Climate shocks hit households headed by women harder. Adaptation that ignores this leaves the most vulnerable behind.
When a heatwave or flood hits a farming community, everyone suffers. The losses, however, are not shared equally.
In 2024 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published The Unjust Climate, a study of more than 100,000 rural households in 24 low and middle income countries, representing over 950 million people. It found that in an average year, heat stress causes households headed by women to lose 8 per cent more of their income than households headed by men. Floods cause them to lose 3 per cent more. Across the countries studied, that amounts to around US$37 billion a year lost to heat stress and US$16 billion to floods.
When heat or floods hit a farming community, households headed by women lose more. FAO found they lose 8 per cent more of their income to heat stress, and 3 per cent more to floods, than households headed by men. The cause is unequal access to land, credit, advice and time. This article sets out what adaptation that works for women looks like in practice.
Why women lose more
The reason is not a lack of farming skill. FAO's 2023 report on the status of women in agrifood systems found a 24 per cent gap in land productivity between women and men farming plots of the same size. The gap comes from unequal access to land, credit, extension advice, technology and labour. Women in agricultural wage work earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men.
In Africa south of the Sahara, 66 per cent of women's employment is in agrifood systems, compared with 60 per cent of men's. For many women, farming is not one income among several. It is the main one.
Unpaid care work adds to the burden. When water sources dry up, women and girls usually walk further to fetch water. Time spent coping with climate shocks is time taken away from earning, learning and rest.
What gender responsive adaptation looks like
Adaptation that works for women changes how programmes are designed and delivered. In practice that means:
- consulting women separately as well as in mixed community meetings, so their priorities are heard;
- targeting inputs, grants and training at the constraints women face, such as land, credit and time;
- scheduling activities around care responsibilities, and providing childcare where possible;
- collecting data by sex and age so results for women can be tracked; and
- supporting women's groups to lead, as well as to take part.
The potential gains are large. FAO estimates that closing the gender gap in farm productivity and wages in agrifood systems would add nearly US$1 trillion to global GDP and reduce the number of people facing food insecurity by 45 million.
What this looked like in Tamale-Ghana
In our adaptation training in Tamale, the age limit for participants was 35. Many women farmers who met every other requirement were older than that, or were mothers with young children. So we looked beyond the age limit for women who qualified, and deliberately included mothers, among them nursing mothers and pregnant women. We also made provisions for children so that mothers could take part without worrying. Women made up about 70 per cent of participants. Mothers completed the training, and participants are now using what they learned on their farms.
Every intake and programme the Centre runs is designed to be gender responsive from the start.
We do this because adaptation that misses women misses many of the households most at risk.
References
FAO (2023). The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
FAO (2024). The Unjust Climate: Measuring the impacts of climate change on rural poor, women and youth. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.FAO (2023). The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
