Strengthening climate resilience - where does gender fit in?
Women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate change-related shocks and stressors, including droughts, floods, and extreme temperature changes. The nexus between gender equality and climate resilience is an increasingly urgent consideration across all projects and initiatives. Kore Global and our partners at Population Services International (PSI) have been reflecting deeply on how to integrate a stronger climate resilience lens into our work on adolescent girls’ sexual and reproductive health and rights. Not easy or straightforward, but we have identified some bright spots and opportunities.
PSI’s Adolescents 360 (A360) is a girl-centred sexual and reproductive health intervention in Africa that focuses on increasing adolescent girls’ voluntary uptake of modern contraceptives. A360 works with adolescent girls to increase their agency in decision-making around fertility choices. A360 also advocates for the centering of girls’ agency in climate resilience initiatives, calling for the prioritisation of girls’ voices and experiences by challenging the underlying social norms that increase girls’ risk to climate shocks and by building girls’ self-efficacy in decision-making.
But what synergies exist between women’s and girls’ empowerment and climate resilience, and how are these framed by different organisations and actors working at this intersection?
While there are only a small handful of climate resilience frameworks that include gender, looking across these surfaced three relevant insights for those designing, implementing, monitoring or evaluating interventions that aim to both strengthen climate resilience and promote gender equality.
1. Climate resilience includes the capacity to address the underlying causes of vulnerability to shock and stresses, including gender inequality
Climate resilience is the ability to prepare for, withstand, and recover from climate-related shocks and stresses. One framing of resilience is centred around the ‘3As’ of anticipatory, absorptive and adaptive capacity. What’s most interesting from a gender perspective is that there is another resilience capacity - transformative capacity - which is the capacity to address the underlying causes and drivers of vulnerability to shocks and stressors. These underlying drivers include discriminatory social norms, practices, institutions, and policies that contribute to inequalities and the increased vulnerability of women, girls, and marginalised groups, such as people with disabilities, people with lower incomes and those living in rural, hard-to-reach areas, to climate-related shocks. Initiatives to strengthen transformative resilience capacity therefore align with gender transformative programming, which also addresses the underlying causes of inequalities - that is, discriminatory gender norms.
The important takeaway here is that by addressing the root causes of inequality and vulnerability, people of all genders will be more able to better withstand the effects of climate change and better adapt to a changing climate.
2. Much like work on gender equality, climate resilience can be analysed and strengthened at all levels of society
As gender practitioners, we often utilise the socio-ecological framework to conduct a gender analysis. This surfaces gender inequalities that exist at each level of society - from the individual to the structural - as well as the solutions to address these challenges. We’ve included a simple representation of this framework below, in case you’re not familiar with it!
Figure 1: the socio-ecological framework
Similarly, climate resilience can be assessed at different levels. Individuals, households, communities, service providers and governments need to be able to plan for, adapt to, and cope with climate shocks and there are a number of strategies to strengthen resilience at each level. For instance, individual-level climate resilience can be strengthened through raising awareness of climate risks, rights, and choices as well as through the building of both hard and soft skills. Soft skills programming includes initiatives to increase confidence, self-efficacy, and leadership, which can be adapted for specific populations, including adolescent girls and women.
The important takeaway here is that we don’t necessarily need to create new frameworks. Good gender analysis frameworks can be used to analyse everything from climate resilience of women fisherfolk in the blue economy, to primary health care reforms in Indonesia - we’ve adapted and applied this and other gender analysis frameworks to a whole range of varied thematic issues and contexts.
3. Women’s and girls’ agency is an important pathway to achieving climate resilience
A number of detailed frameworks illustrate the importance of agency - and women’s and girls’ empowerment more broadly - to the achievement of climate resilience. These frameworks centre women and girls in efforts to increase climate resilience. Building their confidence, knowledge, and skills enables women and girls to make more informed decisions about their livelihoods, fertility, and migration in a changing climate.
The key takeaway here is that gender equality and climate resilience are deeply connected and that efforts to increase gender equality will have an important impact on strengthening resilience. Climate resilience efforts that do not consider gender risk being less successful. Women’s and girls’ empowerment are central to climate resilience and to tackling climate change.
Written by Dharini Bhuvanendra, Consultant, Katherine Nichol, Principal Consultant, and Rebecca Calder, co-CEO
