Climate Change through a Gendered Lens
by Andres de la Sierra
”Street traffic on a rainy evening Calcutta Kolkata India” captured by Jorge Royan http://www.royan.com.ar
In their Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reviewed trends in extreme weather events and concluded that “the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas”.1 Through this report and other, complementary climate change-related literature, the Indian megacity2 of Kolkata has been the focus of further scrutiny due to its susceptibility to these extreme weather events. While Kolkata differs from other megacities at risk of being severely impacted by sea-level rise as a result of climate change owing to its location further inland from the shore, Kolkata’s proximity to the Hooghly River (whose delta flows into the Bay of Bengal) makes the city sensitive to flooding during monsoons at high tide. As a result, “Kolkata could be the worst-hit among Indian coastal cities as sea levels rise” over the next 30 years, with new research suggesting that “by 2050, all of the city and its suburbs will be at risk of annual flooding, affecting many more million people than previously thought”.3 It is important to note, however, that rising sea levels will have a greater, often overlooked impact on certain demographic groups that comprise Kolkata’s over 14 million inhabitants. This paper will seek to understand the effects and responses to climate change through the lens of women in informal housing seeing as they are particularly vulnerable due to their intersectional placement along with gender, caste, and socioeconomic divides.
The first step in understanding the challenges that women of lower caste and economic means experience in the face of climate change comes by analyzing how the land has been used and developed in Kolkata. Figuratively speaking, Kolkata is made up of a “mosaic of formal and informal land-use” with interconnections between “ the formal and informal economies” rendering a “complex patchwork of risk and resilience across the city”.4 While informal housing and economies exist within cities throughout the Global North and South, more than 60% of Kolkata’s workforce is situated within the informal sector.5 Within these statistics, it is important to note that much of Kolkata’s informal economy is undertaken by individuals working from home. This residential-work hybrid prevalent in both registered and unregistered slums6 creates a particularly hazardous reality for women and their dependents due to their livelihoods being inextricably tied to the wellbeing of their homes which are becoming increasingly threatened by rising sea levels. In the event that a household in one of these informal settlements is impacted by flooding or other extreme climatic events, women and children are doubly affected seeing as “public water points” are often located “at a distance from many homes and emergency workers were not always respectful of women and children’s needs”.7
“Policeman facing women in a protest march Calcutta Kolkata India”
Captured by Jorge Royan http://www.royan.com.ar
At the city level, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) is the governing body responsible for future urban development and the upkeep of existing infrastructure. As a response to public and private pressure to increase the city’s resilience to climate change, the KMC has prepared what they call “a systematic strategy towards a better city structure involving stakeholders across different sectors”.8 While credit should be given to the KMC for their attempt to acknowledge the need of a variety of stakeholders in future climate-related development projects, as is the case in many contemporary development efforts, Kolkata runs the risk of prioritizing the needs and wellbeing of groups with a higher economic agency, therefore neglecting the large majority of citizens that call informal settlements their home.9 Before getting bogged down in the KMC’s plans, it is also worth mentioning that the KMC is responsible for 55% of Kolkata’s entire sewage networks.10 As sea levels continue to rise, these networks will have to be adapted in order to handle the burden of additional effluent flow even though “heavy siltation and inadequate maintenance of” these structures have already “resulted in a significant reduction in the hydraulic capacity of the KMC sewer system”.11 The presence of an already overly taxed waste system highlights an additional way climate change may affect the working, underclass women of Kolkata. This is due to the reality that members of the untouchable caste, particularly women, are illegally employed to remove “human faeces from the houses of upper caste and classes in the towns and villages. 12 Those working within the private sector credit the presence of competing priorities as the reason why the health of some Kolkata’s citizens is being jeopardized. In P Parasuram et al’s case study researching Kolkata’s potential pathways towards climate resilience, one interviewee went as far as to say that “The political will for change towards protecting the environment and strategic risk management is missing… All these factors have led to a situation where there is complete and blatant neglect and no strategic risk management plan”.13 As Kolkata, and therefore the KMC’s sewage system becomes increasingly unable to manage the waste created by the city’s more affluent communities, the more “untouchable” women will have to put their health on the line to make a living.
The division of labor between pure and “dirty,” with the latter falling to Dalits as described above, extends beyond the realm of sanitation work to another industry imbued with stigma. Sex work. In India, the culturally-driven marginalization of certain groups of individuals has led to these same groups being segregated from not only their communities but also their families. Prostitution, transcending the caste-based divisions already present, is one of the main contributors to this “societal ex-communication”, with estimates ranging from 4 million to 10 million women being involved in prostitution, 40% of which are children. 14 Granted, prostitution and sex work writ large is not the first thing that comes to mind in terms of planning for climate change adaptation. As sea levels rise and informal housing/businesses are displaced, many underserved women may turn to prostitution to provide for their families.15 While this might seem like a far-off reality, Kolkata is home to Songagachi, Asia’s largest “red-light district.” Here, approximately 11,000 sex workers balance entertaining their clients and raising their families. As of now, little work has been done by the local and federal government to regulate and protect the wellbeing of Kolkata’s sex workers, with even less scholarship as to how the environmental risks associated with climate change might affect this already vulnerable population. With that being said, governments can engage with data garnered from other public health crises to understand and protect sex workers. The USA’s Small Business Administration loans’ exclusion of sex work “because it considers this work immoral” it “reinforces flawed moral judgments and makes workers in this industry, especially women, particularly vulnerable”.16 The way the United States is responding to the COVID-19 pandemic presents Kolkata with a learning opportunity as to how it is in the best interest of public health to divorce moral judgment from economic decisions during a crisis.
As simple as it might be to prescribe solutions from a distanced, theoretical perspective, the local reality is that block voting and clientelism17 has limited the extent to which both the municipal government and private groups/citizens have been able to make inroads in planning for Kolkata’s future in terms of climate change. The “quid-pro-quo” nature of this arrangement has left the city’s poor and/or disenfranchised particularly vulnerable in the face of rising sea levels due to political patronage working at the bequest of those who have the means to employ it. Within the already present vulnerable population, women encounter even greater adversity as a result of implicit labor expectations, the gendered expectations surrounding motherhood, and cultural norms that condemn women’s sexuality and sex work. While women in other locales may face similar problems as coastal cities become increasingly threatened by extreme weather events, it will be more important than ever to remember that “natural causes are not entirely divorced from the social”.18 As day-to-day life becomes altered by climate change in Kolkata and other megacities, it won’t be the rich who are most impacted, but those who either don’t have the resources necessary to adapt or who have been categorized as expandable by governing bodies.
Notes
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change (2007) AR4 http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ publications_and_data_reports.htm#1
Cities with more than 10 million inhabitants are often termed “megacities” as per the United Nations
News, City, and Kolkata News. 2019. "Kolkata At Far Greater Risk From Rising Sea Than Earlier Projected | Kolkata News - Times Of India". The Times Of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/kolkata-at-far-greater-risk-from-rising-sea-than-earlier-projected/articleshow/71828326.cms.
Parasuram, Priya, Priya Narayanan, Mark Pelling, William Solecki, Purvaja Ramachandran, and Ramesh Ramachandran. 2016. "Climate Change Adaptation Pathways In Kolkata". Journal Of Extreme Events 03 (03): 1650021. doi:10.1142/s2345737616500214.
Shaw, Annapurna. 2016. "The Informal Sector In Kolkata Metropolitan Area: Appraisal And Prospects For Local Economic Development". Spatial Diversity And Dynamics In Resources And Urban Development, 499-516. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-9786-3_24.
Registered slums (bustees): these slums are recognized by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) on the basis of land title; since 1980, they have been taken over by the CMC for letting/lease to slum dwellers. Unregistered slums: this comprises slums onthe land encroaching settlements. UN Habitat
Parasuram, Priya, Priya Narayanan, Mark Pelling, William Solecki, Purvaja Ramachandran, and Ramesh Ramachandran. 2016. "Climate Change Adaptation Pathways In Kolkata". Journal Of Extreme Events 03 (03): 1650021. doi:10.1142/s2345737616500214.
Ibid
Rumbach, Andrew. 2014. "Do New Towns Increase Disaster Risk? Evidence From Kolkata, India". Habitat International 43: 117-124. doi:10.1016/j.habitatint.2014.03.005.
Dasgupta, Susmita, Asvani K. Gosain, Sandhya Rao, Subhendu Roy, and Maria Sarraf. 2012. "A Megacity In A Changing Climate: The Case Of Kolkata". Climatic Change 116 (3-4): 747-766. doi:10.1007/s10584-012-0516-3.
Ibid
Doron, Assa, and Alex Broom. 2019. "The Spectre Of Superbugs: Waste, Structural Violence And Antimicrobial Resistance In India". Worldwide Waste: Journal Of Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (1). doi:10.5334/wwwj.20.
Parasuram, Priya, Priya Narayanan, Mark Pelling, William Solecki, Purvaja Ramachandran, and Ramesh Ramachandran. 2016. "Climate Change Adaptation Pathways In Kolkata". Journal Of Extreme Events 03 (03): 1650021. doi:10.1142/s2345737616500214.
Goyal, Yugank, and Padmanabha Ramanujam. 2018. "Ill-Conceived Laws And Exploitative State: Toward Decriminalizing Prostitution In India". Ideaexchange@Uakron. Accessed October 15 2018. http://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview/vol47/iss4/7/.
Johnston, Windsor. 2019. "A Ray Of Hope For The Children Of Sex Workers". Npr.Org. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/01/742323014/a-ray-of-hope-for-the-children-of-sex-workers.
LaGrone, Leah. 2020. "Excluding Those In The Sex Industry From Covid-19 Relief Is A Mistake". The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/04/23/excluding-those-sex-industry-covid-19-relief-is-mistake/.
The exchange of goods and services for political support, often involving an implicit or explicit quid-pro-quo
Taylor, Maria, Sheetal Chhabria, Mike Miller, Cole Edick, and Patience Adzande. 2020. "There’S No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster". Items. https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-natural-disaster/.
