The contribution of women in addressing climate change is still not sufficiently recognised. Therefore, it is essential for the COP21 currently underway in Paris (November 30-December 11) to provide a decisive and concrete step forward by integrating commitments to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment in the Paris Agreement and more broadly, in future strategies and funding.

Differentiated impact

Climate change disproportionately affects persons who are the least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and those with the most limited capacities to adapt. Women, owing to the traditional roles assigned to them by societies and due to the discriminations they face, are the most highly affected. The lower access of women to resources and economic opportunities (land rights, access to credit) and their limited decision-making power in combating climate change, reduce their resilience.

Women and girls are more vulnerable in disasters as they are often confined to the private and reproductive sphere. Women are generally less educated and often less prepared to face natural disasters. They are more vulnerable to them—80 percent of the victims of the cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh (2007) were women—and, following a disaster, young girls are sometimes taken out of schools and married early. In addition, women are generally excluded from consultations and decisions on post-disaster recovery actions.

The scarcity of natural resources also increases women’s working time, makes their living conditions more precarious and aggravates inequalities. Desertification, erosion, water and food shortages often increase the household burden on women and girls. As they have to fetch water and wood from ever more distant sources, women are forced to work for longer hours. This limits their engagement in paid activities that are required to cover incompressible expenditures or reduce their family’s vulnerability.

Climate change also increases health problems and affects women’s sexual and reproductive rights. The effect on women’s health, especially on nutrition and sexual and reproductive health has been proven. In disaster areas, healthcare and access to contraception are often wiped out further hindering their capacity to space out births, which is a prerequisite for their empowerment. In addition, emergency shelters rarely offer services and hygiene materials for women.

Unrecognised actors

Despite having always been in vulnerable situations and seen as secondary stakeholders, women are key actors in the fight against climate change.

Women play an essential role in coming up with prevention, adaptation and mitigation strategies in combating climate change. The adaptation strategies used by women and men differ significantly: men focus on large-scale interventions such as irrigation schemes while women place greater emphasis on concrete and community improvements. By using their traditional know-how and their local environmental knowledge, women actually play a major role in implementing climate change mitigation and adaptation measures in daily life (saving energy and water, recycling, diversification and use of organic products).

The contribution of women is also underestimated and undervalued in the rollout of large-scale national public policies. The effective contribution of women to climate change policies is barely visible at the local level. It is scarcely valued in national action plans in the development of which women are only slightly involved. Lastly, at the level of international climate negotiations, the decisions aimed at ‘broadening the participation of women in the delegations and decision-making bodies’ adopted in 2001, 2012 and 2014, are barely binding and have allowed very slow progress.

As a result, women do not have equal access to funding assigned to the fight against climate change. The issue of funding devoted to the fight against climate change is pivotal in supporting the mitigation and adaptation efforts made in developing countries at the national and local levels. As regards bilateral aid, only a quarter of the projects focused on climate took gender inequalities into account in 2013, for the most part in the traditional fields of women’s involvement (water, agriculture, very few in energy and transport). But, as the Funds of the Climate Convention and Kyoto Protocol have just adopted rules on incorporating gender in their projects, there is hope for improvement.

Strengthening gender equality

The improvement of women’s rights has multiplier effects on the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. In particular, the access of women to sexual and reproductive health and rights has repercussions in child mortality, women’s health, and the education and nutrition of children. It lightens their workload and strengthens their capacity to use technical innovations and act against climate change (improved stoves, pumps, renewable energies), reducing greenhouse gas emissions and their expenditure.

Support for women’s empowerment as a strategy to improve population resilience in sustainable development policies locally and nationally is thus crucial. The proposed strategy is based on the idea that the empowerment is dependent upon the institutions which either promote (or do not) access to the various resources, such as information, mobility, knowledge, technology and economic and financial resources.

Keeping this in mind,  there is a need to incorporate the dimension of human rights and gender equality in the Paris Agreement, promote women’s contribution and strengthen their participation in addressing climate change, at all levels.

Second, the Agreement needs to promote and support genuine mainstreaming of gender and of women’s empowerment in all policies and all programmes on adaptation, mitigation and technology access and transfer. Lastly, it should commit in favour of an allocation of climate funding for the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment in funded projects.

Bousquet is the President of French High Council for Equality between Women and Men; Coutelle, is the President of Delegation for Women’s Rights of the French National Assembly;  and Jouanno is the President of Delegation for Women’s Rights at the French Senate