Climate Hazards, Disasters, and Gender Ramifications

Catarina Kinnvall, Helle Rydstrom, Catarina Kinnvall, Helle Rydstrom

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429756276
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Naturwissenschaften
• Categoría: Geographie

This book focuses on the challenges of living with climate disasters, in addition to the existing gender inequalities that prevail and define social, economic and political conditions.

Social inequalities have consequences for the everyday lives of women and girls where power relations, institutional and socio-cultural practices make them disadvantaged in terms of disaster preparedness and experience. Chapters in this book unravel how gender and masculinity intersect with age, ethnicity, sexuality and class in specific contexts around the globe. It looks at the various kinds of difficulties for particular groups before, during and after disastrous events such as typhoons, flooding, landslides and earthquakes. It explores how issues of gender hierarchies, patriarchal structures and masculinity are closely related to gender segregation, institutional codes of behaviour and to a denial of environmental crisis. This book stresses the need for a gender-responsive framework that can provide a more holistic understanding of disasters and climate change. A critical feminist perspective uncovers the gendered politics of disaster and climate change.

This book will be useful for practitioners and researchers working within the areas of Climate Change response, Gender Studies, Disaster Studies and International Relations.

1 Introduction

Climate hazards, disasters, and gender ramifications

Helle Rydstrom and Catarina Kinnvall

Prologue

In the fall of 2013, a tropical storm took form in Micronesia and soon accelerated into a Category 5 storm, a super typhoon. Heading for the Philippines, super typhoon Haiyan (locally called Yolanda) made landfall on the island of Leyte on November 8, as one of the strongest storms ever recorded. Initial reports coming out of the Philippines described the horrors erupting in the maelstrom of the pounding winds of nearly 315 kilometres per hour: more than 12 million people were affected, including 4 million displaced persons; more than 6,000 persons were killed; and at least 300,000 homes were damaged or destroyed (NASA 20 November 2013; Reliefweb 14 November 2013; Weather Underground, 10 November 2013).

Sustento, a young woman from Leyte, luckily survived the disaster but she tragically lost her mother, father, eldest brother, sister-in-law and young disabled nephew. The typhoon was an extremely hazardous event which brutally took lives and drastically shaped the future of survivors like Sustento (Ecologist, 9 November 2017). In the aftermath of the typhoon, many people could not be reached and they did not receive any assistance for weeks, something which especially affected pregnant women and children as well as the elderly, sick and disabled. Of the displaced persons, 1.7 million were children, who, after being separated from their families, were at risk of falling victim to abuse and trafficking. Women and girls were particularly susceptible to be subjected to violence. For instance, men in uniform (i.e., police and military), who were stationed to protect inhabitants and guarantee their safety at such tumultuous times, reportedly sexually abused female survivors (IDMC 2013; Nguyen and Rydstrom 2018; Philippine Star, 2014; Washington Post, 4 January 2014).

The reconstruction process after the destructive disaster has been slow and the suffering and agony persistent across the country. Four years after the typhoon, more than 1,000 people were still missing; one of the missing was Sustento’s father, whose body was never found after he was swept away by the extreme inland waters. The human and societal recovery process has been prolonged, not least because donations earmarked for rehabilitation allegedly remain in a bank account of the implementing branch of the Philippine National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (Ecologist, 9 November 2017; see also Nguyen 2018).

As a devastating and horrifying crisis of emergency which caused high death tolls, destroyed homes, damaged infrastructure, disrupted means of communication, set aside social order, jeopardised the security of survivors and fostered political torpor, the Haiyan typhoon provides a window to the dire hazards and differentiated ramifications brought on by a climate disaster.¹ The experiences and politics related to storms, flooding, landslides, droughts and earthquakes are informed by gender and its intersections with sexuality, ethnicity, age, class and bodyableness (Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay 2016; Crenshaw 1989; Godfrey and Torres 2016; UNDP 2007, 2013). In this volume, we engage with climate change disasters from a gender perspective by examining first policies, techniques and strategies employed by various agencies and governments to mitigate climate change related ramifications and then by exploring the rupturing impacts of disasters which enforce the redefinition of lifeworlds and the reinvention of livelihoods after a catastrophe.

Climate disasters

A disaster unfolds societal dynamics at the structural level and a community’s relation to its environment, as well as the capability to adapt and the extent to which local knowledge can be infused to reduce vulnerability and harm (Fordham et al. 2013; Oliver-Smith 1999). The United Nation’s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR 2009, 9) defines a disaster as “a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts, which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources”. One of the following criteria must be met for a disaster to be registered in the UNISDR database: (1) a report of 10 or more people killed; (2) a report of 100 people affected; (3) a declaration of a state of emergency by the relevant government; or (4) a request by the national government for international assistance (cited in Bradshaw 2013, 3).

According to Tom Cowton and colleagues (2018), a clear connection can be identified between warmer air temperature, retreating glaciers in Greenland, rising sea levels and climatic warming (see also IPCC 2018). In a similar vein, Victor Galaz (2017, 3) demonstrates how ocean acidification, modification of freshwater, deforestation, mineral flows and releases of carbon dioxide and methane gasses all contribute to climate changes. Such changes result in rising sea levels, extreme weather and changing biodiversity which impact freshwater resources, infrastructure, terrestrial and marine ecosystems, agriculture and coastal systems and in turn living conditions across the globe. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC 2013) thus defines climate change as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods” (cited in UNISDR 2009, 7).

Some places, however, are more disposed to disasters than others and some people’s lifeworlds and livelihoods are more precarious to climate hazards than others. The extent to which the Global South struggles with climate-related disasters compared to the Global North is striking (Crutzen 2000; Galaz 2017; Ogden et al. 2015; Sternberg 2019; Wisner et al. 2003). Enforced monocultures designed to extract wealth from the Global South to the Global North during colonialism have translated into irrigation systems, exploitation of land, deforestation, hydroelectric plants, mining and industrial enterprises which thwart ecological stability and provoke environmental alterations (Cowton et al. 2018; Guardian, 9 January 2017; Oliver-Smith 1996, 1999).

Historically constituted socio-ecological relations between the Global North and the Global South, as James Ferguson (1990) argues, are concealed by the application of technologies designed to intensify agricultural and industrial production and revenue for transnational developers and investors. Launched as apolitical, as the ‘anti-politics machine’, development techniques contribute to the masking of a colonial legacy and the ways in which this legacy has transmuted into politics of power, conflicts of distribution, marginalisation of livelihoods and social inequalities in the present postcolonial era (see also Momtaz and Asaduzzaman 2019; Ogden et al. 2015; Sternberg 2019; Wolf 1982).

The époque of the Anthropocene

Climate change indicates a new type of reciprocity between the Earth and human beings. According to Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), human interventions in nature have propelled us into the era of the Anthropocene; into the Geological Age of Man (see also Crutzen 2000). In this époque, the Earth has left the “interglacial state called the Holocene” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, 17) and is now facing the perils of planetary terra incognita (see also Crutzen 2006; Galaz 2017; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007, 614).²

As outlined in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (2018, 61), “human influence has become a principal agent of change on the planet, shifting the world out of the relatively stable Holocene period into a new geological era, often termed the Anthropocene”. Founded on an a priori division between the things usually referred to as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, the notion of the Anthropocene might be like a ‘poisonous gift’ (Latour 2014) due to the paradoxical way in which it simultaneously embraces and eschews a differentiation of matter and meaning (see also Barad 2007, 2014).

A typical divide between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ emerges as a result of the ways in which each of these is apprehended as a separate phenomenon composed of particular properties and faculties. Our knowledge applies to things, or objects, which are empirically known to us, as those of which we can have knowledge. Perceived as familiar, a thing comes into existence as a recognisable object, with a quality for itself. Restricted epistemic insight, however, fixates the materiality lurking behind what we apprehend as ‘nature’, and its qualities in itself, by dichotomising the materiality of ‘nature’ to the construction of ‘culture’ (Rydstrom forthcoming; see also Guyer and Wood 1998; Heathwood 2011; Kreines 2017).

Plastic epitomises the problem captured by the notion of the Anthropocene in revoking our understandings and definitions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (see also Buckingham and Masson 2017). Heaps of plastic are burgeoning on land and in the oceans. Microplastics are absorbed by plants, insects and animals while entire fragments are consumed by whales and other marine biology. By saturating our environment and pervading our diets, microplastics are eventually infused into the human body (Eriksen et al. 2014; Newsweek, 22 October 2018).

The imagined boundaries between artefacts, the environment, humans and other existences (animals, marine biology, insects and plants) are not only transgressed but even blurred by the immanent forces of plastic (Eriksen et al. 2014). Increasingly sophisticated knowledge about the ways in which plastic engages as a mediating power between the entities of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ recasts established assumptions about their internal demarcations and reciprocal relations (Rydstrom forthcoming).

The ways in which plastic is imposing new insights about the ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ divide might reveal that “the very stuff of ‘matter’ is ubiquitous and chameleon and ‘the natural order’ is essentially sociological, errant, and always ‘out of place’, or ‘out of sync’ with itself” (Kirby 2017, x; see also Barad 2007, 2014; Deleuze and Guattari 2002; MacGregor 2017). The notion of the Anthropocene, we would suggest, captures these intricate alternations of previously agreed stable entities. It therefore emerges as a powerful analytical entry point to advance our knowledge about the complex ways in which climate change obscures and frustrates the internal lines as regards ideas about nature and materiality vis-à-vis culture and humanity (Rydstrom 2019; see also Geerts and van der Tuin 2016; Haraway et al. 2016; Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002).³

Gendered intersections

In her article “A Stranger Silence Still: The Need for Feminist Social Research on Climate Change”, Sherilyn MacGregor (2010, 137) calls for “more case studies and more evidence that will contribute to a thorough understanding of gender differences in perceptions, impacts, and responses”. When the article by MacGregor was published, studies of disasters were mainly focused on emergency issues in a pretended ‘gender neutral’ way. However, even more recently, as Susan Buckingham and Virginie Le Masson (2017) observe, gender perspectives tend to be circumvented in the making of global climate change policies. International sustainable development planning has been reluctant to incorporate gender into environmental protective strategies, such as the Kyoto Protocol; the Paris Agreement; Agenda 21; and the Beijing Conference. According to Buckingham and Le Masson, a more complex understanding of gender needs to be translated into macro-political-economic climate change and environmental policies in order to support the introduction of inclusive and sustainable climate strategies (see also Arora-Jonsson 2017).

As a notion and organising principle of systems and lifeworlds, the conceptualisation of gender, as introduced by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 [1972], refers to sex as a bodily materiality upon which a socially constructed sex, called gender, is formatted. Judith Butler (1993, 2), however, rescinds the Beauvoiran sex and gender dichotomy, arguing that there is “no way to understand ‘gender’ as a cultural construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood either as ‘the body’ or its given sex. Rather, once ‘sex’ itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialisation of that regulatory norm”. If both gender and sex are the result of socio-economic and historical configurations, as Butler (1993) argues, they become indistinguishable as gender is rendered sexed and sex is rendered gendered through the ways in which corporeal properties and faculties are apprehended and instantiated in particular socio-economic and political contexts of power (Rydstrom 2002, 2003).

While sex in Butler’s optic is absorbed by gender, becoming a being in terms of a woman, man or non-binary person emerges as materially conditioned, not in any essentialist senses, but in terms of being-in-the world (Merleau-Ponty 1996; see also Barad 2007, 2014; Derrida 1970; Grosz 1994; Gunnarson, Martinez Dy, and van Ingen 2018). Gender is consolidated at particular sites through intersections with other defining resources and parameters, as discussed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Like one stem of a rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 2002), gender engages with other stems such as age, sexuality, ethnicity/race, class and bodyableness to produce images and realities of people and their powers, roles, status and abilities (Braidotti 2002; Rydstrom 2016).

As Nancy Fraser (1996, 16) notes, gender “codes pervasive cultural patterns of interpretation and evaluation, which are central to the status order as a whole”. Such patterns shape and are shaped by androcentrism: a forceful power, which Fraser (1996, 16) defines as “the authoritative construction of norms that privilege traits associated with masculinity and the pervasive devaluation and disparagement of things coded as ‘feminine’, paradigmatically – but not only – women” (see also Nussbaum 2000). A nuanced, yet operational definition of gender useful for the development of risk reduction and coping and mitigation strategies prior to and in the wake of a climate disaster is provided by the UNDP Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery (2010, 1):

Gender determines what is expected, allowed and valued in a woman or a man in a given context. It determines opportunities, responsibilities and resources, as well as powers associated with being male and female. Gender al...