In the News: How Climate Change Impacts Women the Most

Photo by: Rucha Chitnis

"Climate change directly impacts the ability of women to achieve their own human rights and increases gender inequalities," Eleanor Blomstrom, program director for the Women's Environment and Development Organization, told VICE News.

Despite the greater threat to women, their needs are often neglected in sustainability planning, said Nisha Onta, a gender and climate change expert with the women's rights organization WOCAN. Under UN climate change guidelines, for example, developing countries are expected to submit plans for how they will adapt to a changing climate. But those plans are often made without incorporating plans for addressing gender inequality, like the fact that a lower-class woman in Bangladesh might not be allowed to use a new water pump, which is seen a important tool for managing changing precipitation patterns.

"The needs and reality of women are lacking and the work of women is kind of taken as a given," Onta told VICE News. "[Developers say,] 'We will go in and we will have water, we will make water accessible.' How are you going to do that? Women are going to collect this water. Have they been consulted? Do they have time?"

Read more about the differentiated impacts of climate change, and how the UN hopes to address this with it's Sustainable Development Goals in this great article from VICE News.