Climate responses necessitate trade-offs, which may reinforce inequality. A gender and social equity approach is required to ensure that farmers with least resilience benefit from climate action through transformative climate adaptation.

The COP26 summit will bring parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As the 2021 Sixth Assessment Report has captured, climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying. Food systems are large contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while many farmers, especially in the Global South, are adversely impacted by climate change in terms of droughts, flooding, and increased temperatures. Action is need on two fronts: climate mitigation (e.g. reducing emissions, creating carbon sinks) and climate adaptation (e.g. boosting peoples’ resilience to climate change).

Some in the business community may see climate action within food systems as a peripheral concern compared to more mainstream economic challenges. Our increasingly globalized world suggests otherwise. There are dangers of multiple breadbasket failures caused by simultaneous climate-induced crop reduction in key rice, wheat and maize growing areas worldwide. The impact of such a phenomenon has attracted the attention of the insurance industry. At a more granular level, climate change can adversely affect entire value chains, however local, by disrupting the quantity and quality of agricultural produce, reducing availability and raising prices.

In response to the climate crisis, agricultural researchers and practitioners have focused on developing and promoting climate-smart agriculture (CSA). This includes drought tolerant crop varieties, improved land management practices, and decision-support tools. Often there is a focus on headline numbers: the number of farmers who have adopted CSA, the number of farmers who have escaped from poverty. Numbers are of course important, however, they say little about the broader human development impact, including on health and nutrition, and gender and social equity. In the case of poverty reduction, interventions may be targeted towards those just below the poverty line who with ‘relatively’ little effort can be empowered to pursue livelihoods that take them above the poverty line. There is nothing inherently wrong with this but it may exclude the chronically poor, those who are so far below the poverty line that even greater investment is needed along with the probable result that fewer people would escape poverty. To what extent is there a danger that the chronically poor are further marginalized as an unintended consequence of climate action?

If numbers obscure the tradeoffs inherent in climate responses, interventions may also inadvertently reinforce existing inequalities and indeed create new ones. Such ‘maladaptation’ risks further disadvantaging women and other marginalized groups.  Examples of maladaptation are all too common.

Agricultural extension is critical to working with farmers to build climate resilience. Which farmers are targeted, the character of the extension process, and the extent to which farmers’ own knowledge is encompassed are all vital for effective extension services. It is well documented that women are less likely to have access to agricultural extension information than men. In South Asia, Krishna et al. (2019) found that, in addition, farmers belonging to socially-marginalized castes had even less access to extension services than more powerful farmers, and subsequently benefitted less. A study of 97 countries found that a mere 5 per cent of extension resources were directed at women. Extension information delivered to men will not automatically reach female counterparts, particularly when these women have educational disadvantages, or indeed focus on growing different crops to men within smallholder farm holdings.

In recent years, there has been an increase in decision digital-support tools to help smallholder farmers increase their incomes and yield. Mobile phones, for example, provide farmers with climate and market information and field-specific fertilizer rates. Connectivity of humans and technologies in agricultural knowledge and advice networks is increasing rapidly. Among the poorest 20 percent in low and middle-income countries, 70 percent already have access to a mobile phone, and one in three people have internet access. The problem is that far fewer women have access to mobile phones than men in the Global South and, as such, they are less likely to benefit than their male counterparts.

It is acknowledged that global climate action must be designed to tackle inequalities and injustices related to climate change and action. In line with broader policy thinking on the need for transformational change towards sustainably living on the planet and using resources in ways that ‘leave no one behind’, there is increasing emphasis on the need to move from incremental climate adaptation to transformative adaptation. Through transformative adaptation, climate justice can take center-stage. Transformative adaptation is inherently political. It challenges the power relations that generate and perpetuate the vulnerability of marginal small-holder famers in their exposure to climate risk and in the distribution of positive impact of climate responses. This represents a radical departure because responses to climate change have seldom addressed the “problems of unevenly distributed power relations, networks of control and influence, and rampant injustices of the ‘system”.

We believe that to mitigate the danger of maladaptation, a gender and social equity approach can help guide climate action by addressing the following questions:

1. Who is most at risk from climate extremes and variability? Where are they located? How are they are vulnerable? What are the appropriate climate risk management options? 
2. What are the underlying factors (economic, political, technological and social) that perpetuate climate vulnerability? How can appropriate adaptive capacity options be developed that mitigate underlying climate risks and avoid replicating vulnerability?
3. What capability do people have to respond to change? How can the strategies of diverse change-makers be supported for transformative adaptation at different scales (individual, household, landscape and systems levels)?
4. Who benefits from building resilience? What is the distribution of benefits/positive outcomes?

These questions should steer the design, implementation and evaluation of climate change interventions. It is, hence, incumbent on all stakeholders (and not just researchers) to be guided by this approach. Mitigating maladaptation need not be that complicated: being cognizant of low literacy and education levels and entrenched gender norms can result in gendered extension resources that can be tailored to a female audience. More broadly, inter-disciplinary approaches to the climate crisis allow for innovating interventions:  there are many farmers for who limited secure access to land and/or labour shortages mean that agricultural-based livelihoods may not represent an escape from poverty. In these cases more appropriate climate responses may include social protection programs such as cash transfers rather than conventional CSA.

By applying a gender and social equity lens to climate adaptation efforts, inequalities underlying unequal power structures may be addressed, enabling farmers to pursue climate risk management pathways that contribute to climate resilience and broader development, as epitomized by the sustainable development goals. The COP26 Summit is an opportunity to place climate justice firmly on the agenda, and to put in place a transformative climate adaptation roadmap.

Jon Hellin has thirty years’ agricultural research experience from Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. He is currently head of Sustainable Impact through Rice-based systems at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. IRRI is part of the CGIAR, a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for a food-secure future.

Eleanor Fisher has twenty five years experience conducting participatory development research on poverty, livelihoods, and gender issues in parts of the Global South. She is Head of Research at the Nordic Africa Institute, a Swedish government agency.

Ana Maria Loboguerrero has more than 13 years’ experience working on climate change challenges. She is Research Director of Climate Action for the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and Head of Global Policy Research at the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).