Swiss court challenge makes clear climate change is a women’s issue

Women experience the greatest impacts of climate change, and these impacts exacerbate pre-existing gender inequalities which threaten their lives and health
Despite their unique experiences and being at the forefront of climate action movements, women continue to be absent from climate decision-making processes

Akanksha Khullar

Published: 6:15am, 9 Apr 2023

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In a landmark legal hearing on March 29, a group of Swiss women argued before the European Court of Human Rights that their government’s failure to sufficiently reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions had violated their human rights.

Presenting their medical records as evidence, the applicants – all of whom are 63 or older – claimed that frequent heatwaves, which are becoming harsher and more intense because of climate change, are interfering with their health and quality of life.

While the Swiss government does not deny climate change can affect health, it holds the opinion that it cannot be specifically tied to the older women’s health. However, there is recent research that suggests the opposite and supports the argument that climate change-induced heatwaves are harming at-risk populations, including older women.

It is therefore important to understand that the issue of climate change is not “gender neutral” and is increasingly becoming a significant global feminist cause.

In the past decade, women and girls across the world have often been described as bearing the brunt of looming disasters that climate change brings to their communities. Women experience the greatest impacts of climate change, and these impacts exacerbate pre-existing gender inequalities – which exist in both the developed and developing world – and pose unique threats to their livelihoods, health and safety.

If not dealt with in time, author Fatima Bhutto writes that “crisis will affect women more than everything else in the world – more than abortion rollbacks, more than oppressive governments, more than lower pay grades.”

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Women tend to depend more on natural resources yet have limited access to them. In many parts of the world, women and girls are responsible for gathering food, water and household energy sources such as firewood. The effects of climate change – which include extreme weather, droughts and famine – make their hardship worse as these women have to travel longer distances and spend more time searching for these resources.

The availability of these resources has drastically reduced as a result of the climate crisis. Extreme heat, floods, wildfires, droughts are thus making it harder for women to manage household responsibilities and conduct domestic chores such as cooking, gathering resources, cleaning and providing care.

We must remember that women are more likely than men to be engaged in, and earn a living from, natural resource-based or climate-vulnerable sectors such as livestock management, agriculture, disaster risk reduction, forestry and so on. Consequently, in times of drought or erratic rainfalls, women often see their economic prospects diminish and are forced to work hard to earn an income, thereby reducing the time they could otherwise spend on learning, working and earning.

This puts additional pressure on girls, who often have to drop out of school to provide help to their mothers in managing the increased burden.

Young girls pull containers of water as they return to their huts from a well in the village of Lomoputh in northern Kenya on May 12, 2022. Photo: AP

Climate change and its associated disasters are also increasingly endangering women’s health as a result of their already-limited access to healthcare. A paper published last November in Scientific Reports noted a correlation between extreme heat and instances of stillbirth.

This could produce a nightmare scenario in disasters such as the devastating floods last year in Pakistan, where reports indicated nearly 60,000 pregnant women were deprived of maternal healthcare and left with no support for them or their children.

Climate change-induced displacement, both within and across international borders, is rising globally. Most of those forced to leave their homes are women, further putting them at risk of violence, including sexual violence. UN Environment figures suggest that 80 per cent of the people displaced by climate change worldwide are women.

The threat of systematic violence, exploitation, child marriage and human trafficking also rises during extreme weather. For instance, the United Nations reported that the droughts in Uganda brought rising rates of domestic violence and sexual abuse. The floods in Pakistan and cyclones in Bangladesh brought not only maternal health crises but also increased violence towards women.

Women and children walk back to their tents after going to a medical clinic at a relief camp for flood victims, in Fazilpur near Multan, Pakistan, on September 23 last year. Pregnant women struggled to get care after Pakistan’s unprecedented flooding last year. Photo: AP

But despite their unique experiences and being at the forefront of climate action movements, women continue to be missing from decision-making processes and designing climate-related policies. Given that climate change is a gendered issue which continues to affect women at least as much as their male counterparts, the impactful and meaningful participation of women at the highest levels of decision-making related to climate change is not only a requirement but perhaps a necessity.

Thus, as the world continues to struggle with the onset of disasters, there is an urgent need for global actors to acknowledge that climate change is a feminist issue.

This will help ensure that the concerns of women are mainstreamed into the climate change agenda and that women from diverse sociocultural backgrounds are able to lead negotiations and participate in the design and implementation of climate action programmes.

Akanksha Khullar is a visiting fellow with the Observer Research Foundation, an independent global think tank based in Delhi, India. Her work focuses on gender security issues

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