Gender and Climate Change Adaptation

Humans by nature make efforts to cope with climate variability and change, however, adaptation to climate change manifest in varied ways and forms. From an ethnic and gender perspective, this study examined the choice of livelihood coping strategies in the face of climate variability in the Kasena-Nankana Municipality and the Bongo District in the Upper East Region of Ghana. The concurrent mixed method approach was used.Hence, both qualitative and quantitative data collection and inference techniques were combined. A sample size of 312 rural farmers (194 males and 118 females; age range of 18-73 years), were involved in the study. Two Focus Group Discussions (between 8 to 12 members each) were conducted in each community. The Chi-square test revealed that, coping strategies such as planting of trees and shrubs on farmlands, growing different varieties of crops, collecting and storing grass during the rainy season, among others had very significant relationships with ethnicity, with P Values of less than .001 (P< .001).Gender however, didn't have a significant relationship with coping strategies adopted as P-Values for all coping strategies except collecting and storing of grasses during the rainy season (x 2 =4.41, p=0.04) were greater than the significance level of 0.05.

Over the past two decades, the important role of gender in environmental and water-related crises and conflicts has been increasingly recognized. Environmental crises occur in social contexts imbued with gender and other power relations. Existing literature in this area has examined how gender shapes issues of water access, use, governance, and adaptation to environmental crises. Gender, however, has been variously construed and theorized in this work. From essentialist to poststructuralist perspectives, the theorization of gender is key to its application in the environmental sector. In this chapter I present an overview of several major theoretical conceptualizations of sex and gender, ranging from the biological essentialist to the poststructuralist. I identify how gender has been variously used in the literature on environmental crisis and conflict. Key debates about ontology (essentialism) and representation (universalization) are highlighted. Drawing upon (and drawing together) these earlier theoretical insights and debates, I ultimately suggest a conceptual framework for doing multi-level intersectional research on environmental crisis and conflict. The framework helps to address the current tension between highly context-specific analyses and overly structural treatment of gender. The framework aims to help “scale up” the insights of intersectionality while still appropriately attending to the ongoing relevance of gender across contexts.

Page 1. Gender and Climate Change Overview Report Emmeline Skinner October 2011 Page 2. ii Emmeline Skinner (author) is a human geographer by training, with a PhD from University College London and an MPhil from the University of Oxford. ...

A B S T R A C T Gender-disaggregated, household survey data for Uganda are used to examine how gendered roles and responsibilities influence adoption of drought-tolerant (DT) maize, a new technology that can help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa adapt to drought risk. Multinomial logit (MNL) regression results indicate that, compared to men farmers, women farmers have much lower adoption of DT maize, mainly due to differences in resource access, notably land, agricultural information, and credit. Differentiation of women and men farmers by various characteristics reveals that whether a male farmer was younger or older, or poor or non-poor has no significant influence on DT maize adoption; but important differences among different categories of women farmers are identified. For example, the farmer group found least likely to adopt DT maize is young, poor women household heads. MNL results also show that wives strongly influence adoption of DT maize on plots controlled by their husbands. We discuss the implications of study findings for the development of well-targeted and socially-inclusive adaptation policies.

The purpose of this report is to inform practitioners on existing gender dynamics in Bolivia as they relate to natural resource management and climate change. The study aims to go beyond general assumptions and provide more detailed empirical knowledge on differentiated gender roles,  relative  access  of  women  and  men  to  resources,  and  gendered  responses  to  climate  change  in rural Bolivia. The goal is to provide useful insights that support gender-mainstreaming efforts in rural development and climate change adaptation projects.
Based  on  the  empirical  findings,  the  report’s  overall  conclusion  is  that  there  exists  a  strong  linkage between  gender  roles  in  rural  Bolivia  and  the  differentiated  climate  vulnerabilities  and  adaptation strategies identified by women and men. This has led to a number of more specific conclusions and recommendations.

The issue of loss and damage in climate change is becoming a key issue of discussion with the soon approaching Paris climate negotiations. While countries focus on priorities for their countries  with a focus among many others mitigation targets, adaptation goal and legally bindingness of the outcome, it is important that focus is allocated to how gender sensitivity will be a key issue in the process. Especially when addressing the issue of loss and damage. This paper seeks to address how loss gender is a key component on addressing loss and damage, in planning actions as well as implementing and monitoring them.