Four out of five people displaced by climate change are women and girls. That number, from the United Nations, is the single starkest fact in a new report on how the climate crisis is not gender neutral. It means that for every five people forced from their homes by floods, fires, or storms, four are female.
The report, issued from Islamabad, lays out a cascading set of pressures. Women and girls already face economic and social inequalities. The climate crisis makes those worse. It cuts off access to health care. It blocks education. It destroys employment. Rural women are hit hardest because they depend on agriculture and natural resources to feed their families. When those resources fail, the family goes hungry.
Extreme weather does not just destroy homes. It destroys systems. Acute disasters disrupt sexual and reproductive health services. A woman who loses her clinic in a flood may have no way to get prenatal care or contraceptives. A girl pulled out of school after a drought may never return. The report notes that women, girls, and children are 14 times more likely to die during extreme weather disasters than men. Fourteen times. That is not a small gap. That is a chasm.
Look at Pakistan in 2022. Torrential rains, driven by climate change, killed thousands and affected millions. The report points to that disaster as a case study. Women there bore the brunt. Displacement hit them harder. Loss of livelihood hit them harder. The structural inequalities that existed before the rain — limited access to information, restricted mobility, fewer resources — turned a bad situation into a catastrophe.
The report is clear. The crisis is not gender neutral. It never was. Women and girls are more vulnerable because society made them more vulnerable. They have less land. Less money. Less voice in decisions about disaster planning. When a storm comes, they are less likely to get the warning. Less able to flee. More likely to stay behind to care for children or the elderly. More likely to die.
A sharp rise in extreme weather events is pushing women and girls into precarious situations almost overnight. That is the phrase the report uses: “almost overnight.” One day a woman has a home, a farm, a source of clean water. The next day she has nothing. She is displaced. She is scrambling for health care that no longer exists. She is trying to find a school for her children that is not underwater.
Governments and organizations will need to respond. The report does not prescribe solutions. It describes the problem. The problem is that the same storm that floods a man’s field floods a woman’s entire life. She loses her income, her home, her access to health care, her children’s education, and sometimes her life. The man loses his crop. Both are tragic. But they are not the same.
The numbers make that plain. Four out of five displaced. Fourteen times more likely to die. These are not abstractions. They are the lived reality of millions of women and girls right now. And as the climate crisis accelerates, those numbers will only grow.
