women being disadvantaged in their climate change coping strategies. In northern Tanzania, both women and men use manure for crop fertiliser and as a soil stabiliser. However, when men own machines, they can use these to transport manure to their fields several kilometres away, whereas women have to carry the manure themselves.62 In eastern Uganda, female-headed households were found to be less likely to implement climate change adaptation strategies.63 Reasons cited included a lack of credit, time, and relevant information. However, this is contrary to findings from the Nile basin in Ethiopia, where female-headed households were found to be more likely than male-headed households to invest in climate change adaptation measures.64 There is also evidence from around Lake Faguibine in Mali that there are changes to land access restricting women, in particular, from agriculture where communities from the northern shore are cultivating land under a shared cropping system around the former lake’s southeast or close to the Niger River. This represents a commodification of land with associated power struggles over access by men.65
Female smallholders in Malawi are reported to have adopted a climate change adaptation strategy that harnesses shifting rainfall patterns to produce two annual maize harvests.66 Younger women in Namibia have been experimenting with new varieties of millet that are more drought resistant, although older women reject these in favour of traditional varieties.67 Men in northern Tanzania have adopted methods to reduce water run-off and control erosion, such as building contours and ridge farming.68
5.3 Water
It is estimated that up to six hundred million people in Africa live in conditions of water scarcity.69 Providing water for a household’s drinking, cooking, washing, and sanitation needs is usually the responsibility of women and girls. When rainfall decreases and water scarcity increases, rural women and girls have to spend more time fetching water. Women in Inhambane province, Mozambique, report that they now walk for six hours per day to collect water, whereas before the current drought they would spend two hours completing the same task. Men also become involved when distance increases the need for wheeled transport such as bicycles and wheelbarrows. Households also have to pay for water, thereby diminishing their financial assets.70 Boreholes need to be drilled deeper, wherefore women may have to haul water up from depths of up to thirty metres.71 Women engage in household water conservation techniques, such as reducing bathing frequency. In Ghana, traditional cultural practice can lead women to prioritise their husband’s water needs over their own.72
Female time poverty due to searching for water can be addressed by improvements in water supply infrastructure, although this also requires a reliable energy supply. It is notable that women in the one community in Babugura’s study that had a pumped water supply had far more time available to invest in other coping strategies than women in the other two communities.73 Women in urban areas fare no better than women in rural areas, with interruptions to water supply resulting in women being forced to queue for long periods.
A lack of water also impacts on livestock, which are an important part of a household’s assets. Men, who are usually responsible for large livestock, will migrate with their cattle in search of water and fodder.74 Other coping strategies are emerging in the Sahel, where in some places livestock composition is switching from cattle to small ruminants, which have different fodder demands and higher dehydration tolerance levels and are considered most well-adapted to drought conditions.75 The authors do not state whether this has added to women’s workloads, since they are usually responsible for small animals.
5.4 Energy
In rural areas of ssa, fuelwood is still the most commonly used energy source for household needs, especially cooking and water boiling, two end uses that are key for maintaining good health. In 21 of 38 countries in sub-Saharan Africa with available data, over ninety per cent of households still cook with solid fuels.76 Degradation of the ecosystem—for example, through forest clearing to create more land on which to plant a greater area of crops to offset crop losses arising from changed weather patterns77—reduces the available biomass. This, in turn, results in similar behavioural changes to water collection: women walk further, often assisted by their daughters (who may be withdrawn from school),78 while men start to get involved. Swai et al. report in their study on northern Tanzania that male involvement in fuelwood collection began in the 1990s.79 Men are able to make use of mechanised transport to travel further distances and collect large stores of wood. However, at least in the case of the villages in the northern Tanzanian study, this was leading to the felling of trees, thereby contributing to the undermining of the sustainability of the natural resource base. There was also evidence in these villages of residents switching to poorer quality biomass such as maize cobs to compensate for the reduced availability of fuelwood; nevertheless, this may only be a short-term strategy, since households had also started planting trees within their homesteads to provide fuelwood.
Tree planting cannot be taken as an automatic means of ensuring future fuelwood supplies since land and tree ownership are mediated by gender norms. In the Kakamega area of Kenya, men own the village land under traditional law, thereby granting them rights over what is planted on the land; hence, even during a fuelwood shortage, women would not plant trees they would not have control over when and how the wood would be used.80 However, in a more recent survey conducted in Nyando and Wote in Kenya, where women would traditionally not have had access to or control over trees, both men and women report being involved in tree planting as part of their coping strategies.81
Improved cook stoves are seen as a technical solution to lack of fuelwood availability, albeit one with multiple potential outcomes. Increased stove efficiency may reduce the demand for fuelwood, thereby potentially saving time otherwise spent on wood collection; nevertheless, evidence does show that, even in areas of fuelwood stress, collection does not cease altogether.82 Improved cook stoves are also considered to reduce indoor air pollution related to cooking with biomass. A broad measure of the burden of a disease is the concept of ‘disability-adjusted life years’ (known as dalys), which estimates the years of life lost as a result of premature death caused by a disease as well as the years lived with that disease. Of the approximately forty million dalys globally that are attributable to solid fuel use (including coal), 44 per cent (approximately 18 million) occur in sub-Saharan Africa.83 Gender disaggregation of this data shows a rather unexpected result. In sub-Saharan Africa, the mortality rate linked to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (copd) is 3.2 times higher for men than for women despite the incidence of copd being 1.8 times higher for women than for men.84 The explanation offered is the higher prevalence of smoking among men, which results in greater underlying death rates from lung cancer for men. Moreover, it is not only women but also men who are exposed to indoor air pollution (iap), since families often spend some time together in the kitchen while food is being prepared.85 Another gender issue linked to stoves is that it is men who decide about the acquisition of new household equipment, including for the kitchen.86
Energy access, particularly to electricity, can contribute towards building resilience as an input into water purification, increasing food yields, providing better processing and storage, and cooling to reduce heat stress. Grid electricity barely reaches rural people in ssa; in 2014 the average access to the electrical grid in ssa was 18 per cent.87 While electricity can be expensive for some forms of cooking that require long periods of simmering, it can be a popular means of boiling water for tea and coffee and of powering rice cookers. Electricity can make important contributions to fostering healthy populations by providing refrigeration for food storage and, in rural healthcare centres, for storing vaccines and medicines as well as providing good lighting making the working environments safer for delivering babies and undertaking minor surgeries. Africa has a largely untapped hydropower potential, which is now threatened by increasingly common extended periods of drought. Existing dams are also suffering from silting reducing their power output.88
5.5 Non-Farm Income Generation
Being able to earn an income forms an important part of coping strategies. Both women and men can be involved in income generation—who within a household varies from context to context. For women, however, income generation may not be an automatic option, since gender relations can restrict female agency. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (drc), for example, only 18 per cent of small businesses are run by women, whereas in Rwanda women account for the running of more than 41 per cent. In the former, a husband’s permission is required to start a business, while in the latter it is not.89
Rural women’s livelihoods are drawn primarily from natural resources. Negative impacts on ecosystems reduce women’s income from natural produce. Women in western Zambia report that the harvest of wild fruits from forests, which provide both a source of income and a supplementary food source, has diminished.90 Loss of income feeds through into the hindering of other coping strategies, such as purchasing kerosene or liquefied petroleum gas (lpg) as a substitute for collecting fuelwood. Climate change also impacts on fishing, a livelihood often involving both men (as fishermen) and women (as processors and traders). The sandy shoreline along Senegal’s Atlantic coast is reported to be being eroded at a rate of 1.25 to 1.30 metres per year, with the loss of infrastructure undermining an important income source.91 In Namibia, changes to ocean currents are predicted to affect marine ecosystems, thereby reducing fish stocks.92
Social class influences women’s access to income generation opportunities. Around Lake Faguibine in Mali, for example, Iklan women have adopted charcoal production as a coping strategy, which is rejected by Illelan women as an activity not commensurate with their social position. The Iklan women, despite coming from a group with fewer assets than the Illelan, thus have more opportunity for income generation, since they face fewer socially imposed restrictions on their mobility.
In urban areas, the informal sector is a place of refuge in times of crisis.93 It is not unreasonable to assume that this is a possible coping strategy for rural migrants in response to the impacts of climate change. Food processing or selling prepared food are popular options for informal sector businesses, particularly for women, since this type of enterprise usually makes use of household equipment and thus requires little or no initial investment.
Social norms of allowing men greater mobility enable them to adopt migration to urban areas as a coping strategy. Men’s generally higher level of assets than women means that they are usually able to find new income sources, although they may not accumulate sufficient capital after paying for rent and food and to send remittances home. Men from rural communities can choose to search for casual work while women engage in a range of activities that can be carried out from the home, such as petty trading. Male migration can also leave women to take over men’s tasks. For the elderly as well as for widows, however, the potential for earning an income is limited, resulting in the need to beg for food. Where social protection measures are in place, the need for begging can be reduced, for example in Namibia, where relief is available for those affected by disasters.94
5.6 Climate-Related Disasters
Extreme weather events can lead to the destruction of ecosystems, which in turn threatens livelihoods that draw on natural resources. Degradation of the natural vegetation can lead to armed conflicts, which can lead to fatalities among male family members, creating women-headed households with reduced assets. Incidents of this kind are reported among cattle herders in northern Kenya.95
Degradation of natural resources deepens female time poverty by extending the distances women walk in search of clean water and fuel. This increased time poverty has consequences for their health and well-being, since women have less time to rest and recuperate. Their daughters may also be withdrawn from school to help. Women may prioritise re-building the family home over participating in initiatives to revitalise communities, which could also mean a lost opportunity to develop skills and knowledge that are crucial for building up resilience.96
As in the aftermath of any disaster situation, women have two options, both of which can increase their vulnerability: either to live in displaced persons camps or to stay put. Reasons for remaining appear complex, including possible social constraints, such as requiring a male relative to act as an escort outside the home or a social obligation to look after a less mobile family member.97
The provision of energy carriers unlike that of water and shelter has been a neglected commodity for relief agencies. Having to search in unfamiliar surroundings for fuelwood can result in women being subjected to sexual harassment.98 If their husbands and sons respond by stepping in and taking over fuelwood collection, they in turn can also become victims of physical assault.
Social perceptions of gender roles also play a part in determining strategies to respond to hazards. Men are expected to be proactive, but in disasters men’s roles and responsibilities can expose them to dangers that can result in their untimely death and their wives being left as head of the household. Widowhood is one of the quickest routes into poverty.99 On the other hand, more women are victims of flooding than men often due to social barriers that prevent women from learning how to swim and that place restrictions on their movement outside the home.100 This creates a new category of households about which we have little understanding: male-headed households without adult women.
6 Where Are We Now? Where Are We Going?
As stated above, the nature of the evidence discussed in this chapter is limited and disparate, which makes it challenging to draw any strong conclusions and to effectively compare and contrast different case studies. Nevertheless, the existing evidence does give some useful indicators. In short, these include the fact that there are gender-differentiated climate change impacts, degrees of vulnerability, and levels of resilience that respectively threaten or strengthen the sustainability of households and communities. However, these impacts are not always rigid, straightforward, or predictable, but rather varying with context and may be mediated by a host of other sociocultural, economic, ecological, and/or political and institutional factors. Linear assumptions and conclusions, such as that higher socio-economic classes have more assets and therefore possess greater adaptive capacity, need to be avoided, since they can lead to biased vulnerability assessments of different groups and inappropriate interventions. Vulnerability and resilience are influenced by the intersectionality of gender with characteristics such as class, ethnicity, and age/life course. Likewise, it would be dangerous to assume that women are always more negatively affected than men from the same group in the same situation. Nor should women be considered a homogeneous group of victims of climate change. First, not all women are victims. Second, such a portrayal of women overlooks their agency to be part of the solution of building resilience. However, as gender analysis shows, women’s agency can be mediated by gender power relations which exist at all levels of society. While much is made in the literature about women’s lack of voice in decision-making at all levels, there are signs that this is beginning to change even within traditional power structures in Africa. The Balete people of Botswana, for instance, chose their first female paramount chief in 2003.101
The evidence presented here indicates that there is a need for a more nuanced approach to understanding vulnerability and resilience in rural ssa. Men are also vulnerable in ways that are socially constructed. For example, the role of having to provide food for the family in times of drought or flooding can mean extra stress, possibly leading to negative behavioural changes such as increased gambling or increased consumption of alcohol.102 Society generally expects men to be proactive in the face of adversity, but during a disaster male roles and responsibilities can expose men to dangers which lead to loss of life and widowhood for their wives—a well-recognised route into poverty. Men and boys can also be victims; moreover, they have to be part of the solution.103 Based on research in the Morogoro region in Tanzania, Van Aest concluded that disaggregation into male- and female-headed households is too simplistic and leads to overgeneralisations. The status of the woman at the head of a household (single, married, divorced, or widowed) was particularly significant in determining its capacity for livelihood diversification and access to water resources for irrigation.104
There is evidence of social change induced by the impacts of changes in weather patterns. For example, households in Mozambique are using bride price to raise cash,105 whereas evidence from Zimbabwe suggests that rising cattle prices due to livestock deaths from drought is influencing men’s decisions about delaying marriage.106 There are other signs of behavioural change among men as a consequence of responses to changing weather patterns. When this leads to shifts in gender roles and a more equitable share of household tasks, such changes are to be welcomed. However, changes to practical arrangements within a household in relation to ‘who does what’ also have psychological impacts including challenging an individual’s constructed identity of what it means to be a man or a woman in a particular society. There are signs that some men, particularly in older age groups, can find that climate change-induced effects prevent them from being able to demonstrate and fulfil their role as ‘provider for the family’. This can appear as a challenge to their masculine identity, causing stress and possibly psychological problems that may lead to alcoholism and gender-based violence. The evidence for this is weak and tends to come from South Africa, where there is considerable social awareness of the problems of alcoholism and gender-based violence.107 Generating the evidence linking alcoholism to stress arising out of climate change is methodologically difficult, since these are sensitive topics that do not lend themselves to the easy collection of data through interview techniques and may require more time-consuming ethnographic approaches. There may also be other confounding factors involved. While there are signs of changes in gender roles, evidence to show that gender relations are changing with a shift in the balance of power towards women at the grassroots level, in particular, is more difficult to find.
When dealing with rural communities, it is important not to attribute all environmental degradation to climate change (for example, increased urbanisation of small rural towns also leads to land use changes).108 Furthermore, climate change may not always be negative for smallholders. In Tanzania, for instance, it has been suggested that climate change might be strongly negative for maize, the main food crop, whereas the impacts on coffee and cotton, both significant cash crops, may be positive.109 As such, climate change might not, on balance, harm a smallholder’s food security.
This leads me to the general observation that explains the title of this chapter. There seems to be a temptation to treat the impacts of climate change as ‘exotic events’; however, rural people in ssa have been living with ‘harsh’, fluctuating climatic conditions for millennia, during which they have developed their own coping strategies based on their scientific knowledge of the ecosystems in which they live. For example, pastoralists have traditionally migrated to find water and fodder; however, when faced with the challenges of climate change their coping strategies have not remained rooted in the past and have incorporated ‘modern’ mechanisms, such as bank accounts. What rural people see is ‘more of the same’—periods of drought and floods—but at a more frequent rate than before. Rural people have their own coping strategies based on their indigenous knowledge of the ecosystems in which they live. The factors that impede women and men in their efforts to build up resilience are nothing new, nor are they specific to climate change. Indeed, these difficulties are well-known to the development community: lack of credit (particularly for women), inadequate tools, and insufficient gender-targeted support. Here, it is particularly important to stress the gender dimension, since women and men have different responsibilities within farming systems—with men tending to be more engaged with commercial activities, which receive the attention of agricultural extension services, while women’s practices, which are generally related to household food security, receive less attention. Solutions that would help both male and female farmers are readily available but may require investment: training for female farmers (recognising that they often prefer to work in groups110 and are more restricted in terms of their travel due to family responsibilities) as well as improved communication and transport systems allowing both men and women to sell their products (both farm and non-farm) more easily. The type of information provided as well as the timing thereof is crucial—not only for agronomic reasons but also to synchronise with social norms. For example, in the Kaffrine Region, Senegal, men plant their crops first, with women only being allowed to start when the men have finished, while in polygamous households women plant in order of seniority.111 Radio broadcasts also need to take into account when women are able to listen to information programmes, such as in the evening.
Targeting women and girls can have benefits when specifically aimed at helping them overcome the inherent disadvantages embedded in gender relations. However, many interventions are not set up with this intention in mind. Without an understanding of gender roles in the context in which they are working, project implementers run the risk of burdening women with additional tasks that they are not always best placed to undertake.
The evidence in this chapter has been presented in a compartmentalised way, which reflects the different academic disciplines responsible for generating the data. However, this might inadvertently be contributing to inappropriate solutions, since linkages can be missed. For example, in periods of prolonged drought, relief agencies tend to focus on providing food and miss the associated water and energy supply problems as well as the trade-offs that are required for households to balance these different needs, a burden that usually falls primarily on women.112
When designing responses to climate change, it should be recognised that climate change might not be a priority for poor communities that may be facing more pressing local-level issues. These priorities can be shaped by the ways in which rural communities attach meaning to the environment and climatic events, such as droughts. Rural people will interpret the information they receive about responses to climate change according to their own worldview, concerns, culture, and accumulated experience of climatic events.113 Understanding these perspectives can lead to more effective interventions—in particular, when recognising the link between identity and place. Disruption—or even more drastically, destruction—of the natural environment undermines identity, weakening or removing the bond that keeps an individual in a place as well as threatening community sustainability.
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