Paper short abstract:

An empirical analysis based on panel household survey data from 2010-2019 on whether droughts and floods are associated with biases in investments in education households among boys and girls 5-18 years of age for Malawi.

Paper long abstract:

Severe droughts have increased in intensity and frequency in recent times and African nations are no exception, suffering particularly hard in the past decade. This paper looks at whether such droughts and floods are associated with biases in investments in schooling within households among boys and girls aged 5-18 years of age in Malawi. The data come from the longitudinal Integrated Household Panel Surveys for Malawi for 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019. We also use an objective measure of relative dryness each child was exposed to, derived using data from the Climatology Lab’s TerraClimate product. Using a panel fixed effects model, the paper finds that school enrolment of boys aged 5-14 (the typical ages during which compulsory schooling is undertaken) are significantly positively affected by drought during the survey year, compared to girls. However, past droughts, experienced up to two years before the survey year have persistent negative effects on both school enrolment and education spending once enrolled of boys of this age group, compared to girls. Floods experienced during the year of the survey also have a significant negative effect on education spending on boys compared to girls. The empirical evidence for within household resource allocation during times of extreme weather is sparse and this paper makes an important contribution to this literature, arguing that extreme weather events can create new inequalities and biases in human capital accumulation.

Paper short abstract:

My paper focuses on how women conduct agricultural operations in climate vulnerable districts of India which are characterized by rising rates of male exit from agriculture. I look at how these women farm while navigating restrictive socio-cultural norms and inherent gender inequity in agriculture.

Paper long abstract:

Globalization and policy shifts have increased market volatility and weakened farmers’ safety nets in India, generating serious concerns that culminated in the world’s largest farmer protests in 2020-21. This has been accompanied by two trends: intensifying climate change and an increasingly rapid exit of men from agriculture, primarily through outmigration. While there are still far more male operated landholdings, female operated landholdings grew much faster (57%) than male operated landholdings (18%) from 2000-2016. Simultaneously, the agricultural environment has become increasingly hostile, characterized by irregular water availability, plot fragmentation, high input costs, soaring agricultural debt and rising farmer suicides. It is in this landscape that an increasing number of women are compelled to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of farm management. My paper focuses on the agricultural experiences of women farm operators in five climate vulnerable districts of India: Chitrakoot, Beed, Parbhani, Latur and Osmanabad. I chose these districts to explore the effect of state institutions, crop choices, household wealth and other factors on climate resilience. My central questions are: 1) in what ways are female farm operators and their landholdings susceptible to climate change and how is their experience in this regard different from that of male farm operators and 2) what policy interventions would be most useful to them? To answer these questions, I draw on my qualitative findings from 45 focus groups with 583 participants ( primarily women farmers) and 18 semi-structured interviews with journalists, NGO representatives, government officials and farmers.

Paper short abstract:

This study proposes an investigation into the effects of changing climates on child marriage in Zimbabwe. The presentation will outline how the knock-on effects of climate change interact with institutionalised gender norms to provoke child marriage as a coping mechanism for changing climates

Paper long abstract:

This study proposes an investigation into the effects of changing climates on child and early marriage (CEM). Early research has found an increase of CEM in vulnerable communities affected by climate change. Yet, the relationship between extreme weather-events and CEM is under-researched. This study uses an Ecofeminist Political Economy lens to explore how culturally-ingrained understandings of gender inform household coping mechanisms in response to climate change, and their effect on teenage girls. Ultimately, its objective is to examine the extent to which the effects of climate change interact with social norms that underpin CEM, and to investigate whether households adopt these practices as a coping mechanism for climate change. Both an extensive literature review and preliminary field work suggest that CEM is used as a coping mechanism for changing climates by parents and teenage girls, who view that the reproductive labour and sexuality of girls can support the survival of families who are coping with the multi-dimensional losses caused by sudden- and slow-onset climate disasters.

The nature of this study is abductive, relying on a mixed-methods research approach that applies a case study in the Chimanimani and Chipinge districts in the Manicaland province of Zimbabwe. Research methods include a rigorous literature review, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. By developing a methodological approach to explore the gendered effects of climate change in communities in crisis, it facilitates novel insights into the factors affecting practices in CEM, and the implications of household coping mechanisms for climate change on teenage girls.

Paper long abstract:

We investigate the gender differentiated effects of early-life exposure to earthquakes in Indonesia, one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. We do so by constructing a hybrid micro dataset with information on early life exposure to earthquakes by combining the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) with two datasets on natural disasters: United States Geological Survey (USGS) data and Indonesian Government’s National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB/Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana).  We exploit earthquake exposure in-utero and/or between 0–59 months of birth to examine short and long-term consequences using a double difference estimator. We find that, compared to girls, boys are more susceptible to earthquake exposure in the short term -- they suffer from a higher probability of being stunted and wasted. However, this disadvantage disappears in the long term, leaving girls with a poorer health status, relative to boys. The effects appear to be more salient in severely affected areas. The gender differences in birth weight and the mother’s breastfeeding period among the exposed groups partly explained the causal pathways for the short term while gender differences in household per capita and food expenditure (in favor of boys) helps explain the reversal of male disadvantage in the long run.

Paper long abstract:

Research on the high prevalence of child marriage in climate-vulnerable developing countries often focus on coastal settlements, ignoring non-coastal disaster-prone regions. In Bangladesh, one of the world’s most affected countries in terms of extreme weather-related events, the north-western district of Kurigram is highly vulnerable to floods and has the highest prevalence of child marriage and income poverty. In this research, we therefore revisit the connection between poverty and women’s marriage timing using Kurigram as a case study. Rajshahi, another northern but economically prosperous district, is selected for comparison purposes. The analysis of in-depth interview transcripts (N=60) highlights multiple themes related to the causes of child marriage. However, compared to Rajshahi, female victims from Kurigram cite low income and social custom of dowry as correlates of high prevalence of child marriage. Quantitative data on the size of dowry demanded is positively associated with age at first marriage. Respondents from poorer families also confirm early marriage as a strategy to avoid large dowry payments. This suggests that an important explanation for the unusually high child marriage prevalence rate in Kurigram is the double-burden of extreme poverty and dowry, a process that is likely to have intensified by environmental disasters such as frequent floods and river erosion.

Paper short abstract:

Originally collected household survey data from across South Asia's three largest cities, Dhaka, Delhi and Lahore, offering unique new insights into the mechanisms through which various manifestations of environmental degradation hampers the economic wellbeing of women (and men) residing in slums.

Paper long abstract:

Degraded urban environments disproportionately affect marginalized populations, and especially impoverished women in South Asia’s informal settlements, where climate change vulnerabilities and gender inequalities are extreme. A comparative analysis was conducted of three neighboring countries, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, where urban environments, climate risks, and gender relations exhibit significant variances. With original survey data from 12 informal settlements across New Delhi, Dhaka, Islamabad, and Lahore, it was found that women are less empowered than men in all three countries, but their determinants related to environmental degradation and climate change vary. Qualitative data from key informants reveals several explanatory mechanisms of observed differences.

The paper makes three distinct and unique contributions. First, we explore links between place, gender, and climate resilience in a single framework through comparative case study analysis of three countries of South Asia – India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan – that recognizes

differences in their social and policy environments. Second, we employ mixed methods emphasizing the benefits of the complementary usage of household surveys with residents of informal settlements and key informant interviews with policymakers. Third, we develop

a novel index that captures multiple dimensions of empowerment into a single score. We demonstrate the usefulness of such an index in identifying gendered differences in empowerment and its determinants as well as its usefulness for cross-country comparison.

Paper short abstract:

We examine the reasons that lead parents to marry off their daughters as a response to climate change in Northern Ghana. We place our analysis at the intersection of climate change and social protection and argue the importance of addressing this phenomenon in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Farming communities confronted with climate change adopt formal (state-proposed) and informal (individual/family-led) adaptation strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change. Informal Adaptation Strategies (IAS) are important because they can have both positive and negative consequences on the well-being of people. On one hand, IAS emerges from the lived realities, resilience, and innovation of local populations and provides insight into new formal adaptation strategies that may work for specific people within specific communities. On the other hand, IAS may pose a risk to the well-being of vulnerable groups and potentially lead to an increase in girl-child marriages. While the effects of climate change on the physical and social environment are well documented, and the effects of poverty on early girl child marriage are equally well documented, there is still a dearth of literature on early child marriage as a response to the effects (e.g poverty) of climate change. This is where we situate our study. We use qualitative semi-structured interviews to examine the decision-making processes and reasons that lead parents to marry off their daughters as a response to the effects of climate change in a rural-farming community in Northern Ghana. We place our analysis at the intersection of climate change, social protection, and the incidence of early girl-child marriages. We argue that understanding this link is crucial and can contribute significantly to our knowledge of early girl-child marriage as well as our ability to address this in Sub-Saharan Africa.