For International Womxn’s Day we take the opportunity to critically reflect on the climate crisis and its intersection with gender. We use an intersectional feminist approach to highlight the relational nature of power, which dictates how climate crises and gender equality are being framed, and how that affects the solutions proposed to combat climate change.

The climate crisis is impacting all aspects of life, from daily changes in seasonal predictability to mass socio-economic and political changes such as climate-induced migration, increased natural disasters and the erosion of livelihoods. Climate change will continue to further exacerbate inequalities, including gender inequalities, unless and until we address root causes.

The urgency to address the impacts of climate change is spurring global responses. We see growth in renewable energy projects led by the private sector in coalition with nation states and efforts towards international mandates and regulations through annual conferences. But urgency has become a justification to accept “the usual” approaches to tackle the climate crisis, sidelining critical reflection.

The current limited climate change debate

Climate change discourse centers around two main ideas: “vulnerability” and “resilience”. Vulnerability is about exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity to respond to climate change. In other words, it refers to the extent of susceptibility to harm. Vulnerability is influenced by the socio-economic conditions of a person or community and focusing on it can be an important tool for advocacy. However, it can also be disempowering. Focusing on vulnerability casts the affected people as innocent, passive victims, which diminishes their agency, rendering them “victims”. The other idea – resilience – is the “ability to prepare for, recover from, and adapt to” the impacts of climate change. Like vulnerability,  climate resilience can also be a limiting framework:  it places the actions of a person or community within a preconceived model of how they should act.  Rather than focusing the climate change conversation around vulnerability and resilience, we instead need to ask: what makes a person or community vulnerable, and/or what is it that requires them to be resilient? 

Explaining the intersectionality of the climate crisis from a feminist perspective

When it comes to gender equality and climate change, analysis relies strongly on gender binaries and prevailing stereotypes of two genders: women and men. Evidence demonstrates that women are disproportionately affected by climate change. Some development research looks at this intersection of ‘gender’ and climate change. Oftentimes, though, more fundamental questions as to why women are more affected, are overlooked.

In such a framing,  the woman becomes a passive victim to climate change, while the power relations rendering her to an inferior and disadvantaged position, are missed. Social constructions of gender identities become the basis for analysis of vulnerability relating to climate change. This is problematic because well-intended interventions targeting women can lead to negative impacts if gendered power relations underpinning these inequalities are not analyzed and understood.  The root causes underlying both vulnerability and the need to be resilient, are critical for robust responses.

An intersectional feminist approach recognizes compounding factors of inequality and shifts the focus of climate change responsibilities, effects and consequences from the individual to the structural. An intersectional feminist approach directly confronts power relations to get to the root causes of today’s climate crisis, which may include: obstructive social norms, the increased corporatization of society and state affairs, or, colonial legacies affecting current day land rights. 

KIT Institute’s role

This International Womxn’s Day, we urge reflection on mainstream understandings of the climate crisis and posit that climate justice goes hand in hand with gender justice. To achieve this, a radical shift is needed in how the climate crisis is framed and addressed. We need to embrace transformative approaches that work in partnership with local, national, and regional climate and gender justice movements. 

At the intersection of these issues, KIT Institute works:

• With Fenomenal Funds to tell the stories of women’s/feminist funds and their efforts for organisational resilience and the strengthening of the gender justice movement and funding ecosystem;
• On financial inclusion for climate resilience in Latin America (FAIR Center for Financial Access, Inclusion and Research, Tecnologico de Monterrey, and the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, CFIG);
• On the effects of climate change on young people’s access to sexual reproductive health services (Break Free!);
• On young women’s awareness, agency, advocacy and accountability (YW4A);
• On land rights and governance issues in the LAND-at-Scale project

For more on  gender transformative approaches and the intersection between climate justice and gender justice, please contact KIT Gender advisors Anne Karam (a.karam@kit.nl), Rebecca Hallin (r.hallin@kit.nl), or Ana Victoria Portocarrero (a.portocarrero@kit.nl)