Climate Disasters Kill the Most Vulnerable

Poor countries often have broken governments, shoddy infrastructure, and few systems in place to help when there is a mass crisis — which is why the U.N. Development Program found that there is a severe difference in how people are harmed during a climate disaster, depending on whether they live in a developing or rich country.

UNDP reported that, from 2000 to 2004, a person in the developing world was 79 times more likely to be affected by a climate disaster than someone in a wealthier country.

But say you’re a poor woman or girl living in that poor country that has been hit by a cyclone, a tsunami, or an earthquake. Girls and women (as well as people with disabilities and older people) may not have access to education or health care the way men and boys do, or the ability to make their own money, the World Bank said in a 2018 blog post. In many places, women and girls often eat less, and last.

Poverty is not gender equal, and neither is who suffers most in climate disasters.

It’s a simple math: Being a woman or a girl, plus being impoverished, equals vulnerability. And because of that, women and girls are often unable escape a climate disaster — and therefore are the most likely to die. They may never have been taught to drive or have access to a car in order to evacuate, or even know how to climb a tree, as many men did to survive the 2000 Indian Ocean tsunami, in which hundreds of thousands of people died. They may also be looking after children, pregnant, or put last on the list of who matters in a crisis.

Here are some examples of climate disasters in which women and girls have suffered horribly because of their gender:

Three times as many women as men died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Gender factored heavily in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, in which nearly 230,000 people died across 14 countries. In many areas, male survivors outnumbered female survivors by a ratio of almost 3 to 1, Oxfam reported.

Reasons for this disparity include the fact that more men could swim than women, that many women stayed behind to find their families, and that men were more able to climb trees as the water rose.

Oxfam also pointed to variations in the countries affected: “women in Aceh, for example, traditionally have a high level of participation in the labor force, but the wave struck on a Sunday morning when they were at home and the men were out on errands away from the seafront. Women in India play a major role in fishing and were waiting on the shore for the fishermen to bring in the catch, which they would then process and sell in the local market. In Sri Lanka in Batticoloa District, the tsunami hit at the hour women on the east coast usually took their baths in the sea.”

As in all disasters, women were more vulnerable to sexual assault in the wake of the tsunami, but the incredible poverty across the region also increased the risk of sexual exploitation of women and girls. Not only are the most vulnerable people left behind, but essential services like police are tied up in direct response to the disaster, and services normally available to help women are shuttered.

Women made up 90 percent of Cyclone Gorky casualties in Bangladesh.

In April 1991, Cyclone Gorky, a Category 4 tropical cyclone (the second-deadliest cyclone in recorded history), killed around 140,000 people when it made landfall in southeast Bangladesh, leaving another 10 million people homeless. Women accounted for 90 percent of casualties, outnumbering those of men by 14 to 1.

But, as the World Bank reported, 2007’s Cyclone Sidr, also a Category 4, killed an estimated 3,500, and the ratio fell to 5 to 1. Disaster preparedness had markedly improved since Gorky, with 3,500 cyclone shelters built in the intervening years.

When Gorky hit, most women were culturally and socially isolated at home as traditional caregivers responsible for children and elders, according to the World Bank. They likely either did not hear warnings, or they had to care for others as well as themselves. Many also would not evacuate without their husband or another male to accompany them.

As Bangladesh invested more in disaster risk management in the succeeding years and involved women in disaster preparedness, program designers found that women more readily left their homes when they heard other women calling for people to evacuate.

Still, many women perceived shelters as insecure places where they would have to sacrifice their privacy, and husbands saw them as places they did not want to bring their wives.

Burma’s Cyclone Nargis killed more women and girls than men and boys.

A report produced by the Post-Nargis Joint Assessment three months after Cyclone Nargis ripped through Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta, Ayeyarwady Delta, and Yangon regions in May 2008 found that 61 percent of casualties were women, and that in some villages the difference was even bigger.

Local authorities said that women were not given early alerts about the coming storm, making it difficult or impossible to reach the few shelters available, according to a 2013 article about the impact of Nargis published in the Journal of Emergencies, Trauma, and Shock.

The cyclone altered the composition of the country’s households: Approximately 14 out of every 100 became headed by women, mostly widows. Those households then made up the highest percentage of low-income groups.

Assessments published in 2010 by the U.N. Population Fund’s Women Protection Technical Working Group found that Burma’s female-headed households “are most vulnerable, both in terms of poverty and protection concerns. Sixty percent of female-headed households live in unsatisfactory shelters, female-headed households make-up the highest percentage of the low-income groups, and children from female-headed households frequently drop out of school due to financial constraints.”

The group also observed a “perceived increase in the number of women engaging in sex for money, food or favors,” after Nargis. The study documented an increase in alcohol and drug use, domestic violence, verbal abuse, and occurrences of violence.

Low-income women were more affected by flooding in Nigeria.

Following a flood that lasted for 17 hours on July 10, 2011, a study recorded higher impacts and slower recovery among women in low-income neighborhoods compared to other social categories of women and men. Women in the low-income area of Badia, in Lagos, for example, reported significantly higher percentages of injuries, death, and illness, likely because of their already unsafe environmental and housing conditions.

In middle- and high-income neighborhoods, “access to quality housing in a cleaner and safer environment was probably an intervening factor that reduced the effects of flooding on women,” researchers wrote in an article for the journal Global Environmental Change.

They described how one Hausa woman named Nadia in Badia lost her baby because of the flooding. She went to the hospital that day for prenatal help, but was told her husband had to donate blood in order for her to register. He refused because of his religion, and the hospital refused to take payment instead. Nadia, only six months pregnant, was forced to go home and give birth.

The flood “swept raw sewage, urine, and refuse into Nadia’s home, thus contaminating the water and instruments used during the delivery,” the researchers wrote. “As a result of exposure to unhygienic and unsafe environmental conditions in the first minutes of life, Nadia’s newborn child developed neonatal tetanus infection and died shortly after. Nadia also became ill during this period due to the lack of proper medical attention.

What happened to Nadia was not an isolated incident.

Deeply embedded gender roles in Nigerian society influenced the disproportionate impact of the flood on women over men, the researchers said, due to their attachment to the home: For many, it was their source of livelihood, “a space to display their petty goods for sale; their maternity center — a place where midwives assist in the delivery of their children; and their security — a safe haven from human assailants and inclement weather.”

Women’s childcare responsibilities, a lack of reliable access to clean water for bathing or personal hygiene, the preexisting inaccessibility of prenatal care (for pregnant women), and their vulnerability to sexual harassment and assault also exacerbated the Nigerian women’s negative experiences in the disaster.

(Frances Nguyen contributed reporting.)