Climate change: Women paying the price of a hotter planet • FRANCE 24 English

Recurring and prolonged heatwaves are an environmental issue, a public health issue, and also a gender issue. With each degree Celsius that the temperature rises, domestic violence rises by 4.7%.

That's according to statistics from the UN's Spotlight Initiative, which fights gender-based violence. Here in France, the organization CARE has been sounding the alarm about a likely spike in abuse, and we're joined now by the organization's Engagement Director, Adéa Guillaume. Good morning, and thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

Good morning. This is now the third heatwave that France and other parts of Western Europe are facing. Did we already see a marked rise in domestic violence during the previous two?

It's been documented, yes, in the previous one in June, for example, from some apps that people can, and women and girls can use in the streets if they're facing, for example, harassment, street harassment. There have been a rise of 30% of people reporting to this platform to be victims of street harassment in the streets. So, yes, it started to be documented on those heatwaves.

But more globally, it's been documented over 40 studies around the world that, yes, when there is, for each degree that you feel, you can have a rise of 4.7, a rise of domestic violence, which is a striking number, really. Can you talk about that link between heat and domestic violence?

I mean, why are heatwaves such an exacerbating factor? It's exactly what you just said. It's not that this is the main factor.

Of course, violence is coming from violent men, and they own what they do, and they are the sole responsible for the violence that they do exist. But this said, when there is a heatwave, physiologically, things are changing in your body. Then you have the lack of sleeves, and sometimes you have economical pressure due to the fact that sometimes you cannot work or access work.

And all of those factors together makes us a deadly mix of getting to act and maybe become violent. As you say, there's the impact of heat on the body, but then there's also a confinement aspect as well. Yes.

Yes. When you are locked in your house, sometimes those homes are small, there are no AC. And what we observe is that victims cannot really get out.

So they are stuck in a small house with the nerves getting high and violent strikes. During these heatwaves, we've been talking a lot about inequalities and coping with the heat. For example, people who live in houses with gardens versus poorly ventilated apartments.

Does that also mean that some populations are going to be more vulnerable to these outbreaks of violence than others? Well, what we observe is that, you know, we are talking here about domestic violence, but we at CARE, we are working in more than 120 countries without the world. And what we do observe is that when there is heatwaves, droughts all over the world, women and girls are the first victims and are the most vulnerable.

I give you a very clear example of that. For example, in Bangladesh, it's been documented that when you have 30 days of continuous heat weather, very hot weather, we've been observing a raise of 50 percent of child marriage of young girls between 11 and 14 years. We could also document in Ethiopia during the big drought of 2022, which was the most severe one for 40 years, because we've been observing a raise of 190 percent of child marriage between four young girls, also between 11 and 14 years older.

So what you see is that the type of violence on vulnerable publics is, of course, raising to when it's linked to climate. That's why we are saying that climate change is sexist, because it does have a bigger impact on women and girls. Yeah.

As you say, those statistics point out that climate change is really a gender issue as well. Is it being treated that way by governments when when they make plans for things like future heatwaves? Unfortunately not.

And for a very simple reason is that the women are not around the table to make the decisions and to create the adaptation programs. It's been striking us for a while now that because we are at the COP, we are trying to act and to advocate for more gender, more gender approach on climate for many years. And when we go to the COP, it's always striking for us when you have this lineup of men and so very few women around the table and also so very few women from the context coming from the context where the climate change is very severe.

And so what does it mean? It means that when we come to design solutions, those solutions are not designed by women for women. So what we say is that we need absolutely more women around the table and also more women coming from the context in which the climate change is really intense and has a big impact, because only solutions designed by women for women will have an impact on women and girls.

Can you give some examples of what some of those solutions might be? I mean, how should the rise in domestic violence and other impacts on women be factored into our long-term planning? Yes.

What we do at CARE, for example, we, of course, we are advocating for, you know, reducing the emissions and everything. That's what the advocacy part, but our really programmatic work and our work with population and communities is really around adaptation. And so one of the things that we do a lot and we see a lot is the fact that women and girls and especially women in many countries are in charge of local agriculture, family agriculture.

And so when there is droughts or floods or drought and floods, you need to adapt the way you raise veggies or the way you raise animals. And so we are having those big programs at a very global level around the planet about helping women and girls and women to adapt the agriculture in order to keep safe in terms of independency, food independency. So that's the first element.

But then what we do also is that we raise awareness within the communities between women and girls in order to reduce the gender component that you can have when there is a disbalance of power, for example. And so we need to empower more women and girls within their communities so that the gender aspect of what they are living as a community when it comes to climate change can be considered also. So concretely, it means to to raise leaders, female leaders within the communities so that the gender aspect of what is happening is also being taken in consideration within the communities.

You talk about raising awareness. We've been seeing images there of a campaign that you launched here in France during the heat wave. Perhaps you could talk a little bit more about that.

Yes, it's really a campaign that came out around these figures that for each degree you have a raise of domestic violence of 4.7 percent. And so we decided to raise awareness for everyone, you, me, really, but also the political government and parties and sub-parties within all the streets of Paris.

So this campaign is happening right now. You can see it in most of our malls where there is. I see a lot of people are getting into the malls at the moment because of the heat wave.

And so we are in the street out there trying to explain and discuss and engage the conversation. The traction that we got is really interesting. We have a lot of people aware, we're not aware of that link between climate change and sexism and the fact that women and girls were even more impacted than men.

And so it's really interesting to see the conversations we can having in the streets of France at the moment around this campaign. So it's just so right there, the importance of raising awareness and not giving up on saying to us, the people, but also raising awareness toward our government about this specific aspect and asking the government to basically meet the commitments that they've been making since the Paris Agreement of 2015, the French government has been saying, we need to reduce and we will be serious into reducing our emissions, but really they took a commitment of 5% reduction per year. We are at less than two.

They took also serious commitment to protect women and girls from violence. And you see at the moment, all the movements in the street to get a global law around violence and whether it's sexual or whether it's domestic violence. So our governance needs to be serious and needs to understand that link between climate change and domestic violence and act accordingly and protect accordingly.

Hopefully the governments will be taking note. Adéa Guillaume, thank you again so much for joining us this morning. We'll have to leave it there.

That was Adéa Guillaume, Director of Engagement at CARE France, reminding us that climate change is, of course, a gender issue as well. Let is turn into Secretary ofкивare Schepperemer. We'll be speaking to the community and we are very working on the amendment, at the same time as well. !