New Delhi: Researchers have warned that women will suffer the most from extreme heat as more frequent heatwaves on a warming planet pose a growing threat to their jobs, incomes, and lives.
The Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Centre (Arsht-Rock) released a report titled "The Scorching Divide" that found that women are disproportionately affected by the dangers and costs of rising temperatures, whether they are at home or working.
According to a study by a US-based non-profit that looked at data from India, Nigeria, and the US, hot weather could kill 204,000 women a year across the three nations.
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The director of Arsht-Rock, Kathy Baughman McLeod, stated that extreme heat is quietly but profoundly brutalising women all over the world. The report cautioned that heat places a "double burden" on women.
Women are disproportionately expected to care for everyone else who is ill from heat, whether it be paid care or unpaid care, according to McLeod, who spoke to the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Women are not only more prone to getting physically ill from heat, but they are also more likely to do so.
Around the world, heatwaves are breaking records, and scientists predict that in the coming years, the continued release of emissions that heat the planet, primarily from the use of coal, oil, and gas, will cause global temperatures to reach previously unheard-of levels.
According to the report, the oppressive heat will take its toll on women, forcing them to work longer hours for less pay or no pay at all, whether outdoors on a farm, for example, or performing unpaid domestic work like cooking and cleaning at home.
Women who are already in poverty are being forced deeper into it, and those who are rising above it are being drawn back, according to McLeod.
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Lack of cooling particularly hurts women.
In India, Nigeria, and the United States, the average number of heatwave days is expected to at least double by 2050, which will have a significant negative impact on productivity for women from the poorest and most marginalised communities.
According to the study, a large portion of these heat-related productivity losses—estimated at about $120 billion annually across the three countries—occur in the context of unpaid household work and are connected to a lack of access to domestic cooling equipment.
According to Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), a UN-backed organisation focusing on energy access, 323 million people in India alone are expected to be living without access to cooling systems by 2030, making up approximately 1.2 billion rural and urban poor people worldwide.
These remedies include everything from home air conditioning to agricultural produce cold chains.
Women work at home almost twice as much as men do, caring for children and elderly relatives and managing the household. Those without access to air conditioning see a greater decline in productivity, the study found.
Mothers in countries like Nigeria, where heat exacerbates symptoms of tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria, shoulder the "double burden" of taking care of themselves and their sick family members, which translates to hours of unpaid labour.
Doctors in Nigeria, where power outages are common, are calling for hospitals to be better ventilated and advising pregnant women to take breaks of at least three hours if working outside.
According to Samuel Adebayo, a gynaecologist in Lagos, "pregnant women are at greater risk of heat-related deaths as increasing temperature affects foetus growth and complicates an expectant mother's overall health."
According to the Arsht-Rock report, which used data from the World Health Organisation (WHO), Nigeria accounts for 20% of all maternal deaths worldwide (58,000 women annually), and heat adds yet another difficulty.
According to Selvaseelan Selvarajah, a doctor in east London, the problems faced by Black women in Britain—where they are nearly four times more likely than white women to die in childbirth—will only get worse as a result of climate change.
According to Selvarajah, the wealthy can afford things like air conditioners and electricity costs but the poor cannot. Even if the council provided air conditioning, he claimed, "in poor housing, you're paying hundreds of pounds a month for your electricity — you're not going to want to turn it on."
INVISIBLE LABOUR IMPACTS WOMEN MORE HARDLY THAN MEN
Savitri Devi, a 40-year-old farm worker, persevered through the difficult summer in Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India, working in fields at temperatures as high as 44 degrees Celsius (111.2 degrees Fahrenheit), despite the fact that the state experienced a heatwave in June that claimed the lives of dozens of people. The report discovered that women in India lose nearly a fifth of their paid working hours to the heat and that extreme heat is driving female wages below the poverty line in industries like agriculture, which represents 70% of all female employment.
I undoubtedly felt pain from working in the sun. I became ill, and my pay was reduced for each hour I was absent due to the heat. But how do I proceed? I have to work for money," said Devi, who works eight hours per day for 250 rupees ($3.05).
According to labour experts, the issue has gotten worse, especially for the poor in rural areas. Droughts reduce crop yields and encourage men to leave their villages in search of alternative employment, leaving women to take care of farms and families.
The majority of agricultural work in rural India is done by invisible labour performed by women, who bear a greater burden when men migrate to cities, according to Benoy Peter, executive director of the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development, a non-profit organisation with a base in Kerala.
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Women tend to children, the elderly, and the farm work. But if they get sick, nobody will take them to a hospital, he claimed.
People were beginning to comprehend the effects of heat from a financial and health perspective, according to McLeod of Arsht-Rock, who emphasised the urgency of the situation. "This crisis, given where our emissions are...it's only getting worse," she said. Nobody has to perish from the heat. These illnesses and deaths are all entirely avoidable. Simply put, we just want people to pay attention.