by NEW DELHI (AP) — Manju Devi was in pain for two months last year while working on a farm near Delhi, unable to escape her tasks that sometimes had her standing for hours in water up to her head in a paddy field. waist, lifting heavy loads in conditions of intense heat and spraying with pesticides and insecticides. When that pain finally became unbearable, she was rushed to a hospital.
Doctors’ verdict: Devi had suffered a prolapsed uterus and would need a hysterectomy. She had not said a word to her family about her discomfort due to the social taboo on talking about a “women’s disease,” and with two adult children and three grandchildren waiting for the 56-year-old widow to help her carry food on the table. Devi depended on painkillers to stay in the field.
“I endured excruciating pain for months and was afraid to talk about it publicly. A surgical procedure should not be necessary for us to realize the cost of increased heat,” she said, surrounded by women who said they had gone through a similar experience.
As the annual UN-led climate summit known as COP meets later this month in Dubai, activists are urging policymakers to respond to the disproportionate impact of climate change on women and girls, especially where poverty makes them more vulnerable.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is part of a series produced under the India Climate Journalism Programme, a collaboration between The Associated Press, the Stanley Center for Peace and Security and the Press Trust of India.
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Its recommendations include guaranteeing land rights for women, promoting women’s cooperatives, and encouraging women to lead the development of climate policies. They also suggest that countries, especially developing countries like India, commit more money in their budgets to ensure gender equity in climate policies.
The Group of 20 leaders that met in New Delhi in September also recognized the problem and called for accelerating climate action with gender equality at the center, increasing women’s participation and leadership in mitigation and adaptation.
Devi is a farm worker in Syaraul, a village of about 7,000 people a couple of hours southeast of Delhi, in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and most populous state. Several other middle-aged and older women in the village described similar injuries that led to hysterectomies.
The link between phenomena like uterine prolapse and climate change is indirect but significant, said Seema Bhaskaran, who tracks gender issues for the nonprofit Transform Rural India Foundation.
“Women in climate-affected rural communities are often hardest hit by physically demanding agricultural work, made more strenuous by climate change-related challenges, such as erratic weather and increased labor needs. work,” Bhaskaran said. “While climate change does not directly cause prolapse, it magnifies underlying health problems and conditions that make women more susceptible to such health problems.”
About 150 kilometers (93 miles) away, in the village of Nanu, Savita Singh, a 62-year-old farm worker, blames climate change for a chemical infection that cost her a finger in August 2022.
When her husband moved to Delhi to work as a plumber, she was left alone tending the couple’s fields. As rice and wheat yields fell due to changing weather patterns and increased pest attacks, Singh’s husband, who retained decision-making power, decided to increase the use of pesticides and insecticides. . It was up to Singh, who had opposed the increases, to apply the chemicals.
“With the increase in pest attacks on farms, we started using more than three times pesticides and fertilizers on our farms and without any safety equipment, the chemicals burned my hand and my finger had to be amputated,” he said.
In Pilakhana, another village in Uttar Pradesh, Babita Kumari, a 22-year-old daily wage worker, suffered a stillbirth in 2021 and this year she attributes it to the heavy labor she endured daily working in a brick kiln for long hours in intense heat. Climate change at least doubled the chances of a heat wave that hit the state this year, according to an analysis by Climate Central, an independent group of U.S.-based scientists that developed a tool to quantify the contribution of change. climate to changing daily temperatures.
“My mother and her mother have worked in brick kilns all their lives, but the heat wasn’t that bad even though they worked more than eight hours like me. But in the last six or seven years the situation has worsened and the heat has become unbearable, but what option do we have to endure it?,” said Kumari, who lives in a makeshift camp with her husband.
Bhaskaran noted that in India women often take on primary roles in agriculture, while men migrate to urban areas, making them especially vulnerable to the direct effects of climate change. A government workforce survey for 2021-22 found that 75% of people working in agriculture are women. But only about 14% of agricultural land is owned by women, according to a government agricultural census.
For Bhaskaran, this adds up to a picture of women sacrificing their health by working long hours in intense heat, exposed to insecticides and pesticides, and with uncertain access to clean water. On top of that, many are malnourished because they “often eat the last and the least within patriarchal structures,” she said.
Poonam Muttreja is a women’s rights activist who also heads the Population Foundation of India, a non-governmental organization that focuses on population issues, family planning, reproductive health and gender equality. She said it is essential that COP28, the meeting in Dubai, takes concrete steps to help women.
He said COP28 should go beyond providing financial aid and actively promote and facilitate the inclusion of gender considerations in all climate-related policies, initiatives and actions.
“You should prioritize awareness programs that emphasize the specific health challenges women face in the wake of climate change as a critical step toward increasing public knowledge. These efforts will also serve as a call to action for governments, institutions and communities to prioritize women’s health and well-being as a core component of their climate initiatives,” she added.
Anjal Prakash, professor and research director at the Indian Business School’s Bharat Institute for Public Policy, coordinated a working group that examined gender for a recent assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She said international pressure will be needed to overcome some countries that may silently oppose gender-sensitive climate policies due to conservative ideologies and political barriers.
Finding money will also be a formidable challenge, he said.
Shweta Narayan, a researcher and environmental justice activist at Health Care Without Harm, said women, children and the elderly are among the most vulnerable to extreme weather events. She saw reason for optimism at COP28 due to a dedicated Health Day at the conference.
“There is definitely a very clear recognition that climate has an impact on health and health needs to be considered more seriously,” he said.
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