Women and girls on the front lines of climate change are in deep crisis; the COP 28 discussions about loss and damage need to address their reality.
Every day you can read about the climate crisis in the news. Here in Bangladesh, we are living it.
Our crops are failing. Our fish are disappearing. Cyclones are hammering our coastline with greater and greater force and frequency. Heat is becoming unbearable and potable water scarce. High tides—a result of sea-level rise—are rushing in and out without warning and leaving behind salinized wells and fields and fishponds. Our six seasons have merged into three.
The livelihoods of poor people, which have always depended on the land and sea, have been ravaged, and the toll that’s taking on women and girls is particularly heavy.
I am the CEO of JAGO NARI, a Bangladeshi NGO that focuses on women’s rights, including reducing the impact of disasters on women. We have worked in partnership with Oxfam since 2010. Women who have suffered domestic violence and sexual harassment and abuse come to us for help in resolving their struggles, so we have a chance to hear how the pressures of their deepening poverty are affecting them.
The growing difficulty—or rather, the impossibility—of a great swath of our people to make a living has, understandably, triggered migration. Men travel to the major cities and also to neighboring countries to find work; but while their remittances are helpful, their absence is dangerous.
Women living without a man in the house are subject to sexual advances from men who are not their husbands, which can lead to violence.
Adolescent girls living without their fathers present are at such risk that early marriage is looked on as something positive that will ensure a girl’s security; meanwhile, it will end her education and likely result in serious physical, emotional, and financial harm.
Many men who migrate choose never to come home, leaving their families in a near-permanent state of crisis.
Did Bangladesh create the climate crisis? Emphatically no. We contribute only .4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Though fossil-fuel-powered transportation and industry are present here, if you travel through the countryside—home to more than half the population—you will see people living simply, without cars, air conditioning, or the means to engage in consumer culture. Meat is costly to the climate, but in rural Bangladesh, it is a luxury that some can only afford a few times a year.
As policymakers from around the world gather at COP 28 in November and December to discuss compensating countries for climate-related losses and damage, it’s critical that they look beyond established knowledge to understand what it means to be a woman in the grip of this crisis. (See Oxfam’s research report on the gendered effects of climate change. )
Women are the water carriers, the meal providers, the quiet laborers. In traditional homes, their lives take place in a private sphere, so their struggles, concerns, and ideas fall far below the radar of the world’s decision-makers.
How many people are aware that women facing harsh conditions of heat and floods are compromising their health by taking pills to stop menstruation? How many people understand the connection between high-tide flooding and child marriage? To make wise choices about how to invest loss-and-damage funds, policymakers need to understand the nature of the problems they are setting out to address, and to do that, they must listen to the voices of women.