WUNRN
Climate & Related Natural Disasters - Women's Mortality Much Higher
By Mirela Xanthaki
UNITED
NATIONS, Mar 6 (IPS) - When ministers and government officials meet at the end
of this year for a critical U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen, they
should bear in mind that the mortality rate for women during climate-related
natural disasters is an average of 14 times higher than for men.
"Existing
inequalities determine who is dying," Rebecca Pearl, the coordinator of
the Global Gender & Climate Alliance, told IPS.
After the
2004 Asian tsunami, the level of women’s mortality was in the range of 55 to 80
percent, with
In 1998,
when severe flash floods hit
By contrast,
when Hurricane Mitch devastated
A 2006 study
by the London School of Economics analysing disasters in 141 countries found
that gender differences in deaths from natural disasters are directly linked to
women’s economic and social rights. When women’s rights are not protected, more
women than men will die from natural disasters, while when women’s rights are
protected, the same number of women and men die from natural disasters.
Women
farmers produce more than half of the food worldwide, maintaining seed caches
of innumerable plant species. Many times, in droughts or floods, women are the
ones responsible for finding new seeds or rehabilitating old ones to ensure
that agriculture can continue, and that medicinal plants are available to their
families and their communities. Ecosystem changes impact them directly.
In
By 2025, an
estimated two-thirds of the world’s population will have difficulty accessing
water resources, and up to 15 percent will experience direct water shortages.
Women who are usually responsible in rural villages for fetching the water will
be forced to venture further to find it.
As Winnie
Byanyima, the director of the U.N. Development Programme's Women, Gender and
Development Unit, noted, water insecurity is driving women in Kenya, for
example, to spent 80 percent of their daily energy intake to fetch water - a
process that often takes about eight hours.
Helene
Oldrup, a researcher on gender studies at the
Oldrup and
others spoke at a panel on gender and climate change this week to coincide with
the two-week U.N. Commission on the Status of Women and International Women's
Day.
Ulf
Rikter-Svendsen, director of the Reform Resource Centre for Men in Norway,
which tries to engage men in gender equality issues, noted that "making
men the scapegoat will only strengthen their reluctance to take an active
role."
"We
have just started incorporating men in the gender and climate change debate and
in order for it to succeed we need to move past the point of women being seen
as victims and men as evil and cooperate," he said.
There is a
growing understanding in policy-making and development circles that women in
poor rural areas are closely connected to families, to natural resources, and
often they are running the water tap in the community or bringing the food, and
must be included in discussions.
Initial
water systems in
"Women
hold important knowledge. Policy makers usually respond to empiric scientific
facts, but women possess a different kind of information that needs to
incorporated," Byanyima said.
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