Experts discuss the additional burden women face in disaster zones

For every man who drowns in a flood, three to four women will die in the deluge. That stark statistic on the comparative gender impact of natural disasters was just one of many discussed during a two-day conference organized by the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO), aimed in part at assessing how women and men are affected differently by climate change.

Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, minister of justice and courts of Samoa, was among those who attended last week’s meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Her country, an island nation in the southern Pacific Ocean, is among those most at risk by global warming, with residents endangered by rising sea levels. She told Al Jazeera that climate change puts a particular strain on women in Samoa, where unpredictable rain patterns have prompted the government to ration fresh water.

“The ironic thing is that there is no clean water,” she said, which adds a significant amount of stress to women’s daily lives, not unlike those living in conflict zones, she added. In a society where domestic chores such as washing and cooking and gathering water are seen to be the responsibility of women, lives can become "more difficult," Mata'afa said, for female family members compared to male counterparts. Not only is water more scarce — often resulting in longer walks to get the commodity — but women also suffer disproportionately from nutritional deficiencies caused by the water shortages, according to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO).

It is just one example cited during the WMO meeting of how women are often more affected by climate-related hazards than men.

The traditional cultural positioning of women in society — in which female members of the household tend to take on the role of childrearing, while being burdened with household chores and, in some instances, deprived of equal rights of movement — alongside being less adept physically to cope in some disaster scenarios compared to men, mean that they often suffer the brunt of natural calamities.

Such vulnerability to catastrophe isn’t new, but efforts to counter the imbalance are still in their infancy. And until gender equality is achieved, according to the WMO, women will continue to die in greater number than men when disaster strikes.

Elizabeth Ferris, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of its internal displacement project, said that part of the problem was that in some societies women are not as well equipped to survive. She said that women were less likely to have learned to swim or had experience in other potentially life-saving activities as a part of their education in some high-risk nations.

Additionally, the physical strength needed to stay alive in a flood, for example, can be decisive in determining who survives, an Oxfam study found.

Cultural practices and restrictions on women’s mobility can further hamper their ability to remain safe, Ferris added. For example, in Pakistan’s 2005 earthquake, some women weren’t able to leave the house until a male relative returned who could make the decision to evacuate, according to a U.N. study.

And in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 220,000 people, it was found that in some instances women were more vulnerable by the increased chance that they may be on shore, as opposed to on fishing boats. If the boats staffed by male crews were far enough out, the wave passed safely underneath before inundating shorelines. According to an Oxfam study, in some villages, all victims of the tsunami were female. In Aceh, Indonesia, near the epicenter of the earthquake, two-thirds of the victims were female, according to the same report. In countries where women enjoy more socio-economic rights, female mortality rates in floods drop, according to the U.N.

But female survivors also face a different set of health concerns in the aftermath of disaster. After the devastating Bangladesh floods of 1998, women and girls reported an increase in rash and urinary tract infections because they were unable to wash the damp rags they had been wearing during their periods in the days after floods, according to a report by the World Health Organization. Critics have said aid agencies are often ill equipped to deal with specific female health issues.

Part of the aim of last week’s conference was to push for gender-sensitive disaster relief guidelines — a common complaint about aid agencies is that they have failed to address the different set of challenges women face in times of disaster.

In Sri Lanka, for example, NGOs were unable to feed many newborns after the 2004 tsunami because they had not stocked up on baby formula, according to Ferris. Conventional humanitarian policy encourages mothers to breastfeed, but disproportionate mortality rates among women meant that now widowed fathers were left to deal with the task of rearing young survivors.

"More work still needs to be done to mainstream gender aspects in weather and climate action," WMO's Secretary General Michel Jarraud said in a statement. "We are facing barriers, social and cultural barriers, that often impede women to acquire directly the education and knowledge they need to be more independent actors of their own lives and livelihoods."