NEW DELHI: A new report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) underlined that rural women's income in India has been disproportionately affected due to extreme weather events as India is one of the worst affected regions by drought and heat stress in the world. However, the study finds rural people and their climate vulnerabilities are barely visible in national climate plans.
In female-headed rural households, people live in poverty and older populations suffer significantly greater financial loss than men-headed families as their capacity to react and adapt to extreme weather events is unequal.
The report ‘Unjust Climate’ analyses India as one of the most exposed regions of the world with drought, heat stress and extreme precipitation. It impacts on an average, especially female-headed households losing 8 per cent more of their income due to heat stress and 3 per cent more due to floods compared to male-headed households.
This translates to a per capita reduction of USD 83 due to heat stress and USD 35 due to floods, totalling USD 37 billion and USD 16 billion respectively across all Lower Middle-Income Countries (LMICs).
FAO further analysed that if the average temperatures were to increase by just 1°C, these women would face a staggering 34 per cent greater loss in their total incomes compared to men. Considering the significant existing differences in agricultural productivity and wages between women and men, the study suggests that if not addressed, climate change will greatly widen these gaps in the years ahead.
FAO analysed socioeconomic data from over 100,000 rural households (representing more than 950 million people) across 24 LMICs including India.
The Data shows that impacts differ not just by gender but by socioeconomic status. Heat stress, or overexposure to high temperatures, exacerbates the income disparity between rural households classified as poor, who suffer a 5 per cent greater loss (USD 17 per capita) than their better-off neighbours, and the figures for flooding are similar.
Extreme temperatures, meanwhile, worsen child labour and increase the unpaid workload for women in poor households.
The report analysed the decade-old data between 2010 and 2019, which shows that India experienced 111 days of cumulative duration of consecutive dry days in the given period. In the same period, India also experienced a large number of days as extremely hot days.
The study finds rural people and their climate vulnerabilities are barely visible in national climate plans. It finds only 6 per cent of climate action plans proposed mention women, 2 per cent explicitly mention youths, less than 1 per cent mention poor people and about 6 per cent refer to farmers in rural communities.