Uncovering New Spaces for Innovation: Climate Displacement and Gender
By Jessica Olson, Senior Climate Lead, Gender Equity & Environment @ Sierra Club, and the UNHCR’s Innovation Service.
Building on shared challenges and values, the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Innovation Service and the Sierra Club, the United States’ oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization, collaborated to explore the role of innovation and gender in responding to the needs of people displaced in the context of climate change.
This article is the fruit of conversations that sought to begin to understand how an intersectional appreciation of the consequences of climate breakdown can help us to better shape innovative solutions to displacement challenges.
As such, we will outline some of the core concepts and dynamics at play in the context of gender, displacement, and climate, in order to make more visible an emerging space for innovation.
Innovative approaches help to reveal the solutions to complex, cross-cutting challenges. This is true of climate change and the manner in which it interacts with gender, and stresses systems of livelihoods, and mobility in societies around the globe.
Considerations of environmental change and gender norms and roles are inseparable in the pursuit of impactful, sustainable, and just solutions for displaced people and host communities.
The confluence in question
As the world faces unprecedented impacts in the face of a rapidly changing climate, humanity must grapple with a new reality that includes ever-increasing threats to not only the health and safety of people across the planet, but also to their fundamental human rights.
As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report in 2018, “climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth are projected to increase with global warming of 1.5°C and increase further with 2°C.” As of January 2020, humanity has already exceeded 1°C in warming and is already facing disastrous impacts including rising sea-levels threatening low-lying islands, increasingly grave wildfires amidst record-breaking heat waves, and coastal cities or worsening disasters including storms, waves, floods and droughts.
This is not news to UNHCR, where work is already underway to identify the implications of climate change and the exacerbation of both poverty and conflict in contexts of forced displacement. A factsheet from UNHCR on the subject of gender, displacement and climate change is available here.
Gender roles and responsibilities play an important role in shaping the trends, challenges, risks and opportunities of people forced to move as a result of conditions shaped by climate change. While these dynamics are context-specific and cannot be generalized, women who face heightened risks of vulnerability are often also leaders in their homes and communities and are critical actors in shaping responses to climate-related mobility.
We believe that innovation can support the design of solutions that reflect the multidimensional quality of human rights and social justice concerns in the climate crisis.
Why should gender and climate conversations be aligned?
- Women and children girls are disproportionately impacted
Evidence suggests that there are gender-based differences in displacement related to extreme weather events. It is the understanding that climate change alters dynamics in communities and even exacerbates existing inequalities. This is evident in that where there are already entrenched patterns of inequality they are intensified by the many different impacts of climate change.
Inequality can surface in access to services, jobs, land, and more depending on context. It is also important to note that even among these global consequences, women of color and indigenous women can face even more negative ramifications than others.
2. Social justice, gender equality and climate justice are interrelated
By and large, the people and countries whose emissions have caused the most adverse climate impacts are the ones feeling them the least. This dynamic is no different when we interrogate the push and pull factors for climate-related human mobility internationally. Moreover, we know that human-made climate change is a problem that disproportionately impacts often already marginalized communities including indigenous communities, LGBTIQ+ communities, women and girls, and people living in lesser-developed countries or conflict-affected areas.
Research suggests that in countries with less inequality, emissions of carbon dioxide are lower. Though this is not conclusive, it suggests more equal societies create conditions for establishing better environmental policies and practices.
And Women Are Already Leading Innovative Responses to Displacement
3. Women are uniquely positioned to respond
Women and people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities from around the globe take on leadership roles for their communities in all phases of climate-related mobility and displacement. Given their unique roles, skills, and knowledge, women, and in particular indigenous women, are well-positioned to create, implement and lead on effective and inclusive solutions to climate problems.
For example, in many relocation sites after Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines, the ‘camp managers’ or leaders of bunkhouses were often women. After Hurricane Mitch made landfall in Guatemala and Honduras in 1998 and many men migrated north, women took active roles ‘in what [were] traditionally considered male tasks’, such as mobilizing their communities. One such leader is Ursula Rakova of Tulele Peisa who founded a cocoa cooperative of 640 small farmers in Bougainville composed mostly of women to create a reliable stream of income to sustain both the Islanders and their new neighbors after their planned relocation in the Carteret Islands.
4. There are strong examples of climate leadership
Women are already leading on solutions related to climate and displacement in their communities. Mary Robinson, former Irish President and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as part of her recent climate justice campaign, argued for the centering of women’s leadership in order to overcome the effects of climate change on communities.
In a speech, she argues, “The impacts of undermining poor livelihoods, and setting back development, which is what climate change is doing, that impacts particularly on women in trying to hold their families together and trying to fight back.”
From Christiana Figueres, whose diplomatic efforts in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) paved the way for the 2015 Paris Agreement, to Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, the activist in Chad who helped bring the rights of indigenous communities to the heart of global climate considerations, the evidence for the value of inclusive responses to the challenges before us is clear.
Innovate with gender in mind
Gender norms and roles influence who moves (or stays), how decisions are made, an individual’s circumstances in transit, and the outcomes of movement. Mobility and displacement can also influence gender dynamics by entrenching traditional gender roles and existing inequalities, or by challenging and changing them.
Understanding the interconnections between gender and the environment in displacement contexts should be a priority for innovating in a world of climate breakdown. As UNHCR’s 2018 Age, Gender and Diversity (AGD) policy argues, “Understanding and analysing the impact of intersecting personal characteristics on people’s experiences of forced displacement or statelessness are necessary for an effective response.”
As climatic factors come to bear on all aspects of the environments of people of concern to UNHCR, seeing how possible challenges and solutions interact with gender roles is key for the processes of user-centric design and an optimized delivery of the organizational mandate.
The tools and methodologies of innovation can help shape gender-responsive strategies to climate-induced displacement and the advancement of gender equality. As global temperatures and sea levels rise, people of concern to UNHCR are feeling the pressures on economic and political systems, and on the safety of the environment around them, but they are also leading the counterbid with solutions for a fairer world.
Know stories or promising practices of women’s innovation in response to climate change and displacement? Reach out to us at innovation@unhcr.org and jessica.olson@sierraclub.org.
