How climate change and gender-based violence are connected

In the northern Peruvian Amazon, Conservation International has long prioritized engaging women to restore rural landscapes and design sustainable livelihoods. Indigenous Awajún women hold vital knowledge of medicinal plant cultivation and are eager to learn new practices, explained Cecilia Gutierrez, monitoring and evaluation manager for Conservation International Peru. As project staff continued to build trust with more than 50 women in the village of Shampuyacu, regular meetings about climate change or agroforestry turned to another pressing topic: gender-based violence. “Suddenly it started to become a space where women felt very confident to start talking about things that happen at their home, with their partners, with their husbands,” Gutierrez told Devex. Project staff questioned how to respond, unsure whether to accompany women to local authorities to help them report incidents of violence or not to get involved, considering their expertise is in conservation, not GBV. “We saw that this was an important barrier, of course, to achieve our conservation objectives, but it was also impacting the mental health of our staff,” Gutierrez said. In January, Conservation International was awarded a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Resilient, Inclusive, & Sustainable Environments, or RISE, Challenge. RISE, launched in 2019, is an effort to spur greater awareness of the connections between environmental degradation and GBV and to encourage environmental programming that incorporates violence prevention and response. The $3 million program has so far awarded $1.8 million to nine organizations around the world and is one step toward building a larger community of practice around the issue, according to a USAID spokesperson. Conservation International will use its grant to partner with a Peruvian NGO with GBV expertise, aiming to train its staff on how to respond to incidents of violence and also work with the local community to expand knowledge of women’s rights. For Gutierrez and other experts who have witnessed firsthand the links between gender-based violence and the environment, recent attention to the issue from donors and researchers is long overdue. “We found absolutely clearly across sectors that gender-based violence is used regularly to negotiate and exert power over natural resources.” --— Cate Owren, senior gender program manager, International Union for Conservation of Nature “The women we work with every day are experiencing violence,” Gutierrez said. “We can't close our eyes anymore and say, ‘well, this is not my problem.’” ‘Everything is shattered’ One-third of all women and girls will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, a number that has remained largely unchanged over the last decade. But the past two years have seen a marked increase in attention to the degradation of nature and competition over scarce resources as a driver of this endemic problem, according to Cate Owren, senior gender program manager at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In collaboration with USAID, IUCN released a report in 2020 to help fill the “documented knowledge gap around the nexus of these issues,” Owren said. The study found that environmental pressures exacerbate gender inequalities and that GBV — including sexual assault, domestic violence, child marriage, economic deprivation, and forced prostitution — is regularly used to maintain inequalities that affect access to and control of natural resources. “We found absolutely clearly across sectors that gender-based violence is used regularly to negotiate and exert power over natural resources,” Owren said. For example, women and girls commonly collect water and firewood for their households, which puts them at risk if access to those resources is compromised. The creation of a new protected area might be agreed upon without consultation with local women. “And so women are trying to access their water source and being directly abused by various actors along the way,” Owren said, adding that GBV is also used to negotiate property rights or facilitate property grabbing. Climate change compounds these issues. During prolonged drought, for example, families might use child marriage as a survival strategy to cope with scarcity of food and income. Bangladesh, a country exceptionally vulnerable to climate change, has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world. Women and girls are regularly exposed to exploitation in overcrowded disaster shelters or urban slums, where their families may have migrated to find work as the climate changes. And the domestic violence that takes place in any society is only heightened in a natural disaster scenario, said Farah Kabir, country director for ActionAid Bangladesh. When Kabir began at ActionAid Bangladesh 14 years ago, she would oversee capacity building and gender sensitization programs. “But suddenly, in the middle of all of this, you will have floods. Everything has to stop, and it’s a humanitarian response.” “Our donors do not include or see GBV as part of [what we do] … We don’t have funds to start dealing with this kind of situation.” --— Cecilia Gutierrez, monitoring and evaluation manager, Conservation International Peru She grew weary of seeing development progress washed away with every new flood. It was women, Kabir noticed, who were doubly vulnerable: “Your infrastructure is suffering, and your social arrangements. On top of this, the problem is your economic security, food security — everything is shattered. And that has an implication for gender-based violence,” she said. Climate change resilience programming has become an integral piece of ActionAid’s work in the country, with a particular focus on climate justice. The organization supports vulnerable women and children to protect themselves from violence, helping to design safer disaster shelters, and train women to lead emergency responses. Along the way, Kabir emphasizes the importance of working alongside women to design programs. “If you want to do training on disaster preparedness, and you want to do it at school level, let's say half the girls are not in the school. So who are you training? If you're going to provide the early warning information in the kiosks and the tea shops, there's no woman and girl there … It has to be about transformation,” she said. ‘These are all opportunities to raise awareness’ Some donors, development organizations, and conservation groups are already taking action to understand and address the linkages between GBV and the environment. However, the work is still in its early stages, Owren said. Opportunity lies in government budgets, global and national policies, and a growing community of practice. ActionAid has engaged in gender and climate budget advocacy with the Bangladesh government for years, which Kabir says is vital to create widespread change. The government now identifies climate vulnerability as one of the criteria for providing cash support within its social protection scheme, Kabir explained. “Incremental or not, some of the changes are happening,” she said. Right now, many countries are finalizing their revised nationally determined contributions to comply with the Paris Agreement, as well as updating national adaptation programs and working to implement the gender action plan that parties agreed under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “These are all opportunities to raise awareness, to put enablers in place, to build capacities, to create cross-sector cooperation and innovation,” Owren said. The draft gender plan of action for the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework reveals a new level of awareness, she added. Currently, the first goal in the draft includes an objective to eliminate gender-based violence in relation to natural resource access and control. IUCN’s 2020 research sought to collate existing tools for those interested in GBV-responsive action across the environment and sustainable development spheres — whether that’s someone working in a fisheries ministry or on a country’s national climate change plan. The idea is not that conservation experts become GBV experts but that they can use gender analyses to safeguard people, not just ecosystems, Owren explained. Still, when Conservation International’s Gutierrez first looked into addressing GBV in Shampuyacu, Peru there was no funding available: “Our donors do not include or see GBV as part of [what we do] … We don’t have funds to start dealing with this kind of situation,” Gutierrez said. USAID received hundreds of applications for RISE funding. The interest signals that there is room for greater donor support, according to Corinne Hart, USAID senior gender adviser for energy and environment. This is one of the reasons the agency helped launch the Gender-Based Violence and Environment Linkages Center, hosted by IUCN. Designed to build an evidence base of what works to address GBV in environmental programming, the online platform aims to provide tailored technical support and create communities of practice, as well as attract new donors into the space. In Peru, Conservation International will kick off its RISE-funded project in just a few weeks, and Gutierrez is hopeful that the learnings can be applied to other projects. “Three years ago, we didn’t think about including GBV into our work. But I think more and more, we see that this happens in all the places where we work. When you are in the field, you see it everywhere,” she said.