Climate change solutions that promote gender and social equality deliver more effective and equitable outcomes – and can accelerate progress on China’s climate and development goals.
In the summer of 2022, parts of China experienced the longest and most intense heatwave on record, followed by one of the worst droughts in six decades. These incidents affected hundreds of millions of people and impacted food production, manufacturing and power supply in multiple cities. In Guangdong province unprecedented rainfall levels caused flooding that threatened important economic centres and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate. Climate change is expected to make such extreme weather events more frequent and intense in China, as the country is acutely vulnerable to its adverse impacts.
Tens of millions of people in China live in low-lying coastal urban centres that are likely to be affected by sea-level rise, as well as heatwaves and changing weather patterns that may also increase the frequency of air pollution events and the spread of infectious diseases. Other urban centres are at high risk of waterlogging and flooding. China’s average temperature has been rising faster than the rest of the world, and over 80 per cent of China’s glaciers are shrinking. Temperature increases are expected to exacerbate water shortages in northwest China, and increase the amount of drought-affected farmland. These direct climate risks will affect socio-economic development in China by disrupting agriculture, forestry and water resources, as well as economic activity in urban centres. Trillions of dollars are estimated to be at risk from climate change impacts in China’s coastal provinces.
These direct climate change risks can also set into motion cascading effects that impact China’s society and the economy. For example, in 2019, the working hours lost in China due to heat-related events caused by climate change alone were equivalent to 40 per cent of the working hours lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. This figure is expected to increase in future – with growing economic implications. Systemic risks caused by the effects of climate change may also affect food security, migration, economic stability, health and well-being. Going forward, building resilience to direct and systemic climate risks – especially among disadvantaged social groups – will be a key challenge for China, although this will take a range of forms, given China’s significant social, ecological and climatic diversity.
China has national climate change mitigation targets, but to meet them it will need to urgently accelerate its decarbonization efforts.
China has national climate change mitigation targets, but to meet them – like all major greenhouse gas emitters – it will need to urgently accelerate its decarbonization efforts. China’s key goals are to reach peak CO₂ emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. China has also pledged to reduce carbon intensity (CO₂ emissions per unit of GDP) by more than 65 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. Guidance on these targets from the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the State Council has informed government authorities at all levels to develop implementation plans for sectors and industries. This is commonly referred to as the ‘1+N’ policy system – in which the ‘1’ refers to an overarching long-term approach to achieving the 2060 carbon neutrality goal, and the ‘N’ encompasses a range of specific plans to meet the 2030 carbon peaking goal, including implementation plans for construction, transport, energy and industrial sectors. National ‘1+N’ policies inform the development of climate policies and measures at the provincial government level. China’s national low-carbon development strategy is guided by the concept of ‘ecological civilization’ – a Chinese vision of sustainable development, aiming to balance continued economic development with environmental protection – which was written into the country’s constitution in 2018.
China’s climate change policies currently integrate gender and other social factors to a limited extent. This is partly due to China’s predominantly scientific and technocratic approach to national climate change policymaking – which is relatively siloed from socio-economic policymaking – as well as the underrepresentation of women in climate change policymaking. A lack of awareness of the relevance of gender and inclusion to climate action among policymakers is another contributing factor. However, as the next section explores, by addressing inequalities and promoting wider public participation in climate action, gender-transformative and inclusive approaches can accelerate progress on China’s national climate goals while promoting equitable socio-economic development.
Gender and inclusion in climate action
Groups that are disadvantaged by social, economic and political inequalities are more vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, especially in developing countries due to gender inequalities – such as the underrepresentation of women in decision-making on environmental issues, making it more likely that climate change solutions do not meet their needs. Due to social inequalities, low-income groups, rural-to-urban migrants, people with disabilities, elderly people and children are also more likely to be affected by direct and systemic climate risks in varying contexts. However, an individual may be a member of more than one of these groups and consequently experience overlapping forms of marginalization – a concept known as ‘intersectionality’. This can shape people’s experiences of climate change impacts and solutions. For instance, women with disabilities are more likely to be unemployed, or to work in informal, precarious and poorly paid employment, than able-bodied women, which affects their capacity to cope with economic shocks related to climate change impacts.
China’s population of 1.4 billion is culturally and socially diverse, given the range of ethnic groups spread among its over 30 provinces, autonomous and special administrative regions, and centrally administered municipalities. Combined with the country’s ecological diversity and disparities in development between urban and rural areas, making generalizations across China’s population is challenging – pointing to the need for increased research on the vulnerabilities of different social groups to climate impacts in diverse contexts. There is evidence that due to social inequalities, certain social groups are likely to be more vulnerable to direct climate impacts such as extreme weather events in China – in both urban and rural areas. Urban waterlogging affects safe access to public transport, which is more commonly used by women and low-income communities. It also affects access to public health services, which can disproportionately affect pregnant women, children and elderly people. In urban heatwaves in China, elderly people and women, especially pregnant women, are significantly more vulnerable to adverse health impacts. Internationally, people with disabilities are two to four times more likely to die in a disaster, due to exclusive disaster risk reduction processes and inaccessible early warning systems, and while publicly available data in China are limited, similar patterns are likely to apply. In the aftermath of extreme weather events and disasters, women and girls are more exposed to the risk of gender-based violence, and women and girls with disabilities are at particular risk.
Gender and social inequalities affect the ability of people to access land, finance, technology and services key for climate resilience. In China, women are less likely to have land and property in their names than men, in both rural and urban contexts, despite the social norm that female partners and their families contribute to such purchases, which affects their financial independence and credit. In a study of Jiangsu, Qinghai and Shaanxi provinces, researchers found that women were disadvantaged in terms of income; control over land; and access to credit, off-farm employment, climate change adaptation training, and early warning systems. These disparities have significant implications for China’s rural climate change adaptation, given the overrepresentation of women and elderly people in China’s agricultural sector, particularly in small-scale farming. Moreover, poor households in China’s rural areas are more exposed to the adverse impacts of climate change, but have a lower capacity to adapt – making climate change impacts (especially extreme weather events) an increasing cause of rural poverty. In urban areas, informal sector workers and migrant workers without a ‘hukou’ (household registration permit) – disproportionately comprised of women – tend to have lower income. They also face disparities in access to social protection. This affects their resilience to climate impacts and related economic shocks.
Climate change impacts can worsen pre-existing gender inequalities, in turn exacerbating the vulnerability of women and girls
Facing systemic barriers, women are underrepresented at all levels of political decision-making in China, affecting their ability to contribute to solutions. Women comprised only 24.9 per cent of delegates to the National People’s Congress, 3.2 per cent of ministers, and 24.2 per cent of villagers’ committees in 2020 (a 2.8 per cent increase since 2010). China’s highest-level group of policymakers on climate change – the National Leading Group on Climate Change – does not include any women, or members with gender expertise. Both internationally and in China, the underrepresentation of women in climate change decision-making has contributed to the limited integration of gender perspectives into climate policies.
Climate change impacts can worsen pre-existing gender inequalities, in turn exacerbating the vulnerability of women and girls. Due to the gender division of labour, women and girls around the world – including in China – are responsible for most unpaid domestic work, such as collecting fuel and water, as well as care for family members. This burden is worsened by resource scarcity and extreme events such as drought, increasing women’s time poverty, exhaustion and exposure to risk, including the risk of experiencing gender-based violence. Climate change is also expected to cause food price shocks and worsen food insecurity, disproportionately affecting poor households, and poor women and girls in particular. This is because, due to the gender division of labour, women are typically responsible for managing household food security, and due to gender inequalities in the household, women and girls are more likely to reduce their food consumption in times of hardship than men and boys.
Gender-transformative and inclusive approaches to climate action
Policies that do not take gender and other social factors into consideration are often known as ‘gender blind’. Without explicit efforts to address gender and social inequalities, climate change mitigation and adaptation actions risk entrenching them further. In particular, ‘gender blind’ climate change adaptation measures risk exacerbating inequalities through ‘maladaptation’ – underlining the importance of inclusive, interdisciplinary approaches. On the other hand, policies and programmes that address the causes of gender-based inequalities can change harmful gender norms, roles and power relations to support gender and social equality. These are known as ‘gender-transformative’ policies and programmes (see Table 1). Creating gender-transformative solutions requires analysis of the root causes of vulnerability and unequal power relations in a particular context, and conducting ‘gender mainstreaming’, or integrating measures to address these inequalities at every stage throughout the policy or programme process – including planning, research, design, budgeting, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. These can be applied to climate change mitigation and adaptation interventions alike.