Women in rural areas suffer significantly more economic losses as a result of climate disruption than men in developing countries, the United Nations said.

Gender Gap

The data released by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that households headed by women in rural areas lost about 8% more income to heat stress than male-headed households, and their income loss when floods struck was about 3% greater than that of men.

The gap, when applied to the world's low- and middle-income countries, amounts to around $37 billion in additional losses to women from heat stress and $16 billion from floods each year.

According to the study, a 1°C increase in long-term average temperatures is related to a roughly one-third decrease in the incomes of female-headed families as compared to male-headed households.

Children and women are also forced to labor more when exceptionally high temperatures strike, with children working roughly an hour more per week in rural regions on average, according to the survey.

Lauren Phillips, the FAO's deputy director of inclusive rural transformation and gender equality and a co-author of the research, said that governments were failing to consider the issues that disadvantage women, and climate funding was not targeted in ways that addressed the gender gap. She said that the report was the first to quantify this explicitly.

"This gender gap can have a very dramatic impact on GDP growth. We could increase GDP by 1% globally if we could reduce food insecurity for 45 million people, by focusing on women," she said.

The researchers analyzed socioeconomic data from over 100,000 rural families in 24 low- and middle-income nations, totaling more than 950 million people.

They cross-referenced this with 70 years of daily precipitation and temperature data to get a clear picture of how climate change and extreme weather affected people's wages, labor, and lives.

It adds to a growing corpus of studies demonstrating that the repercussions of the climate catastrophe disproportionately affect women and disadvantaged people.

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Socioeconomic Class

The survey also discovered that elderly people were more affected than the young, who may have more options to relocate to avoid the effects of extreme weather, and that the already poor were more vulnerable than those with greater earnings.

The findings also show that impacts vary not only by gender but also by socioeconomic class.

Heat stress, or overexposure to extreme temperatures, exacerbates the economic difference between rural households categorized as poor, which suffer a 5% larger loss ($17 per capita) than their better-off neighbors, and flooding rates are comparable. Meanwhile, extreme temperatures exacerbate child labor and increase the unpaid workload for mothers in low-income households.

Indeed, limitations like access to resources, services, and employment opportunities have an impact on rural people's ability to adapt to and manage climate change.

Discriminatory norms and practices, for example, disproportionately burden women with care and home responsibilities, limit their land rights, hinder them from making labor decisions, and impede their access to information, money, technology, and other critical services.

The study stressed that resolving these difficulties requires tailored initiatives that empower distinct rural groups to participate in climate-adaptive strategies.

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