The links between climate change and gender are widely known. However, little research has been done on how men and women respond differently to climate variability and uncertainties. To help respond to this, my ongoing PhD examines the politics of gender in climate change adaptation in the Maasai community of the Mara region in Kenya. So far, I have found many ways in which gender, class and age intersect with responses to climate variability, among diverse pastoralist men and women.
Extreme weather events
The Mara region of Kenya has experienced increasingly unpredictable extreme weather events like frequent prolonged droughts and floods that plague the area. This has led to a loss of key resources for livestock pastures, water, and salts, that are crucial for livestock production. The region has also faced tremendous ecological and social economic changes in the last couple of decades in the form of land fragmentation and dispossession, urbanization, and an influx of immigrants. These changes, coupled with the erratic weather events, have compromised the communities traditional coping strategies. In response, changes in processes, livelihood activities, and sources of income have emerged, along gendered lines.
Responses to climate variability occur in the confines of society that is laced with social inequalities along the lines of gender, class, age, race etc. These in-equalities pose barriers to access, control, and ownership of resources, perpetuate unequal distribution of labour, and excludes certain segments of society from meaningful decision making. Thus, shaping how diverse men and women, avoid, prepare for, respond, and recover from extreme weather events that threaten their lives and livelihoods.
International Women’s Week was a day of celebration – and combativeness – for WEGO-ITN researchers and partners. Coordinator Prof. Dr. Wendy Harcourt held a lecture at Radboud University on ‘Gender Dimensions in Climate Change’, which is now fully available online:
About the lecture:
’My talk will look critically at the notion of the green economy as the way to mitigate climate change. My argument is that the neoliberal green economy relies on market and technological efficiency and only pays lip service to notions of gender, empowerment and inclusion. Its apparent championing of small-scale green entrepreneurs – particularly women and indigenous groups from the Global South as ‘good for climate’ ignores power relations and inequalities based on gender, race, ethnicity, class, and physical ability. The neoliberal green economy is not a climate- or people-caring economy because it ignores the actual care work that is required to maintain everyday life in all societies.
My talk proposes that we must move beyond the green economy in order to advance climate justice by reimagining ‘caring for climate’ through a caring economy or solidarity economy framework, one that is embedded in the principles of cooperation, sharing, reciprocity, and intersectional environmental justice. Instead of ‘greening’ the economy we need to be ‘sustaining livelihoods’ to ensure nutrition, ecological balance, clean water, secure housing, gender equality, meaningful approaches to all forms of labour.
Care work is always there. What needs to change is that it is no longer invisible, privatised, and done for free by women, people of colour, immigrants, or other marginalised groups. Caring for climate, caring for earth, and caring for people should be at the centre of economic value, not at the margins. What is required in order to ‘care for climate’, is to build caring communities for change based on solidarity economies. Such economies would value care work in all areas of life with the creation of new job sectors and climate-friendly livelihoods which challenge the gendered composition of the today’s neoliberal, androcentric and capitalocentric economy.’’
AS STATEWIDE CLIMATE RECOMMENDATIONS BEGIN TO TAKE SHAPE, HOW DO WE PUT MAINE COMMUNITIES AND EQUITY AT THE CENTER?
Equity. It’s a concept that many value but can struggle to put into practice. When it comes to the state of Maine’s efforts to develop strategies to aggressively respond to climate change, what does it look like to design with a commitment to equity and to meeting the needs of all Mainers at the center?
While much of the world came to a screeching halt this spring, members of the Maine Climate Council’s working groups doubled down on their efforts to develop recommendations on how to reach the state’s climate goals. According to the Governor’s Office of Policy, Innovation, and the Future, the entity supporting the effort, more than 200 people across seven working groups participated in 30 meetings in April alone—an average of one per day—to refine strategies, review data, and make progress towards the early June deadline for submitting their recommendations to the Maine Climate Council.
Island Institute staff are pleased to serve on four of the Council’s subgroups (Science and Technical Subcommittee; Buildings, Housing and Infrastructure working group; Marine and Coastal working group; and the Community Resilience, Emergency Management, and Public Health working group), giving us unique insights into the cross-cutting nature of the Council’s work and the ways in which we can try to reflect the realities of Maine communities, large and small.
The legislation behind the Climate Council, LD 1679, calls for explicit consideration of rural communities; persons of low income and moderate income; economic sectors that face the biggest barriers to emissions reductions; vulnerable communities; and natural resource-based industries. The Climate Council’s plan must treat all Maine people “fairly and equitably” and must ensure “equity for all sectors and regions of the State.”
But as the working groups began to compare proposals, the question arose: “How do we know when we are making meaningful progress on equity and doing more than just ticking the box?”
At the Island Institute, we’ve seen first-hand how some of our state’s island and coastal communities can be —usually unintentionally—left behind by policy and program design that was built with a one-size-fits all approach. Research shows that these communities are unique due to their population size, demographics (primarily age), geography, and employment. Our collaborations with Maine communities have repeatedly shown that these realities can lead to obstacles when trying to access clean energy financing and other efforts to build resiliency in the face of climate change. Specifically, our 2018 Bridging the Rural Efficiency Gap white paper with the Maine Governor’s Energy Office highlighted the geographic, financial, and awareness gaps faced by residents of rural communities when trying to access energy efficiency programs.
This experience has increasingly led us to ask questions about other segments of Maine’s population – along the coast or in the interior – that may have a harder time helping to shape or equitably benefit from carbon reduction measures. How could we raise the concepts for the Council to consider, while grounding them in real stories of Mainers from across the state?
On April 28, 2020, we partnered with Ania Wright to co-present to the Council’s Buildings, Infrastructure, and Housing Working Group to combine research and data with accounts of Maine communities and industries to illustrate how these concepts play out in Maine. Ania is the youth representative to the Climate Council, representing Maine Youth for Climate Justice and Island Institute partner, College of the Atlantic. In February 2020, we were honored to have her share her perspectives on the climate movement during this year’s Waypoints Forum, “Courageous Leadership in Disruptive Times.”
Youth involved with Maine Youth for Climate Justice share similar first-hand experiences to how certain groups are often left behind in policy decisions. Young people are at the frontlines of the climate crisis as they will be the ones to inherit our earth, and yet the urgency they bring to the table is not always heard. Additionally, they see the climate crisis for what it is, a failure of our societal systems, and not just an ecological crisis. Dealing with the climate crisis will take rethinking the way we solve problems. Part of that rethinking is around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Vulnerable communities have already been, and will continue to be the most impacted by climate change.
Rural residents—who make up 61% of Maine, the highest rate in the nation—experience additional challenges of high energy costs and barriers to addressing them. Reliance on expensive heating fuel; an older housing stock; lower incomes; and higher numbers of mobile homes all contribute to a higher “energy burden,” or the percentage of household income spent on electricity and heating. Remote geography, lack of access to financing, and other barriers, can make it harder to access and pay for energy efficiency.
Natural resources-based industries such as fisheries and forestry are particularly vulnerable to climate change, due both to the impacts they are experiencing and their significant reliance on and challenges associated with moving away from fossil fuels. Equitable support for these culturally iconic and economically essential industries is key to successfully addressing climate change.
Addressing these inequities is possible and can effectively support vulnerable communities and everyone—e.g., by partnering with trusted messengers to go beyond traditional marketing channels; adding funding and flexible financing options; or addressing limitations in local capacity to plan and implement projects.
These lessons shared specifically with the Buildings, Infrastructure, and Housing group are relevant to all the Maine Climate Council’s working groups striving to help Maine communities reduce our carbon pollution and adapt to the future impacts of a rapidly changing climate. By doing so with an eye toward equity, as required by the legislation that formed the Maine Climate Council, we can ensure that any actions taken by the state will benefit all Mainers, especially those on the front lines of climate change impacts.
We are encouraged by the Climate Council’s progress in these trying times. While we are all now focused on and experiencing the health and economic crises from COVID-19, we know that Maine people, and in particular our most vulnerable residents, will continue to be hit by increasingly strong storms, rising seas, uncertain growing seasons, and other impacts resulting from climate change. Our commitment now to basing recommendations on their realities will help to increase the likelihood that all Mainers will benefit from this work in the months and years ahead.
This piece was written in collaboration with Ania Wright of Maine Youth for Climate Justice and College of the Atlantic.
In December 2019, WEGO PhD researchers Alice Owen and Eunice Wangari joined the thousands of negotiators, climate action advocates and researchers who convened in Madrid for the UN’s 25th annual climate change Conference Of the Parties (COP25). Whilst most media coverage focuses on the outcomes of the high level summits, COP25 is an important arena for all levels of climate politics as civil society converges to put pressure on governments to listen to the science and agree strong climate policies. Over the busy fortnight, Eunice and Alice found countless opportunities to learn about these global climate change politics which contextualises their research with communities in Kenya and the UK. In this blog we join Alice and Eunice in conversation to find out more about their diverse inside experiences and perspectives of this important event.
How does climate change come into your research?
Eunice: Climate change adaptation is the context of my research. My research delves into the gendered adaptation strategies that the Maasai community in Southern Kenya use to weather the increasingly severe droughts and floods that frequent the region. Using an intersectional lens, I am exploring how local forms of knowledge systems and practices are mobilised and used in tandem with conventional knowledge to adapt to the changes. I also explore how these adaptation strategies shape subjectivities of today’s Maasai men and women. To gain a multi-scalar analysis, I have been following the gender target of the Paris Agreement, that is discussed during the COP.
Alice: My research explores the different forms of knowledge and contestation that are mobilised in campaigns against fracking and unconventional fossil fuels in the UK. Many communities are concerned about the local environmental, geological and social impacts of these industries, as well as their contribution to the climate crisis. Despite the certainty of climate change science and the urgent need for global climate action, in the UK and elsewhere governments continue to act against their own Paris Agreement commitments by allowing the development of new fossil fuel projects. I am researching with anti-fracking campaigners to learn how this implicit climate denial undermines scientific expertise as well as tacit knowledges about the environment and justice.
What were your motivations for going to COP25?
Eunice represents the WEGO network at the Gender Day exhibition inside the COP.
Eunice: A significant amount of data for my MSc thesis was collected at COP23 and the Subsidiary body for scientific and technological advice meetings held in Bonn, Germany. I experienced first hand how diverse actors converged in this forum to discuss various and even differing climate change agendas. Thus, I decided to attend the COP not only as a networking event but to conduct some interviews that I would have otherwise not physically done due to geographical constraints. More so, I secured an opportunity to present my research and the WEGO project at large during the gender day, an offer I couldn’t resist.
Alice travels by train and coach to Madrid with Angelica Johansson, a PhD student at UCL researching the Loss and Damage negotiations. COP attendees are encouraged not to fly to COP by the #railtocop campaign.
Alice: I also had the opportunity to attend COP23 in Bonn, and it was there that I first engaged with the UK’s anti-fracking campaign. At a side event, I was really moved by the stories of the communities defending their environment and standing up to fracking in Lancashire, and I found the alliance between frontline communities and persuasive climate scientists really persuasive and interesting. Two years on and having committed to researching with precisely these communities, I was keen to better understand the UK anti-fracking campaign in the context of climate science and international anti fossil fuel campaigns. With the COP being moved from Chile to Spain due to social unrest, I was able to travel by train instead of plane and was lucky enough to organise a conference pass with this short notice.
What did a typical day at COP25 look like for you?
Eunice and Alice are relieved to find a calm space inside COP to catch up with each other and organise their schedules.
Eunice: Each day at the COP differs largely by the type and officialness of the events and activities scheduled, with some thematic days included. Due to the broad content covered by these events, it requires some level of planning or one risks spending days being confused and not following anything in particular. My day would therefore be planned the previous night where I marked key events that I needed to attend and identified a number of extra ones I found interesting, even though they weren’t the focus of my research. I followed talks and presentations on gender and women rights, indigenous knowledge, environmental justice, adaptation from below, loss and damage and the right to remain in climate induced migration, feminisation of climate change among others. In between attending events, I visited different exhibition booths and learned what countries and organisations were working on, looked for a quiet place to reflect and write down my thoughts or met up with Alice or Angelica at free food locations to catch up as we rescued surplus catering from being wasted. It is amazing how food is used to lure participants to attend events. At times, the food and drink is too much and ends up being disposed of and that is where we and many students at the COP come in.
Alice: Perhaps the only thing the days had in common were having to choose a few key events to attend from the multitude of presentations, discussions and activities organised at various locations across the city. While the high level negotiations proceeded often behind closed doors, in the COP conference centre there were numerous side events to choose from. These usually took the form of expert panels organised in each country’s pavilion or in the dedicated rooms, typically organised by research bodies, NGOs or businesses. I was particularly interested in attending events concerning fossil fuels and the carbon budget, the science-policy interface, and the role of women, youth and indigenous peoples in climate action. Attending these events and conducting follow-up interviews involved lots of running around the huge conference space, so I was very glad to be invited to join the ‘Free Food at COP’ chat to help me refuel!
Outside the COP venue there were also plenty of fascinating events and actions organised in Madrid. One afternoon I attended an event in a hotel organised by The Heartland Institute, who are known to be funded by the fossil fuel industry to promote climate skepticism particularly in the US. I felt very out of place in the small room of predominantly older males advocating for business as usual as far as fossil fuel production is concerned! In complete contrast to this, later in the week I helped make banners at the activist art space and took to the streets with friends to join the huge climate march that called for real action on climate change. Similarly, In parallel to the COP the ‘Cumbre Social Por El Clima’ was organised as a summit for activist groups and campaigners, with many talks and workshops organised including a talk I gave based on the findings of my MA research.
The Heartland Institute presented moral and scientific arguments urging climate inaction.
In contrast, the Degrowth parachute is taken to the streets during the climate march urging a slowdown of economic growth to tackle socio-environmental injustices, and providing a fun interactive protest experiences for children young and old.
After the events of the day the evenings were no time to rest with so much important socialising and networking to be done. It was only in ‘curious researcher’ mode that I had the stamina for some otherwise unlikely encounters. One evening I could be having tapas with the chief negotiator of Kiribati, the next having drinks with BP insiders, or another evening dancing with green finance professionals. There were also some much more familiar and convivial evenings at the activist art space and listening to the talks and music at the Cumbre Social with friends new and old.
What was the biggest challenge and why?
Snapshots from inside the green and blue zones give an impression of the different levels of formality and participation.
Eunice: The biggest challenge that I faced was choosing between two interesting events scheduled at the same time. Whereas the activities in the blue zone, “La zona azul” were very formal and updated on the main website and app, those in the green zone “zona verde”, where the civil society, youth, indigenous communities, and gender activists converged were given less visibility. That meant receiving information of scheduled activities on a last minute basis as some of these people did not have the resources to disseminate their calendar of events. Additionally, some of the activities in the green zone happened spontaneously in response to an outcome of a formal event. These spontaneous events could get very heated with the protestors being banned from the pavilion at one point, something that fed into my fears of participating in them for a while.
Alice: Throughout the COP I chose to attend really diverse events with all sorts of people, which was quite exhausting as I had to continuously navigate the different social and physical spaces. Something I found particularly challenging about the conference centre was the lack of daylight and access to nature. As I wondered how the negotiators were getting on with their discussions carrying on late into the night, I couldn’t help but imagine what different conference outcomes and global realities might arise if the negotiators convened at the Bolsena Convento where we had our feminist writing retreat in the summer!
Who did you connect with?
Eunice: I connected with several exciting people, but one that intrigued me most was a Kenyan woman in the Beyond Labels, Beyond Borders forum held at the German pavilion. Jolene responded firmly to a Nansen type passport suggestion. She said that the indigenous communities were neither interested in the passports nor were they keen on leaving their native land to be foreigners in other peoples lands. She articulated what is probably in the minds of most indegenous communities members, whose voices are often silenced in making decisions that affect them, as if they were passive victims or recipients. You could hear a pin drop after she said the COP had become one big pleading session without any action. Something we all probably thought but hadn’t said out loud. Later, I hung out with her and her peers, who came from different pastoralist communities in Kenya. They explained the frustrations of attending the COP for years on end without any tangible outcome. “Hii ni kupewa mate tu” she said, Swahili for this is just lip service. After some brief chats, we exchanged contacts and later scheduled an interview with them for my project, which they agreed upon.
Alice learns about anti-fracking initiatives around the world and befriends other youth activists working on the cause
Alice: With fracking and unconventional fossil fuels seemingly off the agenda for the side events inside the COP, the Cumbre Social Por El Clima became an important convergence space for network building. Following presentations about fracking and LNG in the US, Argentina and Ireland, a meeting was organised to bring together activists from further afield. I shared insights from the UK, and made important connections to movements elsewhere including the US where I will be going for my secondment. These discussions have been really useful to draw pertinent themes from my research in the UK, and to consider how I can pursue scholar-activism. Connections were also made with UK campaigners who will be particularly active over the coming year as COP26 will take place in Glasgow.
Eunice with other activists
Global fracking ban presentation
What are some of the key things you learned?
Eunice: I experienced this COP in a very different way to before as together with fellow WEGOer Alice and our friend Angelica we made a perfect team particularly in the last minute logistic arrangements that followed the relocation of the COP to Madrid from Santiago. Being a team provided moral support during low moments, as lethargy builds up fast as the long days go by. In addition to logistics planning, we hung out with each other during the breaks, sharing how the sessions we attended were, brainstormed which events to attend, or to catch up on work together. With that, I learnt the value of being in a network like WEGO.
Eunice networks at the Gender Day exhibition
I also experienced the value of keeping close networks when I received an email from the Women and Gender Constituency working group inviting me to host an exhibition during the 10th December Gender day. This was a pleasant surprise as the exhibition was not guaranteed when the COP moved to Madrid from Santiago. I grasped the opportunity and hosted the exhibition for some hours. There, I came in contact with diverse people who had a tonne of questions about the WEGO project, our objectives and the EU H2020 funding process. I interacted with fellow exhibitors from all over the world.
One day, I was requested by a Masters student studying Feminist Political Ecolgy to be interviewed on my experience as a woman in the COP. The interview served as a reflection of the privileges I had as someone working on a EU funded project, hence subsistence money to travel and live through the conference was not any challenge. At the same time, I recalled my underlying fears for attending protests and how my interactions during the COP were to a large extent shaped by my identity as a black woman funded by the European Union.
Alice: I definitely learned a lot this COP by getting out of my comfort zone and spending time observing and participating in the many arenas of climate change politics. It is all too easy to stay in your bubble where there are familiar outlooks and ideas, but listening to and sharing with others really helps to refresh and recontextualise your own perspectives. For example, having been involved for several years in the climate activist networks I found that I wasn’t learning much more from attending these events. However, at The Heartland Institute’s event I was confronted with many new discourses that require acknowledgment from climate campaigners. It is evident that populist politics have adopted many tactics and even arguments from more progressive campaigns to the extent that there are some disconcerting similarities. Both call the other “mad”, and both distrust the corporate capture and inaction of the COPs thus far. With politics becoming more polarised, climate change activism will have to evolve to maintain strong advocacy for social justice and democracy and to avoid ecofascist tendencies.
What are your highlights?
After hearing inspiring speeches from Indigenous communities, Eunice joins her first protest.
Eunice: My highlight was coming out of my comfort zone and participating in the final protest, which comprised both conference participants and members of the Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future climate activist groups. Being my first activism protest, I was super anxious, perhaps due to the anticipation buildup and having to deal with my underlying fears to finally join and become part of this admirable action. The protest started inside the pavilion with young people from the global south making speeches in their native languages before proceeding outside and going along the streets up to the roundabout at the IFEMA junction. We sang protest songs and repeated slogans that called for acceleration of climate action, something that resonated with Jolene’s previous sentiments. After hours of sitting in and protesting,I became relaxed and felt part of the movement, that was uncharted territory for me, just a couple of days ago.
Eunice, Alice and friends enjoy a celebratory meal together once the COP is over.
Alice: It was so valuable to go to this COP with friends old and new from WEGO and our ever-expanding family. Even if we were doing completely different things all day, when we did find time to pause and digest what we’d been up to there were always so many fascinating stories to be shared.
Join former Irish President Mary Robinson and comedian Maeve Higgins in this uplifting new podcast, celebrating amazing women doing remarkable things in pursuit of climate justice.
Each episode features the Mothers of Invention driving powerful solutions to climate change – from the grassroots to the court room, the front lines to the board room – all over the world.
Mothers Of Invention is a podcast on feminist climate change solutions from (mostly) women around the world.
Women are more likely to be affected by climate change, so women who are spearheading compassionate solutions. Mary, Maeve, and a different guest host every week dig into the biggest climate issues of our time. We learn how to cope, empower and enact change through the eyes of extraordinary women driving climate innovation– our Mothers of Invention. People-powered initiatives to new government policy to groundbreaking research to hard science. It’s not over till it’s over.
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