Gender and Climate Change

Interrogating the relation between gender and climate change is a burgeoning transdisciplinary field. Although gender and the environment were intrinsically linked in the scholarship and politics of ecofeminism from the 1970s, early research, policy, and practice on climate change were often gender blind. Researchers and activists predominantly from the global South insisted that gender inequalities alongside class and race were crucial in the divergent experiences of climate change. They revealed how women were more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, in their daily lives and in extreme weather events. Later analyses qualified the prevalent portrait of women as the most vulnerable victims by highlighting women's agency, resilience, and resistance. Critical studies have analyzed the gendered inequalities in dominant discourses about climate change and challenged the bipolar emphasis on male/female and human/nonhuman. The urgency of the climate crisis has heightened the need to deeply connect gender justice and climate justice.