Women’s jewelry acts as a buffer against climate change in India

In over 100 villages that Shubhangi Rathod visits in central India’s Nagpur region, the agriculture officer finds virtually no women who own land. But when a heat wave, excessive rainfall, or pest outbreak destroys the crops, the men turn to the women’s gold jewelry to raise loans, she said. Climate change has hit agriculture in South Asia hard. There are record-breaking heat waves that destroy crops in peak summer months and rains don’t come when they are supposed to. When it does rain, the downpours are so hard that crops are washed away. Then there are the rising pest outbreaks and wild animal attacks. To tide over incessant losses, farmers increasingly turn to loans where gold jewelry is offered as collateral. This gold is a gendered asset that is often gifted to women during marriage by their natal families for their financial security. It can be as little as a pair of gold earrings, a chain, or thin gold bangles. “The gold is given to them by their parents, so the women don’t want to sell it but they have no other asset. The women here are not very educated and don’t have jobs. Given that the society is patriarchal they have no choice but to listen to their husbands and give away their gold,” Rathod said. India’s banking regulator, the Reserve Bank of India, or RBI, has noticed a rise in gold loans in the agricultural sector and has expressed concern, but not for its gendered impact. Devex spoke to several women farmers in the Indian states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. The interviews throw up a similar pattern: Weather destroyed the crops, so they mortgaged or sold their gold jewelry to tide over the financial crisis and keep children in school. Research from Coimbatore in southern India has documented that as water stress rose, and families needed money to dig wells to access groundwater, they sold or mortgaged women’s gold to raise the money. “I found a similar phenomenon in the fisheries sector in Tamil Nadu — where dowries [of gold jewelry] were one amongst several strategies for raising capital for investment in larger boats, better technology, to protect from adverse weather conditions at sea, more frequent cyclonic storms, etc.,” said Nitya Rao, professor of gender and development at the University of East Anglia. All of this puts pressure on women who are vulnerable even without the added stress of the changing climate. Gold — a woman’s asset India is the world’s second-largest gold market, according to World Gold Council data. Half of the country’s annual gold demand comes from weddings. It could also be demanded by the husband’s family as a dowry, which though illegal is still a popular cultural practice. The asset is easy to sell or mortgage to raise cash. Less than a third of women in the working age group are employed in paid work and barely 14% own land titles — already limiting women’s possibilities. Of this 14%, most women own small parcels of land giving them limited agency as the family head continues to make key decisions, said V Rukmini Rao, founder of the Gramya Resource Centre for Women that tackles their land rights. Rao’s organization also runs a women’s crisis helpline in Nalgonda and Suryapet in southern India. She explains how gold loans work. “It appears that the women are willingly doing it, but there's an element of coercion. If they don't do it, then what will happen, your husband will leave you to suffer,” Rao said. Government data shows roughly a third of Indian women have reported experiencing spousal violence. Almost half of India’s working age population, and 80% of women in rural areas are engaged in agriculture. Both Rathod and Rao said women feel resentful about giving up their gold but are often left with no choice. Rao added that the agriculture sector is full of private lenders who give credit at very high interest rates. Once the farmland is mortgaged, desperate women have no option but to borrow from them as farm incomes continue to crash. She emphasized that for some the loans do help when used strategically. Farm suicides are high in India and this makes women more vulnerable. In 2022 alone, over 11,000 individuals engaged in agriculture died by suicide, according to government data. A majority of them are men, leaving behind destitute women and children, who then become easy targets for private lenders providing small amounts of credit. Research suggests climate change is further driving up farmer suicides in India. Indian banks also encourage gold loans as they provide collateral and reduce the risk on the loans they offer. Advertisements targeting farmers can be seen on buses where banks encourage them to mortgage their household gold. This year, RBI raised limits on the gold-backed loans banks can offer customers in response to its popularity. That policy, though, does not factor in the stress promoting gold loans puts on women, say experts. Limited understanding in the policy circles There is considerable research that documents how climate change affects women, but it is not well understood in policy circles, said Chandni Singh, a climate scientist and a lead author of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. Singh explains that even in a world without climate change, households would turn to gold loans, but now the number has increased. “In particular drought years, the loans … the number or size of the loans are becoming higher. And then third, I think, the precarity of the household itself is high.” The government does not consider gold as a woman’s asset, but as a family asset, according to Rao. Rohini Pande, economist and director of Yale University’s Economic Growth Center, said that even though dowries are provided by the woman’s family, she does not control the assets. “The reason why it's bad that gold is being used in this form is if for instance a woman needs to leave her husband for whatever reason, or there's domestic violence. This gold used to be the asset that she would have relied on.” Chetna Sinha, founder of Mann Deshi, a bank in rural India that lends to women, has flagged that gold loans rise during drought years. Farmer distress in the absence of climate finance At the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP 28, in Dubai, once again climate finance is a big area of focus. While an estimated $89.6 billion has been raised since 2013, it is not clear if this money ever reaches desperate local communities. Farmers raise the funds themselves, according to a global survey across 13 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Those with small land holdings spend $368 billion of their own income every year on measures to adapt to climate change. The survey was conducted by Forest and Farm Facility which provides financial assistance to farmers, along with International Institute for Environment and Development. Using their household gold reserves is an example of what the grassroots impacts look like. In Dubai, a city known for its gold markets, gold is culturally recognized as a woman’s asset provided to her as a financial buffer. According to Singh, it is not COP 28 that needs to pay attention to the gendered impact of climate change, but the funding agencies like banks and philanthropies that design the policy framework. Singh said that funders investing in climate response need to pay close attention to the gendered impact of climate. Apart from that, the state and national governments that might design loan waivers and insurance schemes must also understand the fallout. The impact will follow when funders mainstream gender as they design their investment portfolios, Singh added. The central and regional governments of countries also get to decide where they want to put their climate finance and those decisions ought to factor in the impact of climate change on women. At this point there are no clear answers to what a good response could be. “So the main thing you would want to be seeing if you think the government wants to respond to climate distress and agriculture is, for instance, by having more index insurance,” said Pande, adding that she would like to see more evaluations of how this can help reduce distress. Response to agrarian distress comes from the governments and private players. In the eastern Indian state of Odisha, frequently battered by cyclones originating in the fast-warming Bay of Bengal, the government is experimenting with insurance that covers certain key crops. The regional government will bear the premium of the insurance. It is unclear if the insurance will affect how people use their individual assets like gold, Pande said, but the government must improve the insurance market. Even so, women’s vulnerability to climate stress has been noticed and attempts are being made to respond as they form the largest chunk of home-based workers globally. A pilot insurance for informal women workers was also rolled out this year in India that would compensate for lost wages with funding from the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. But any method that requires poor people to pay premiums, even if the premiums are temporarily waived, by the state or philanthropies, cannot be a long-term solution, according to Singh. So far, all of this response has been centered around the concept of insurance, as Pande recommends. Only a fraction of climate finance that flows to communities in need actually comes in the form of grants that advocate said communities in distress need, and COP 28 at this point is far from addressing the issue.