Dr. Falendra K. Sudan
Flood and disaster risk poses significant threat to affected communities, which can never be eliminated altogether. The flood loss has many dimensions. Besides economic loss and loss of life and injury, there may be irreversible loss of land. Socio-economic factors such as land use practices, living standards and policy responses are increasingly influencing the frequency of natural hazards. Poverty worsens when natural hazards destroy vital infrastructure. Among natural catastrophes, flooding has claimed more lives than any other single natural hazard. Economic losses and impacts have remained high and constitute a large developmental burden. Flooding accounted for one-third of the global economic loss from natural catastrophes. Social and economic costs of disasters create obstacles in the processes of sustainable development and achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
There are increasingly negative impacts of floods and natural hazards affecting agricultural productivity adversely and threatening food security. The rural poor experience the most severe effects and need adaptation strategies and development assistance to cope due to least capacity and limited resources. Assets can help them cope better with climate shocks, including floods and hazards in increasing incomes, reducing vulnerability, and empowering people to move out of poverty. Assets, broadly defined may include natural, physical, financial, human, social, and political capital. The better-off households typically sell assets in order to maintain their consumption when facing shocks. The poorer households often reduce assets and consumption simultaneously to forego future investments in health, nutrition, and education.
Women are disproportionately affected by floods and disasters due to social and economic marginalization. Women experience more poverty and deprivation and can be more affected by climate shocks. Women usually have fewer assets and rights than men, and are more vulnerable to loss of these assets and rights. Women’s asset holdings often have positive effects on important development outcomes.
Many factors may influence how climate hazards and disasters affect the well-being of women and men differently. The interdependencies, expectations, entitlements, and livelihood strategies influence on the impacts of floods and hazards. Social structures or demographics also intersect with the gender dimension. These institutional arrangements may also affect the way they perceive, understand, value, or respond to climate hazards in the adaptation arena. Increasing climate hazards presents challenges for agricultural production. Repeated climate shocks and disasters strengthened women’s control over resources to invoke a cultural norm for household food security. Climate shocks and disasters associated depletion of water resources increasingly jeopardize women’s livelihoods and social connections. A prolonged natural disaster caused the greatest economic stress to widowed women with children who were severely resource-limited. Women and men are changing their cropping practices in response to climate variability, with different impacts on well-being for both sexes. This leads to decreased food consumption, which could have gendered human capital outcomes.
The immediate impact of climate-related disasters such as floods is determined by their ability to evacuate in time to safer grounds. Cultural norms and skills could be a crucial determinant for survival in disasters and may also prevent women from moving freely during times of disaster. Women put the safety of their children and assets before their own survival. Natural disasters kill more women than men. However, gender-differentiated roles do not always result in higher losses for women because men tend to be more engaged in outdoor activities and exposed to high risks.
Longer term impacts of climate-related disasters depends on access to post disaster support such as food, shelter, medical aid, and recovery support. Disaster destroys livelihoods and assets, both women and men suffer, but women may suffer more. Due to the erosion of social controls and protections in times of natural and climate-related disasters, women and children face a greater risk of becoming targets for exploitation. Loss of utensils and other household essentials poses a great hardship for women and undermines their well-being because of their dependence on economic activities linked to the home. The survivors of floods and hazards have a range of immediate needs, including safe drinking water, food and shelter. Such survivors are likely to be traumatized and vulnerable. Demographic impacts of loss of life due to flooding can be significant. The impacts on human health of flooding can be very serious indeed due to waterborne and water-related disease or injuries. Increase in disease transmission and the risk of epidemics in the post-flood period depends on population density and displacement, and the extent to which the natural environment has been altered or disrupted.
Floods cannot be prevented but their devastating effects can be minimized. Most floods are more or less natural phenomena, but the flood hazard is largely of human origin. Populations at risk to disasters include those living in hazardous areas, illiterate small agricultural producers located on hillsides and river embankments, female-headed households, indigenous women, and the elderly, young mothers, the ill, and disabled. Women are subject to all levels of the disaster process including exposure to risk, risk perception, preparedness, response, physical impact, psychological impact, recovery and reconstruction. They have less access to productive and social resources and decision-making processes and find it harder to withstand and respond to crisis situations.
The vulnerabilities are more due to a lack of adaptive capacities to address disasters and hazards. Climate disasters and hazards will greatly impact the health of poor and marginalized groups due to lack of resources and ability to adapt. Majority of the women will experience vulnerabilities including vector borne diseases, infectious waterborne diseases, poor infrastructure, poor water and environmental management, and high poverty rates and less access to public health facilities. Human safety in time of extreme weather is also a concern. Poor hygiene may result from inadequate sanitation. Water availability is diminished forcing people to access poorer quality and or degraded water supply sources. There are heavy economic losses due to poor sanitation and hygiene. Vector borne diseases particularly malaria may become more widespread.
Socio-cultural norms and childcare responsibilities prevent women from seeking refuge or migrating to other places for working when a disaster hits. Disasters increase a women’s daily burden such as travel longer distances to get drinking water and wood for fuel and suffer inequalities with respect to human rights, political and economic status, land ownership, housing conditions, exposure to violence, education and health. Reducing vulnerability to disasters is paramount. Addressing all elements of ‘poverty’ must go hand in hand with disaster risk reduction initiatives. Impoverished households will prioritize educational expenses by reducing the participation of children (especially girls) in educational opportunities. During extreme weather conditions, women tend to work more to secure household livelihoods and subsistence needs. The limited mobility places women disproportionately at risk to climate induced natural disasters. Disasters threaten to reverse progress in fighting diseases of poverty, e.g. malaria, dengue, even mental health.
Himalaya is one of the most disaster prone regions in India due to climate hazards and disasters and lack of adaptive capacity. Hazards such as cloud bursts and floods are main climate risks in Himalaya, which pose huge vulnerabilities to affected population with persistent poverty, social and economic marginalization, and gender inequalities. In times of disasters, poor people often resort to selling assets, parents migrate in search of paid labour leaving children without care, and exposed to the more extremes like the trafficking of women and children. The ability to cope with shocks is also influenced by household size, composition and underlying social vulnerabilities within the family including land concentration and declining access to common property resources as social safety nets for the poor. Overall, the consequences of social and economic stresses are not the same for men and women. In such situations, the Government(s) have important role in ameliorating the livelihoods for poor people, adaptation financing and awareness-raising. Not only this, there has been greater scope for improvement in women’s rights and gender equity by developing and implementing gender specific policies and adaptation.
(The author is Professor, Department of Economics, University of Jammu, Jammu)
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