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The combination of climate change’s disproportionate impacts on the poor and the context of women’s roles in the poorest countries will result in women bearing a substantial adaptation burden due to their vulnerabilities to climate change impacts. While there is substantial diversity in women’s roles and experiences (Klasen 2006), they typically make

up the majority of the population of rural areas in the poorest countries (with males more likely to have migrated to cities and abroad). This has several negative consequences.

Women’s food production, often limited to marginal soils in rain-fed agricultural systems, will bear the brunt of climate change impacts. As the principal caregivers in most households, women will have to contend with a worsening disease environment. As the poorest segment of the population, women’s low access to new technologies, credit and assets limits their inherent ability to adapt (Blackden and Bhanu 1999, Udry 1995).

Moreover, as women’s incomes and access to resources also affects their bargaining power within households, which in turn affects their ability to ensure that their children will receive adequate nutrition and care, drops in female production and earnings opportunities will have negative repercussions for the next generation (Thomas 1997, World Bank 2001).

A plausible and urgent policy agenda that follows from this context would focus on a range of initiatives, such as enhancing current efforts to combat malaria by promoting eradication, assisting households to prevent infection and improving access to treatment.

Such an agenda would also improve health systems to combat diseases more generally, improve women’s access to technologies and credit, invest in more climate-resilient crops and sustainable irrigation systems, and improve social protection systems (e.g. cash transfer programmes or public works programmes) focused on transferring resources to women and children (European Commission 2011).

Though such a policy agenda must be part of an overall package of climate change adaption efforts, focusing analysis and action in this way would present a rather limited way of framing the issue and developing lasting solutions. Further, it would focus too much on the role of women as victims of climate change rather than promoting their roles as resilient actors.

BroAD-BAseD eConoMiC DeVeloPMenT As ADAPTATion sTrATegy

An appropriate approach to the issue of gender and adaption to climate change should also focus on women as key agents of sustainable economic development, based on the premise that rapid broad-based economic development is the best way to increase a societies’ resilience to climate change. Greater resilience will mean that countries will be less affected by climate change, for example because their dependence on rain-fed agriculture will lessen. Economic development will also improve the ability to adapt to climate change by increasing the resource, knowledge, and capital case to undertake specific adaptation measures.

Economic growth based on exploiting a narrow range of natural resources or accom-panied by sharply rising inequalities will not equitably address climate change adap-tation. In contrast, broad-based rapid economic growth and development lessens the dependence on traditional rain-fed agriculture, promotes urbanization and industriali-zation, typically reduces fertility and population pressure, and expands the resource and infrastructure base of households and states to combat tropical diseases and promote new, adapted and sustainable technologies (Grimm et al. 2007).

East Asian economies’ growth over the past three to four decades serves as an example of this view of broad-based economic development. Such growth involved a structural transformation from agriculture to industry, was broad-based in the sense that it was labour-intensive, promoted mass education, led to sharply reduced fertility and was based on relatively low (though in some cases rising) income inequality. What Drèze and Sen called “growth-mediated security” (Drèze and Sen 1989) when referring to food security has also promoted the resilience of societies to climate change.

The adaptation challenge of rapidly developing countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea or Thailand will be easier to meet than those faced by tropical African countries. In the East Asian countries, dependence on rain-fed agriculture is low, tropical diseases are held in check, poverty is lower, the poor have greater means to deal with shocks, and states are much better able to provide social protection and promote appro-priate technological change to adapt to climate change impacts.

As a sizable theoretical and empirical literature on economic growth has docu-mented, women’s economic roles are central to broad-based economic growth. In particular, countries with low rates of gender inequalities in education and employment access have grown substantially faster than those in which inequality rates were high (Klasen 2002, Klasen and Lamanna 2011, Ray and Riezman 2012, World Bank 2011b, World Bank 2001). In countries with low rates of gender inequalities in education and employment (such as those concentrated in East and South-East Asia and parts of Latin America), growth has been more sustainable in terms of longer-term structural trans-formation, industrialization and export-oriented economies (Seguino 2000, Klasen and Lamanna 2009). While in some of these countries, particularly in East Asia, gender gaps in earnings were substantial, they have slowly been reduced over time (Oostendorp 2010). Some argue that these large earnings gaps were an important factor promoting high economic growth, by providing a competitive advantage in female-dominated export industries (Seguino 2000), although others question this claim (Schober and Winter-Ebmer 2011).

Conversely, in places where gender inequalities in education and/or employment have been very high (such as South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa), growth has typically either been much lower or much more narrowly based on

natural resources. Growth in these regions has often not led to broad-based economic