Climate Change and Gender in Rich Countries

Work, public policy and action

Marjorie Griffin Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315407883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Développement durable

Climate change is at the forefront of ideas about public policy, the economy and labour issues. However, the gendered dimensions of climate change and the public policy issues associated with it in wealthy nations are much less understood.

Climate Change and Gender in Rich Countries covers a wide range of issues dealing with work and working life. The book demonstrates the gendered distinctions in both experiences of climate change and the ways that public policy deals with it. The book draws on case studies from the UK, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Spain and the US to address key issues such as: how gendered distinctions affect the most vulnerable; paid and unpaid work; and activism on climate change. It is argued that including gender as part of the analysis will lead to more equitable and stronger societies as solutions to climate change advance.

This volume will be of great relevance to students, scholars, trade unionists and international organisations with an interest in climate change, gender, public policy and environmental studies.

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PART I

Context and overview

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1

INTRODUCTION

Why gender matters when dealing with climate change

Marjorie Griffin Cohen

Climate change is the one global issue that is both ubiquitous and long-term: there is no one on earth who will not be affected. In the summer of 2016 the urgency of dealing with this monumental problem was underscored by it being the hottest summer on record. But this was not an isolated event because 2015 was the hottest year for the world up until then, and 2014 was the hottest year before that. Fifteen of the sixteen warmest years on record have happened in the twenty-first century. Just as alarming is that this warming is occurring at a more rapid rate than ever seen in the past 1,000 years (The Climate Examiner 2016).

While climate change deniers still exist, most governments now understand that they need to take action to slow the progression of climate change to a rate that will allow life to be tolerable in most parts of the planet (UN Paris Agreement 2015). The problem is that it is neither certain that the current objectives (of no more than a 2°C increase) are adequate nor that the actions and plans of governments, either singly or collectively, are sufficient to make a difference to the current trajectory. The major international agreement to reduce GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, the Paris Agreement, is criticized by many environmental scientists and other groups for being too weak to compel genuine change because it consists mostly of intentions and aims, rather than real instruments to compel countries to enforce compliance (Milman 2015). Others see actual climate change denial in the actions of those governments who, as do most governments represented in this book, continue to expand the fossil fuel industry while at the same time professing support for GHG reductions (Daub & Klein 2016).

This book on Climate Change and Gender in Rich Countries: Work, Public Policy and Action grew out of a researchers’ workshop that took place in Vancouver, BC, Canada in June 2015. The workshop, “Climate change, gender and work in rich countries”, brought together researchers working on gender and climate change from developed, wealthy countries to share their research and to discuss the issues inherent to making gendered issues, particularly those regarding work, a part of the discussions and debates on climate change policies (SFU, Climate change, gender and work in rich countries 2015). The focus on rich countries was deliberate because of the dearth of information about the implications of climate change by gender in these countries. During the workshop researchers presented research related to Australia, Canada, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. While this was a researchers’ workshop, practitioners from trade unions, environmental organizations and community groups also presented papers and discussed the challenges for including gender issues in both analysis and action on climate change.

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Gender analysis in rich countries

The workshop was specifically about “rich” nations because while governments in highly developed nations have begun to look at the impact of climate change on people, and while the inclusion of gender considerations is sometimes mentioned, it is rarely central to public policy analysis of the problem, plans to deal with it, or the implementation of climate change policy. The absence of a gendered analysis in policy discussions in decision-making venues is troubling, but is recognizable as consistent with most problems and debates on policy issues in wealthy, highly developed capitalist countries. There are many reasons for this, but an obvious one is that a gendered analysis of any new policy measure is usually fairly rudimentary and an inordinate amount of effort over a long period of time is required on the part of feminists to have any issue taken seriously (Bashevkin 1998; Cohen & Pulkingham 2009; Sainsbury 1999). The other possible reason for this policy lacuna is the under-researched nature of the subject itself in wealthy countries. While feminists have long been writing about ecological issues, this has been on the fringe of feminist demands in most countries and ecological feminism tends to be considered less central to feminist thought and action than issues dealing with more rights-based issues. This may be changing, but any analysis of the gendered implications and climate change and the political action associated with it are not developed enough to penetrate the current approaches to dealing with climate change. There is neither a well-developed body of information about the effects of climate change by gender, nor how public policy that is intended to cope with or mitigate climate change affects people differently, whether by gender or any other form of difference.

Work has been done in pointing out the problems of excluding gender in climate change analyses and ideas about what needs to be done both by researchers and international organizations (MacGregor 2010; McNutt & Haryluck 2009; Nelson 2009). In North America research interests on the gender/climate change nexus so far deals most heavily on the distinction between male and female responses to climate change initiatives. It shows that women tend to have both greater knowledge about and concern for climate change than do men, and women are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviours than men. This phenomenon appears to have increased over time and is related to women’s tendency to be more progressive in their political outlook than men (Mohai 1997; Clancy & Roehi 2003). There is also an interest in the disproportionate way that women are likely to pay for the costs of climate change mitigation initiatives, such as a carbon tax (Chalifour 2010). The methodologies used vary, with some focusing primarily on income distribution by gender and class to show the unequal impacts of climate change mitigation policies. Other approaches use the distinction between males’ and females’ time-and-use patterns that influence energy use, research that is usually associated with an analysis of household work and consumption patterns. Studies on consumption indicate that gender has a significant impact on the use of resources, with women having a lower use in all income levels in both the North and the South (Johnsson-Latham 2007; Cohen 2015). At least one study in the US, however, finds little evidence to indicate differences between male and female-headed households and in countries where more equal economic opportunities exist, women tend to adopt male-type lifestyles and consumption patterns (Lambrou & Piana 2006).

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As Seema Arora-Jonsson shows, however, the more general references largely tend to essentialize the issue and see women as either vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment, with women in the South usually depicted as more affected by climate change than men, and men in the North as polluting more than women (2011). Also as a result of the lack of hard information about gender distinctions, there is a tendency to conflate the experiences of women in developing and developed countries. The usual justification for including women in climate change analysis is based on claims that everywhere “women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men – primarily as they constitute the majority of the world’s poor and are more dependent for their livelihood on natural resources that are threatened by climate change” (UN Women Watch).

Despite this relative neglect of gender and climate change issues in wealthy counties, the global literature in relation to developing nations is surprisingly extensive.¹ This is undoubtedly because the impact of climate change so directly affects the work that people in developing countries do in providing food, working in forests and fisheries, and living on marginal land (Agarwal 2010; Ahmed & Fajber 2009). But it is also because international agencies have been more pro-active in connecting sustainable development and its funding to gender and social development policies (UN Women n.d.). The argument for inclusion of gendered approaches to climate change rests on the idea that gender issues are integral to the whole concept of development policy in that the latter deals with both the contributors to climate change, the policy associated with solutions to climate change and how poverty can be alleviated and development can be achieved in a sustainable way (Khamati-Njenga & Clancy 2002). Most importantly the argument is made that gender issues should not be marginalized in the discussion of how to pursue a sustainable economy, a message that can and should be carried over to the developed world as well.

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Another possible reason for the lack of seriousness on this issue in developed nations is the sense that it is less of a problem because there is more homogeneity in experiencing climate change than in developing areas of the world. In a global perspective the equity and justice issues are framed around the North/South divide, while in rich countries the divide is more often recognized as that between generations as well as class, with gender more or less absent from considerations (Posner & Sunstein 2008). As a result, the discussion of gender and climate change in developed nations and academic research on the topic is not well advanced and is very much less related to the general structure of sustainable development than it is in developing countries. This means that when the effects of climate change mitigation strategies are examined, such as the implementation of a carbon tax, no consideration is given for the gendered impacts, and usually if there is an examination of its effects they are based on effects on different income levels (European Environmental Agency 2011; Williams III et al. 2014).

Major themes

The major themes of this book concentrate on gender, work, public policy and action. Frequently when “gender” is used it is a signal that women will be the subject. In this book the intent is to understand when and where the different experiences of males and females matter with regard to climate change. There is not an assumption that in all cases females will be more disadvantaged than males, but rather, that their very different situations, depending on location, type of work, class position and ethnicity or race will play a big role in how they are affected by climate change and government actions to deal with it.

Gender is not a simple concept, although it is now widely accepted as preferable to understanding differences by sex because sex refers to physical differences while “gender” implies a social condition applied to the biological sex of either a male or a female: the distinctions between males and females are not strictly biological, but are cultural as well. This is an idea that in itself can be problematic, in that for many there is not a clear distinction between the physical and the psychosocial aspects of sex (Halpern 2012, 35–36). The recent use of the word “genders” tends to be more inclusive than simply males and females and indicates that genders can relate to personal identification that crosses a wide spectrum of gender divides. This book will examine ways in which the social construction of gendered systems of work and social life in rich countries mean that climate change has different implications for a wide range of human conditions. This is because men and women do very different kinds of work, tend to have very different kinds of economic and social relationships, and have different physical attributes that are affected by any change. A monumental global change, such as climate change, will have differential impacts by gender, but clearly not in all circumstances, and there are certainly times when males and females will be affected in the same way (Nagel 2016). The emphasis in this book is on the male/female gender divide only because that is the current state of research, not because there is a failure to recognize the potential distinctions for other gendered groups.

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The idea of recognizing the “intersectionality” of experience in research is evident throughout the chapters in this book. This relates to the multiplicity of cultural experiences that affect people, particularly with regard to those who experience some type of social dominance or discrimination. For many, gender is not the dominant oppression, although its intersection with a dominant oppression, such as racial identity, can mean the experience is different because of gender. Intersectionality as a distinct concept was identified by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in the context of the issue of violence against women and greatly advanced ideas about how oppressed peoples can experience their oppressions differently (1991). Usually an intersectional analysis deals with race, class and gender. In this book the intersections of various ways of identifying people aside from gender are important. This includes differences based on a variety of issues such as ability, age, ethnicity, racial identity, location, class, education and physical location.

One group that is frequently the point of study in this book are Aboriginal peoples in Canada. The distinct historical position of these groups, who are descendants of the original inhabitants of the country, means that they are especially vulnerable.² Their vulnerability is also shaped by location and gender. The chapters specifically dealing with the Aboriginal experience are those by Michael Kim on the Inuit in the Arctic and Ellie Perkins on the activism of Aboriginal women on climate change. Both Maureen Reed in her chapter on forest-based communities and Maya Gislason and her research groups’ examination of resource extracting communities include the particular significance of living in these types of communities and the meaning this has for Aboriginal women and children. Other forms of difference that intersect with gender in this book relate especially to geographical location and the incidence of poverty, but also significant is the type of work performed and the conditions under which it occurs. The impact of climate change on specific areas is well known and a first obvious place for research; so too is the impact on those living in poverty. Less understood is the relationship between climate change and the need for humane work. In this a gendered examination is merited and is undertaken in various ways throughout the volume. In a particularly novel approach to climate change research, Kendra Coulter raises the issue of humane work across animal species. She shows that an examination of the gendered nature of the implications of climate change is significant for animal as well as human life.

Work is a major theme in this book because of its centrality to life and the transformations required in both the economy and work that are inherent in climate change and the ways that governments deal with it. The gendered conditions of work and its value is dominant in feminist analysis of capitalist economies and how these economies deve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Climate Change and Gender in Rich Countries
• Routledge Studies in Climate, Work and Society
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Context and Overview
• PART II Challenges for Paid and Unpaid Work
• PART III Vulnerability, Insecurity and Work
• PART IV Rural and Resource Communities
• PART V Public Policy and Activism
• Index