Climate Vulnerability in the Shadow of Gender, Age, Poverty and Location Nexus
Abstract
Climate change is universally recognized as an environmental and economic crisis, but its social manifestations bear greater inequalities. This research explores how climate change disproportionately affects adolescent girls belonging to low-income urban and rural settlements in Delhi, India, and how gender, age, poverty, and location intersect to configure their vulnerabilities. Whereas previous research tends to conflate adolescent girls in a category of "women and girls," few studies focus on their special issues. This study employs the qualitative method using secondary materials and primary data from questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to present the lived realities of adolescent girls in flood- and drought-prone areas. Evidence shows that climate change exacerbates gender violence, interferes with education, adds more household and income-generating tasks for girls, and undermines their physical, psychological, and reproductive health. All these impacts tend to create a poverty cycle, food insecurity, and early marriage. This study brings to the forefront the imperative for gender-sensitive climate adaptation policies that emphasize resilient WASH infrastructure, accessible health care, secure schooling, and social protection arrangements. These connected issues must be addressed to construct equitable, climate-resilient futures.
References
2. Atkinson, H.G., & Bruce, J. (2015). Adolescent girls, human rights and the expanding climate emergency. Annals of Global Health, 81(3).
3. Bartlett, S. (2008). Climate change and urban children: impacts and implications for adaptation in low-and middle-income countries. Environment and Urbanization, 20(2), 501-519.
4. Bartlett, Sheridan, David Dodman, Jorgelina Hardoy, David Satterthwaite and Cecilia Tacoli. (2009). Social Aspects of Climate Change in Urban Areas in Low-and Middle-Income Nations, in Daniel Hoornweg, Mila Freire, Marcus J Lee, Perinaz Bhada-Tata and Belinda Yuen (editors), Fifth Urban Research Symposium, Cities and Climate Change: Responding to an Urgent Agenda Vol 2, pages 670–726, World Bank, Marseille.
5. Chuang, E., Pinchoff, J., & Psaki, S. (2018, 23 January). How natural disasters undermine schooling. Brookings. Retrieved from: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2018/01/23/how-natural-disasters-undermine-schooling/.
6. Das, M. B. (2017). (rep.). The Rising Tide: A New Look at Water and Gender. World Bank.
7. Demetriades, J., and Esplen, E. (2008). The gender dimensions of poverty and climate change adaptation. Ids Bulletin, 39(4), 24-31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1759-5436.2008.tb00473.x.
8. Goodrich C,G., Udas P.B. and Larrington-Spencer, H. (2019). Conceptualizing gendered vulnerability to climate Change: Contextual conditions and drivers of Change. In: Goodrich, C. G; Udas, P. B. & Prakash, A. (eds) Conceptualizing and Contextualizing Gendered Vulnerabilities to Climate Variability in the Hindu Kush Himalayan Region; Special Issue of Environmental Development, ELSERVIER. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2018.11.003.
9. Education Cannot Wait. (2020). Stronger together in crises: 2019 annual results report. https://www.educationcannotwait.org/annual-report/pdfs/ECW2019-Annual-Results-Report.pdf.
10. Islam, S. N., and Winkel, J. (2017). Climate change and social inequality. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
11. IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, 3056 pp., doi:10.1017/9781009325844.
12. Lieber M, Chin-Hong P, Kelly K, Dandu M, Weiser SD. (2022). A systematic review and meta-analysis assessing the impact of droughts, flooding, and climate variability on malnutrition. Global Public Health;17:68–82.
13. Mian, L. H., & Namasivayam, M. (2017). (rep.). Sex, rights, gender in the age of climate change. Asian-Pacific Resource & Research Center For Women.
14. Patel, S. K., Agrawal, G., Mathew, B., Patel, S., Mohanty, B., and Singh, A. (2019). Climate change and women in South Asia: A review and future policy implications. World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, 17(2), 145-166.
15. Plan International. (2011). Weathering the Storm: Adolescent girls and climate change.
16. Plan International. (2019). Climate change: Focus on girls & young women. Plan International Position Paper. Interim. September 2019.
17. Pope DH, McMullen H, Baschieri A, Philipose A, Udeh C, Diallo J, et al. (2023). What is the current evidence for the relationship between the climate and environmental crises and child marriage? A scoping review. Global Public Health;18 (1)/.
18. Pross, C., Han, J. Y. C., Kim, D., and Vigil, S. (2020). Climate change, gender equality and human rights in Asia: Regional review and promising practices. UN Women.
19. Proulx K, Daelmans B, Baltag V, Banati P. (2024). Climate change impacts on child and adoles-cent health and wellbeing: A narrative review. Journal of Global Health; Vol.14:04061.
20. Resurrección, Bernadette P.; Chanda Gurung Goodrich; Yiching Song; Aditya Bastola; Anjal Prakash; Deepa Joshi; Janwillem Liebrand; and Shaheen Ashraf Shah. (2019). In the Shadows of the Himalayan Mountains: Persistent Gender and Social Exclusion in Development. In: P. Wester, A. Mishra, A. Mukherji, A.B. Shrestha (eds) The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment – Mountains, Climate Change, Sustainability and People. Springer, Cham
21. Shamsuddoha, M., Jabed, M. A., Islam, M. S., Sultana, N., Imran, A., Rabbi, S. N. A., Tanje U. J, Shanjia, S. and Sharif, M. M. (2024). Impacts of climate change-induced natural hazards on women and their human rights implications: a study in the southwest coast of Bangladesh. Journal of Migration and Health, 9, 100221.
22. Sharpe, I., & Davison, C. M. (2022). A scoping review of climate change, climate-related disasters, and mental disorders among children in low-and middle-income countries. International journal of environmental research and public health, 19(5), 2896.
23. Sugden, F., Silva, S. D., Clement, F., Maskey-Amatya, N., Ramesh, V., Philip, A., and Bharati, L. (2014). A framework to understand gender and structural vulnerability to climate change in the Ganges River Basin: lessons from Bangladesh, India and Nepal (IWMI Working Paper, 159). IWMI.
24. Theirworld. (2018). Safe schools: The hidden crisis. A framework for action to deliver safe, non-violent, inclusive and effective learning environments. Theirworld.
25. Thurston AM, Stöckl H, Ranganathan M. (2021). Natural hazards, disasters and violence against women and girls: a global mixed-methods systematic review. BMJ Global Health. 2021; doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004377.
26. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (2019). Synthesis report: Differentiated impacts of climate change on women and men; the integration of gender considerations in climate policies, plans and actions; and progress in enhancing gender balance in national climate delegations. Bonn, Germany.
27. WMO (2021). WMO Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes (1970–2019). WMO-No. 1267.
28. WHO (2023). Climate Change. 12 October 2023. Climate change.
29. Bardan, R. (2024). NASA analysis confirms 2023 as warmest year on record. NASA https://www. nasa. gov/news-release/nasa-analysis-confirms-2023-as-warmest-year-on-record (12 January 2024).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
