By: Dr. Meg Perret
Climate change disproportionately impacts women, trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people. The perspectives of these communities on the frontlines of climate change offer critical routes to addressing the climate crisis. Their narratives enable stronger activist coalitions, new policy solutions, and more climate just futures.
How does the climate crisis impact women and LGBTQ+ people?
Feminist climate justice activists often use the framework of gender justice to describe how women and LGBTQ people are among the groups most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Gender justice is a movement to end patriarchy, transphobia, and homophobia that recognizes that gender oppression is tied to classism, racism, and ableism. As intersectional, youth-led social movements describe the concept: “gender justice can only truly be achieved when all forms of oppression cease to exist.” Feminists have identified the following key areas in which climate change amplifies existing gender-based marginalization.
Climate Disasters: The U.N. reports that natural disasters such as droughts, floods, and storms kill women at fourteen times the rate of men, and tend to kill women at a younger age. Women with lower socioeconomic status are impacted more severely, and often face additional challenges with food insecurity and accessing clean water. Following natural disasters, LGBTQ+ people are often excluded from relief efforts, emergency shelters, and official death records.
Gender Roles: Due to traditional gender roles, women are overburdened with domestic responsibilities, including producing food and collecting water, which are increasingly difficult due to climate change. As the result of patriarchy and colonialism, women’s economic marginalization in the global south often limits their ownership of the land and access to natural resources needed for their livelihoods. Social inequalities further restrict women’s participation in environmental decision making.
Migration & Displacement: The U.N. estimates that women and girls are 80% of climate refugees displaced by climate change. Women who are climate migrants experience some of the highest rates of sexual violence and often face difficulties accessing resources to seek justice. LGBTQ+ people who cross national borders to flee climate disasters are often denied entry due to discriminatory immigration policies. Among climate refugees, LGBTQ+ families are often not recognized and are even separated, and gender-expansive people may be placed in dangerous living situations.
Gender-based Violence: Sex trafficking, sexual violence, and intimate partner violence against women and gender minorities–particularly trans women–often increase during and after extreme weather events. Domestic violence skyrocketed following Hurricane Katrina, when many women were forced to live in close quarters with their abusers or in other unsafe conditions. “Man camps” associated with oil extraction have been found to increase rates of sex trafficking and murder of Native American women and children. Gender-based violence has also been used against women environmental activists to reinforce male domination and resource-control.
Reproductive Justice: Reproductive justice is the right to decide if and when you want to have children, and to raise them in a safe environment. Following natural disasters, pregnant people are at greater risk of experiencing miscarriages, low-birth weight, and delivery complications. In the U.S., Black, Latinx, and disabled women are at the highest risk of preterm delivery from rising temperatures.
Solving the climate crisis must involve transformation of the social, economic, and political structures that oppress women and LGBTQ people. As marginalized groups are already coping with climate change, they can also be a resource for generating solutions to the climate crisis, and crafting more resilient and equitable societies.
Queer Climate Futures 