Avni Mishra is an associate scientist with CGIAR GENDER Platform; Els Lecoutere is a science officer with CGIAR GENDER Platform; Ranjitha Puskur is a gender research coordinator with CGIAR GENDER Platform; Jawoo Koo and Carlo Azzarri are senior research fellows with the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Environment and Production Technology Division.

Climate change is projected to have substantial and widespread impacts on food production, food security and the livelihoods of the poor in low-income countries. Emerging evidence suggests that different climate change events — such as droughts and floods — differentially affect women’s and men’s ability to cope, produce adequate food and earn a living.

In many cases, women are more vulnerable to adverse climate change impacts, due to their limited asset ownership, such as land, as well as more reduced access to capital, labor and agricultural inputs. Women also have more limited access to information, which, in turn, means lower awareness and knowledge of climate risks and strategies to manage them. Social norms and gender roles in many countries limit women’s participation in strategic decision-making in their households and communities, making them less able to participate in and affect group activities, access extension services or adopt new practices and technologies. Overall, their capacity to respond to climate stress is lower.

However, this generic knowledge of women’s vulnerabilities to adverse climate change effects limits policy action. More granular knowledge on women’s involvement in agriculture and on how their involvement is affected by climate stresses is needed to support adaptation responses.

To this end, we studied 87 low- to middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to understand different climate change risks as well as impacts on women engaged in agriculture. We defined climate-agriculture-gender inequity hotspots as areas where large numbers of women participate in agriculture and food production and where extreme climate hazards can trigger crop failure, pest and disease outbreaks, and degradation of land and water resources.

Identification of climate-agriculture-gender inequity hotspots provides policymakers with the necessary spatial information to allocate investments in actions to address such inequalities.

Building on previous research on the labor burden of climate-smart agriculture practices, we developed a methodology for hotspot identification to support policy action.

We started by using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2020 risk framework where risks “arise from potential impacts of climate change as well as human responses to climate change.” A hotspot is identified as the intersection between climate hazard, vulnerability resulting from entrenched inequities and farmers’ exposure to risks defined below.

1. Climate hazards are based on events such as drought, floods and climate variability, as well as changes to crop suitability, such as a relatively short growing season with higher temperatures. We used geospatial data on climate hazards and population headcount to estimate the share of rural population likely to face climate hazards.
2. Exposure is the extent to which female farmers, as compared to male farmers, are exposed to such hazards given their level of involvement in agriculture. We identified women’s exposure to climate hazards at the country level by looking at the share of women involved in agriculture. For identifying hotspots at the subnational level, we used the International Labour Organization Statistics Database (ILOSTAT) to estimate women’s labor participation and hours worked by commodity, taking the relative importance of each commodity into account at the country level.
3. Vulnerability reflects the constraints to women’s capabilities to mitigate and adapt to climate change effects due to prevailing gender inequality in different domains. We used the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2014 Social Institutions and Gender Index, which captures a range of gender inequality components to identify hotspots at the subnational level.

We combined information on climate hazards, exposure and vulnerability to calculate a climate-agriculture-gender inequity hotspot index and rank the 87 countries by the index score. This index was standardized, allowing countries to be compared as well as visualized on a map (Figure 1). The “hottest” countries (ranked in the first 15 positions) are all situated in Africa.

As an example, we found that in Zambia, Luapula is a climate-agriculture-gender inequity hotspot province for perennial crops (Figure 2). This is likely due to heavy annual rainfall rendering the area prone to seasonal flooding. Livelihoods are centered around the perennial cassava crop, labeled in many places as a women’s crop, in addition to groundnuts and millet. As in other areas in Zambia, women here have less access to land, capital, technology and information than men, have more limited decision-making power and are subject to restrictive gender norms.

Overall, our research shows substantial heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of women at risk of high climate vulnerability. The high risk stems from the combination of climate hazards, women’s exposure to such hazards due to their involvement in agriculture and women’s vulnerability due to gender inequalities.

At a policy level, climate hazards should not be examined in isolation, but jointly with women’s vulnerability and exposure. Different risk components, such as climate hazards, women’s exposure to climate hazards and women’s vulnerability due to gender inequalities overlap and interact in complex, location- and context-specific ways.

Our hotspot mapping helps identify hotspot countries and hotspot areas within those countries, where women are disproportionally hit by extreme weather events and are also disadvantaged on mitigation and adaptation strategies to cope with climate change. As a next step, we are participating in CGIAR’s Adaptation Atlas project to apply the methodology for incorporating gender equity in the location-specific identification of climate adaptation solutions. Stay tuned!

Forthcoming: Koo, J.; Azzarri, C.; Mishra, A.; Lecoutere, E.; Puskur, R.; Chanana, N.; Singaraju, N.; Nico, G.; Khatri-Chhetri, A. Forthcoming. Climate-Agriculture-Gender Inequity Hotspot Mapping: A Methodology. CGIAR GENDER Platform Working Paper #005. Nairobi, Kenya: CGIAR GENDER Platform.

Avni Mishra is an associate scientist with CGIAR GENDER Platform; Els Lecoutere is a science officer with CGIAR GENDER Platform; Ranjitha Puskur is a gender research coordinator with CGIAR GENDER Platform; Jawoo Koo and Carlo Azzarri are senior research fellows with the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Environment and Production Technology Division.

An earlier version of this blog appeared in CGIAR GENDER Platform’s Gender Insights blog series.