Climate change and a national economic crisis are overworking rural women in Sri Lanka

By Indika Arulingam, Sanjiv De Silva, Vidhisha Samarasekara & Darshini Ravindranath

This statement by a woman from an agricultural household in Puttalam District in the North-West Province demonstrates that rural women’s vulnerability to climate change is heightened by Sri Lanka’s ongoing economic crisis. This finding is part of an IWMI study across four provinces in Sri Lanka. It shows the urgent need to understand how national debt distress—currently faced by 52 low and middle-income developing economies—can impact how countries in the Global South are able to respond to increasing climate variability. These 52 countries are home to 40 percent of the world’s poorest people and make up more than half of the world’s top 50 most-climate-vulnerable countries.

Sri Lanka’s economic crisis was triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and a preemptive sovereign default on foreign debt in 2022. It was exacerbated by several challenges facing the national economy. This has increased poverty levels, threatened livelihoods, increased costs of living and worsened household food security across the country.

In this blog, we discuss what we learnt from focus group discussions (FGDs) held across a period of ten days during March-April 2024, with women from the Northern, Eastern, North-western and Uva provinces. These FGDs were conducted as part of a study supported by the UNFPA, which aimed to understand how climate change can impact different aspects of gendered and intersectional wellbeing, including employment and livelihoods, health, educational attainment, protection from gender-based violence and participation in formal political processes, against the ongoing impacts of the economic crisis. The fieldwork was conducted when many parts of the island were experiencing hotter than average temperatures.

Work more, earn less

The study showed that, at the intersection of the climate and economic crises, women’s labor burdens had increased, in both agricultural production, and in fulfilling their caring responsibilities. Women across the FGDs discussed how the dry weather and conditions of water scarcity experienced by the country at the beginning of 2024 had intensified the amount of labor they expended in agricultural production. They had to water crops more frequently as well as fetch water and feed for livestock as their grazing grounds dried up. Women had to compensate for the extreme rise in the cost of living as well as falling agricultural incomes linked to increasing climate variability and the high costs of fuel, electricity and agricultural inputs. They did this by working longer and harder, including for some, by seeking additional sources of incomes under precarious conditions.

While women’s participation in income generation had increased, this did not diminish their labor burdens in care-work, which too had expanded. Care-work is the undervalued and under-appreciated physical and mental labor of looking after and providing for the needs of households and communities, overwhelmingly undertaken by women and girls, and a key driver of women’s subordination. The climate crisis is expected to increase this labor. The FGDs highlighted how women’s caring responsibilities played the function of insulating household wellbeing against the impacts of falling agricultural incomes and rising costs of living. Women across the four provinces discussed how in fulfilling their care responsibilities, they were more likely to reduce their food intake, skip meals entirely and forego medical care needs.

Climate adaptation as the work of laboring people

Coping with climate change, both the slowly eroding consequences of slow-onset events as well as the sudden shocks and destruction of more extreme events, will involve the work of laboring people, particularly from the Global South. It is this work that will continuously enable the conditions for collective life-making against the continuously depleting impacts of climate change, and the systems that benefit from producing it. Our findings show that this work is gendered, and that for countries such as Sri Lanka, the consequences of national public debt distress can expand these gendered labor burdens and increase gendered harms and inequalities.

As climate variability intensifies, it will become increasingly important to understand the mechanisms for recognizing and rewarding the labor of climate adaptation, and the gendered divisions of this labor, including by redistributing caring responsibilities. This will have to be part of national climate adaptation policies that take into account how economic precarity can further heighten climate vulnerability, and how this experience can differ by gender, socioeconomic status and other forms of social difference. At the global level, this calls for the need to understand how public external debt and mounting levels of debt service can impact the capacities and resources of countries in the Global South, in supporting their populations, and the most vulnerable, from the climate crisis.

Acknowledgements

This study was carried out under the project “Study on gender analysis on climate in the context of recovery from the economic crisis in Sri Lanka” funded by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Additional support was provided in the Northern and North-Western provinces by the “Building Resilience by Co-Creating for Climate Security” Project implemented by a consortium of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Chrysalis and the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), and financed by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) of the United Kingdom through the British High Commission in Colombo under its Conflict Stability and Security Fund.