Will Climate Change Make Life Harder for Girls?

Girls interviewed in Bangladesh and Ethiopia for a new report suggest that climate change is making their lives even harder.Image: Syed Touhid Hassan/Wikimedia Commons

Girls! Always exploited, even if you look at how evolution has treated this gender! Now, with all that a new report from a study conducted by a nonprofit Plan U.K and U.K Department for International Development suggests that climate change makes the lives of adolescent girls even more difficult and hazardous in the developing countries. The study focused on 500 million adolescent girls in the developing countries with their vulnerabilities towards disastrous risk for a bad life. 

The report includes private interviews with 60 adolescent girls between the ages of 13 and 18 in flood and cyclone prone areas in Bangladesh and drought prone areas of Ethiopia. Living on the front lines of climate change the girls share common experiences. For example, they are the last to leave their houses since they are  responsible for livestock and the household, when a cyclone or other disaster hits. 

There is an increasing amount of interest growing among academicians and researchers towards the relationship between this gender and climate changes. This report focuses exclusively on that issue and reports that women and girls accounted for 90% of  deaths from a 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh and 80% deaths from 2004 tsunami in Asia. Across Africa, about 75% of women and girls of 1.5 million were left homeless during rains and flooding of 2007.

Crowned with all this extra burden adolescent girls will have to bear the excess workload which likely will increase in the coming days because of scarcity of water and timber produced due to rise in global temperatures. If you take time to read this report you will find so many circumstances described by these girls  where they have to wake up at midnight to walk for miles to get water or timber or stay day long at market to sell them missing their schools and what not!

As the report concludes that climate change and gender should not be looked in isolation, it strikes us at our face shockingly that even a climate change exploits women more!