Mounting evidence highlights forces us to ask questions of what it means for climate change, when largest groups of a society are deprived of resources and decision-making for adaptation and mitigation.

Gender equality is central to sustainable development and, in many ways, to tackling climate change. Women are disproportionally affected by climate-related extreme events (Global Gender and Climate Alliance, 2016), signaling their heightened vulnerability. There is nothing inherent to women (pregnancy being an exception) that makes them more vulnerable, but it is rather societal roles and expectations that set women up for, for example, not being able to adequately protect themselves against a climate extreme, being primarily responsible for caring for children and elderly, experiencing physical and psychological violence in the aftermath of an extreme event, etc. Lack of access to different types of resources, be it financial, education, information, hinders women’s capacity to adapt to climate change.

Women are underrepresented in decision-making bodies at all levels of governance. Empirical evidence, meanwhile, suggests that countries with higher shares of women in parliaments are also enacting more stringent climate policies (Mavisakalyan and Tarverdi, 2019), prompting us to think about the importance of gender equality not only for adaptive capacity, but also our collective mitigation abilities. In short: roughly half of a society is lacking equal access to resources and opportunities, this spills over onto a society as a whole, making it necessary to consider current and future estimates of gender equality in our analyses of exposure, vulnerability as well as solutions to climate change.

Indicator of gender inequality in scenarios

Following the current SSP narratives, in a 2019 paper entitled “Overcoming gender inequality for climate resilient development”, my co-authors and I analyzed macro-economic factors that correlate with gender inequality and found that a combination of GDP per capita, post-secondary education and gender inequality in mean years of schooling of a population can explain country-specific development of gender inequality over time.

There are many ways to measure gender (in)equality, and here we used the Gender Inequality Index (GII) of the United Nations Development Programme. It is a simple index that measures differences between men and women in labor force participation, education and health. There are other, more complex measures, such as the Gender Equality Index of the European Institute for Gender Equality, which cover many more aspects of gender equality. But for our analysis, it was important to have a global coverage and at least two decades of data, which is why we chose the index that is less comprehensive in content, but more in coverage. We hope that our work will inspire projections of other indicators too, for a more complete overview of the many different facets of gender inequality.

Improvements in gender equality are possible in the near term

In 2017, 72% of girls and 54% of women were significantly affected by gender inequality. Here on the plot we see how much difference for gender equality it makes if a society embarks on an SSP1-like pathway, in which, primarily thanks to rapid expansion of educational attainment, gender equality significantly improves. On the other hand, a world in SSP3 virtually retains the present global distribution of our gender inequality indicator, due to faster population growth and slower and uneven socioeconomic development up to 2030. This once more highlights the importance of prioritizing investments in (female) education, also in the context of climate resilience.

More emphasis on gender equality is needed in the scenario space

Empowering women through improved healthcare, education, and representation in government could help societies adapt more quickly and easily to the impacts of a changing climate. In the paper that I describe here, we use historical patterns to extrapolate future trends of one simple indicator of gender equality. Still, with mounting evidence on the centrality of gender equality and female empowerment for building resilience to and fighting climate change, more work is needed on disentangling the empirical connections and more interconnectedness with classical scenario dimensions such as GDP, population, or urbanization, with the hope is that gender equality will gain a more prominent in future generations of socio-economic scenarios.

References