GGCA Gender and Climate Change Training Manual - Women's ...

By excluding women from climate change decision-making processes,
societies are excluding the voices of half the world’s population, contravening
the principles concerning their rights and, at the same time, depriving themselves
of an important number of skills, experiences and capacities. Women’s
environmental resources, knowledge and practices are key elements in climate
change processes, for example:
• During a drought in the small islands of the Federated States of
Micronesia, the women’s ancestral knowledge of the islands’
hydrology allowed them to easily find places to dig wells for drinking
water. The women do not normally become involved with decision
making, but the information they provided benefited the entire
community (Anderson, 2002).
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4.3 The role of women in climate change adaptation
4.3.1 Women and men as agents of change
As already stated in Module 3, it is necessary to stress that women are
not vulnerable because they are “naturally weaker”, but because conditions of
vulnerability faced by men and women are different because of their gender.
Women, like men, have particular socially-built vulnerabilities and capacities
which have been developed through a socialization process. They are, however,
also capable of bettering themselves, becoming empowered, or changed.
Women are not passive, they do not only receive help – they are active agents with
different capacities to respond to the challenges posed by climate change.
4.3.2 Differentiated relationship of women and men with the
environment
When we discuss vulnerabilities, or the role women and men can play as
change agents, the starting point is an analysis of the differentiated relationship
women and men have with environmental resources. Women and men relate
differently to the environment for a combination of the following reasons:
• Level of dependence on environmental subsistence resources;
• Unequal relations in using, having access to, and controlling
resources, and in the distribution of benefits;
• Ownership of, and rights to, resources; and
Module 4