The high share of spending by female-led
households - many based in the flood-prone north - is double the average of 15%
because women have lower incomes than men, said a study by the International
Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Often men from Bangladesh's northwest
regions migrate on a seasonal basis to work elsewhere, leaving women to run the
home. Common measures taken by rural families
to adapt to climate change and reduce risks include raising the plinth of their
houses above flood-water levels, planting trees and making shelters to keep
livestock safe. Low-lying Bangladesh is extremely
vulnerable to the impacts of rising global temperatures, including more severe
monsoon flooding, fiercer storms and higher sea levels. "While men spend a greater amount
for climate adaptation in absolute terms, women have to spend a larger share of
their smaller average income," said Paul Steele, IIED's chief economist
and one of the study authors. For the study, IIED, Kingston University
London and the UN Development Programme in Bangladesh surveyed 3,094 rural
households in 10 districts to analyse how gender and socio-economic factors
shaped spending to protect households from disasters like storms, floods,
drought, salinity and heat. The researchers found that 43% of
households were exposed to floods, 41% to storms and 83% were affected by
longer-term stresses like drought or salinity. Each household spent nearly 7,500 taka
($88) a year on preventive measures in 2021, which would add up to about $1.7
billion among the wider rural population, the study said. The findings show that the Bangladesh
government and donor nations need to provide more financial support to poor
households dealing directly with climate change, including those headed by
women who are shouldering the burden, Steele said. An earlier 2019 study by IIED found that
Bangladeshi families in rural areas were spending 12 times more each year than
the foreign aid the country had received to prepare for and cope with the
effects of climate change. More data is needed to track households'
climate-related spending in Bangladesh and other nations on a regular basis,
Steele said, adding that research could be extended to include the losses
suffered by urban households. Dwijen Mallick, a climate expert at the
Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, said climate change is pushing a steady
flow of migrants into cities, where they often lack the knowledge and resources
to protect themselves from threats. "It is important to quantify the
loss and damage borne by poor urban households due to localised climate change
impacts to make a case for compensation," he said. Mahfuza Mala, a climate expert and
member of Naripokkho, a women's activist group, said the IIED study
demonstrated how efforts to deal with climate change play out differently
between men and women. “Just as women’s care work is often
unpaid and unrecognised, their role in adaptation also sometimes goes
unheeded,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The study found that female-headed
households spend 2 percentage points more of their overall budgets on coping
with floods compared to their male-headed counterparts, and 3 percentage points
more for other hazards like extreme heat. But when it comes to storms,
female-headed households spend a huge 30 percentage points more, although there
are fewer such households in the storm-prone southwest region, where Cyclone
Amphan affected millions of households in 2020. Social norms often require women to act
as providers of food, water and other essentials, even though they have less
capacity to adapt to climate pressures, the IIED study noted. Mala said the positive side of women
playing a greater role in preparing for, and responding to, floods or storms
could be that it allows them to assume a more active role in society.