The Women that Climate Forgot

Nicola Biggerstaff

A recent report by the UN Population Fund and Queen Mary University of London found that only 38 nations include specialist provisions for women in their climate emergency plans.

The report studied the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of the 119 signatories of the Paris Agreement. Of these nations, 109 reference gender, 72 recognise women as a vulnerable group, and 48 make specific reference to women’s health. However, only 38 make specific reference to continuing access to reproductive health services in their plans, and just 15 reference the potential for increasing violence against women.

The is just the latest in a long line of women’s needs being treated as secondary, or outright neglected. By ignoring the needs of half the world’s population as we head into this crisis, we are setting ourselves up to simply accelerate the human cost. For long enough, women have been left out of these discussions, particularly among the developed nations more concerned with the advancement of their economies under new environmental conditions.

It is a great oversight to think of the issues of women’s healthcare and climate change as anything less than interlinked. With changes in how we live our lives pending, whether through the drastic economic, social and lifestyle changes required to reverse or lessen the impact of climate change, or through the worsening effects should we fail to do so, women’s healthcare is a fundamental right that we cannot lose sight of.

The report theorizes that the impact of extreme heat, pollution, and other changing factors attributed to climate change will have adverse effects on rates of domestic violence, fertility, maternal health, and birth rates, as well as inflate the discrepancies which already exist globally.

The Guardian’s article on the report launch this week provides some context to the importance of this report being released now, in that we can already see changes happening across the globe. It highlights that the recent cyclones that hit southern and eastern Africa and Madagascar have disrupted the provisions of health services and damaged the buildings that housed them, as well as spread waterborne diseases which are more likely to have fatal outcomes in babies and young children.

Access to family planning services will be more important than ever when heading into the climate emergency. Women must retain their bodily autonomy throughout, and the choice whether or not to have children is still theirs alone to make. More and more women are choosing to remain childfree, and an increasing number are doing so for environmental reasons. On the flipside, extreme weather has also been linked to increasing numbers of high risk pregnancies and premature births.

The increase in child marriage in nations when facing economic hardship has also been noted, as families marry off their children to reduce the economic burden on the household. As climate-related hardships come into play, such as food shortages or homelessness due to extreme weather, this will only increase in underdeveloped nations.

However, there are measures which can be taken, and we can look to the report for some inspiration. It singles out the specific measures some nations have taken as examples for how others may wish to improve upon their own plans, including Benin’s commitment to improving access to maternal and child health services, Jordan’s commitment to strengthen protections for abused women, the elderly, children and other vulnerable groups, and Costa Rica’s commitment to improve data collection for women, the indigenous community, and other vulnerable groups, to improve their understanding of the discrepancies of climate change impacts.

No one will be immune from the effects of climate breakdown, nor can we predict what those effects may be from nation to nation. The lack of provisions for women in the UK’s climate plans is extremely concerning.

Most recently updates in September 2020, the UK government’s NDC makes reference to women 14 times. However, all of these references concern the inclusion of women in more STEM-related fields to benefit green research and economies. While this is obviously encouraging, there is no reference to women’s health, and it only recognises that women are still generally at a disadvantage in the workplace. A cynical person could interpret this as an ignorance to the needs of women, only concerned for our output, our ability to work and produce for the good of the economy, rather than our needs, our health and wellbeing. A rather typical response from our government.

Now allow me to pose a couple of hypothetical scenarios: the first, inspired by the events of last weekend, in which floods have left communities in the northeast still repairing the damage. A town floods, leading to the forced closure of public services, including healthcare access. The local health clinic has been forced to close due to flood damage, and now women cannot access the pre- or post-natal services provided. They cannot leave the town due to the water, and are essentially trapped there with no healthcare access, unless in the case of a life threatening emergency which requires an airlift.

Another could be a family, whose eldest daughter has recently moved in with her partner. She made this decision partly out of guilt as the cost of living increases, and she recognises the strain that an additional mouth to feed puts on the family bills. She does not want to burden them by moving back home when her partner becomes violent, and now she feels trapped.

What is truly terrifying about both of these scenarios, is that they could very well be happening right now. Last year, just ten months after the UK’s report was updated, the country reached temperatures exceeding forty degrees for the first time. Since then, we have had extreme storms, flooding, and even more unseasonable heat which would more than suggest that the climate crisis is already here.

Since September 2020 we’ve had two more prime ministers, both of whom publicly stated their desire to delay or outright reverse UK climate policy. Just last month, Rishi Sunak announced the delay to some of the UK’s key net zero goals, and I wrote last week just how much he decries the public transport infrastructure necessary to build a greener, fairer economy. What woman would want to work in a sector which this government is now trying to downsize? And with that, the UK’s gender-specific contributions to climate plans is thrown out the window.

So what can we do here in Scotland? Our government must, with urgency, declare the necessity of provisions for women and minorities in climate policy, that our health and wellbeing is not an afterthought when our lives are at stake. And they must improve upon their current commitments to gender equality by incorporating the potential impact of climate change and preventative measures.