This archive report was first published on 5 December 2019.
On December 5, 2019, the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) highlighted the link between climate change and gender-based violence (GBV), stating that the loss of natural resources due to climate change is exposing more women and girls to GBV.
According to a 2019 Unep document, the degradation of natural resources and the resulting shocks of climate change are making it difficult for women to cope, leading to increased GBV. The document notes that among other factors, the extremes of changing weather patterns associated with crop failure push families to marry off their girls as a way of tackling household food insecurity.
This, in turn, leads to early marriages, the practice of female genital cutting, and the denial of girls' right to education. The document also recognises that climate change affects women and men differently, with women often being responsible for gathering and producing food, collecting water, and sourcing fuel for heating and cooking.
Extreme weather events such as droughts and floods have a greater impact on the poor and most vulnerable, with 70 per cent of the world's poor being women. Deforestation has forced women and girls to walk long distances in search of firewood and water, predisposing them to physical violence and in some cases, rape.
Unep recommends that to prevent GBV, women, men, girls, and boys should have equitable access to natural resources, credit, education, and information and markets. It also calls on governments to put in place laws and policies to safeguard girls' and women's rights and to restore degraded ecosystems to make collecting water and firewood easier and safer.
Empowering women to become stewards of the environment is seen as an avenue to eliminating violence against women and girls. Women and girls also become subjects of violence when men lose their bread-winning roles, according to Unep.
Shadrack Omondi, Executive Director of the Resource Conflict Institute, notes that lack of secure land tenure systems is a major factor leading to the exclusion of women, especially from marginalised communities, from participating in climate change mitigation programmes.
“Without secure land tenure rights, women from marginalised and minority communities cannot make substantive investment, leaving them vulnerable to violence and disadvantaging them as decision-makers,” Mr Omondi said.
Paul Cheruiyot, a gender specialist with the International Land Coalition (ILC), agrees that climate action is an essential component in the fight to eliminate violence against women and girls. He recommends that policies integrating the contribution of indigenous women in the management of natural resources would be influential in reversing the degradation of Kenya's biodiversity.
