Gender,
Militarism and Climate Change
As evidence of climate
change becomes ever more compelling, the battle over who gets
to frame its causes, effects and solutions will intensify. In
popular as well as policy venues, whose voices get heard and whose
don't will become a key political issue of our time. Today, at
the international policy level, gender is conspicuous by its absence
in climate change debates. In fact, the words "women"
and "gender" are missing in the two main international
global warming agreements, the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change and the Kyoto Protocol. Recent feminist scholarship and
advocacy challenge this invisibility of gender, pointing in particular
to the importance of gendering the analysis of vulnerability and
adaptation to global warming.
Feminist work on
vulnerability draws on previous research regarding what makes
certain populations more at risk in natural disasters such as
floods and droughts, extreme weather events that could become
more prevalent as the result of global warming. For example, in
places where women have less access to food and health care than
men, they start off at a disadvantage when facing natural disasters
and environmental stress. Since they are often the primary caregivers
for children and the elderly, they may also have less mobility.
Cultural restrictions on women's mobility can compound the problem.
During the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh many more women died than
men because early warnings were displayed in public spaces where
women were prohibited and women delayed leaving their homes because
of fears of impropriety.
Rather than relying
on broad generalizations, feminist scholars and practitioners
have developed gender-sensitive risk mapping in which women map
their own vulnerabilities in terms of what crops they cultivate,
what resources they do or do not control, their access to irrigation,
markets, information, etc. In this sense, gender analysis is a
tool to explore diverse contexts and come up with locally effective
solutions rather than a one-size-fits-all understanding of vulnerability.
So far, much of the
literature on gender and vulnerability to climate change has focused
on rural women in the global South though in a few decades the
majority of the world's people will live in cities. As hurricane
Katrina illustrated, the global North is not immune to extreme
climate events either, and the degree of vulnerability people
in New Orleans experienced was closely correlated with gender,
poverty, race, age and class, and the intersections between them.
Given the likelihood that risks associated with climate change
will increase in the years to come, gender-sensitive risk mapping
and data collection would be useful tools for communities, rural
and urban, all over the world.
Much also remains
to be done to make early warning systems more attentive to gender
issues. According to Maureen Fordham of the Gender and Disaster
Network, mostly male experts dominate this field, and the traditional
emphasis is on ('hard') scientific and technical approaches to
the identification of hazards and the solution of problems with
little attention given to the role of women's networks and other
citizens' groups in developing informal warning systems. The field
of disaster management is similarly dominated by men, and women's
needs for information and services are often neglected in disaster
response.
Given the wholesale
neglect of gender issues in international climate change agreements,
it is not surprising that little attention has been paid to how
those agreements themselves may have gendered outcomes. In a critique
of the Kyoto Protocol's approach to carbon trading, Larry Lohmann
of the U.K.-based Corner House points to how the resulting carbon
accounting systems marginalize non-corporate, non-state and non-expert
contributions toward climatic stability and are creating new exclusionary
forms of property rights. They favor large-scale carbon sequestration
projects in the South that can have both negative social and environmental
consequences. For example, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the Plantar
S.A. Corporation has asked for carbon finance for its expanding
monoculture eucalyptus plantations. These plantations not only
occupy public lands that by law should go to poor peasants, they
draw down the water supply and greatly reduce biodiversity.
Such plantation schemes
are likely to have a number of gendered effects. For example,
women will not have access to them for domestic fuelwood collection,
and the few jobs they generate for forest guards, etc. will go
largely to men. Since women in many places rely on wild plants
both for food and seed domestication, loss of biodiversity could
reduce their livelihood resilience. Nor are such plantations likely
to contribute to solving the longer-term energy needs of poor
women. According to Margaret Skutsch of the Gender and Climate
Change Network, the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism
has effectively shut the door on small-scale, non-corporate solutions
such as systems that encourage local control of existing forests
and improvements in their ability to sequester carbon and produce
sustainable fuelwood supplies.
In general, little
effort has gone into analyzing how gender relations affect the
drivers of climate change. For example, in the global North, which
is disproportionately responsible for global warming, the transport
sector is a primary source of greenhouse gases. Perhaps with the
exception of the U.S., women in the global North are less likely
to own cars and more likely to use public transport. Moreover,
in Europe the cars women drive tend to be smaller and more fuel-efficient
because they are not viewed as status symbols. This latter point
underscores the need to look at gendered dimensions of consumer
desires as they affect energy use. Advertising is highly gendered
- the typical SUV or pick-up driver portrayed in automobile ads
in the U.S., for example, is a male, either alone or with his
mates, out to conquer the rugged wilderness. If there are women
in the picture, they are usually sleek and beautiful, adding an
element of sex appeal. Thus notions of masculinity and femininity
are strategically deployed to create and sustain a wasteful, gas-guzzling
culture, from promotion of ATVs as 'toys for boys' to the military-civilian
Hummer crossover as a potent symbol of American manhood.
Gendering climate
change also requires keeping a close eye on fine line between
justifiable concerns about the threats posed by global warming
and the strategic deployment of alarmist discourses to build support
for the Kyoto protocol as well as to serve other more problematic
objectives. Here one has to closely monitor implicit and explicit
gendered narratives that reinforce negative views of women and
poor people.
A case in point is
the framing of women in terms of the population threat. Apocalyptic
predictions of population growth overshooting the carrying capacity
of the planet have long been popular in Northern environmental
circles, particularly in the U.S. where there has been a long
relationship between the population lobby and the mainstream environmental
movement. Those seeking to shift the blame for global warming
from Northern consumption and production patterns to poor people
in the South often make use of alarmist population arguments.
For example, Professor
Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, recently
made headlines in the British press when he argued that without
significant population reduction, there was little hope for effectively
coping with climate change. The implicit message is that women's
fertility must be controlled. In the past, such reasoning has
contributed to the implementation of draconian population policies
deeply harmful to women's health and rights.
Population alarmism
also figures in images of starving waves of global warming refugees
washing up on our shores, as illustrated in a 2003 Pentagon-commissioned
abrupt climate change scenario where reductions of carrying capacity
in overpopulated areas cause increasing wars, disease, starvation
and ultimately migration to the North. This kind of threat narrative
incorporates women into an overall menacing portrait of the Third
World poor and reinforces the authority of national security agencies
over civilian initiatives to tackle climate change.
One way to challenge
such military maneuvers is to focus on how militaries themselves
play a significant but neglected role in global warming The Department
of Defense is the largest single consumer of fuel in the U.S.,
accounting for 1.8% of the nation's total transportation fuel.
This is no mean contribution to global warming, given that the
U.S. is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Militaries elsewhere
also disproportionately consume energy supplies; according to
one estimate, worldwide militaries collectively use the same amount
of petroleum products as Japan, one of the world's largest economies.
In the case of the U.S., the irony is that the military is presently
using vast amounts of oil to fuel a war in Iraq fought at least
in part to ensure future American control of oil supplies.
Casting a gendered
eye on both militarism and climate change raises a number of inter-related
questions. What are the gendered politics of setting strategic
and budgetary priorities? How do ideologies of masculinity and
networks of powerful men shape defense policies, shield the military
from the need to reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions,
and determine that spending on conventional defense is a much
higher priority than investing in clean energy sources and technologies?
How does male military
culture impact consumer choice via products like the Hummer and
sustain wasteful energy-intensive lifestyles?
How does a state
of war undermine democratic freedoms, push women out of the public
arena and reduce the space for inclusive debate on how to address
global warming?
How does militarism
multiply and/or intensify women's vulnerabilities to climate change?
In the case of global warming-induced natural disasters, for example,
will the risk of sexual violence increase if governments rely
on military institutions to supply relief and maintain order?
On the more positive
side, how can women's movements for peace and the environment
contribute to a broader vision of climate justice and more practicable
solutions that reduce emissions while increasing the incomes and
power of poor women and men?
These are but a few
of the questions we need to be asking to mount an effective feminist
and social justice challenge to business as usual in the climate
change arena.
By Betsy Hartmann,
ZNet Commentary, April 10, 2006
-- Betsy Hartmann
is the director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire
College in Amherst, MA. Recently, she is co-author with Joni Seager
of Mainstreaming Gender in Environmental Assessment and Early
Warning (UNEP 2005) and co-editor with Banu Subramaniam and Charles
Zerner of Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
