Climate change is projected to continue for a considerable length of time. This means that the impacts related to climate change will continue to pose threats to humanity. Africa, due to its relatively low adaptive capacity and relatively heavy reliance on natural resources for livelihoods, remains one of the hardest-hit continents by the impacts of climate disaster.
Therefore, adapting to the impacts of disasters associated with climate change constitute an important endeavour in communities across the continent.
Women, and other socially undermined gender groups, are specifically vulnerable to the impacts of climate disaster. Women’s vulnerability does not result from biological factors, but rather from various socio-cultural, socio-economic, institutional, and political factors that socially construct a woman’s identity as second class. These factors operate mostly at local levels, justifying the need to situate any study that seeks to address issues pertaining to gender and climate change adaptation, within the local context. Situating such a study within the local context is also important, especially in a context like South Africa, to identity other factors such as race and class that intersect with gender to influence the vulnerability of women.
This study was located within the context of eThekwini municipality. Using a qualitative research methodology, the study contributes to existing literature on gender and climate change adaptation by exploring the underlying socio-economic, cultural and socio-political factors that
shape Black women’s (specifically Black women from uMlazi, Inanda, Ntuzuma and KwaMashu) experiences of vulnerability and adaptation to flood impacts within the municipal areas. In line with other literature on gender and climate change adaptation, the study finds that poverty constitutes one of the main factors that contribute to Black women’s vulnerability to climate impacts within the study context. Poverty, which to some of the women was caused by unemployment and lack of necessary resources, limits the opportunities and choices of the women.
Other factors that shape vulnerability of the women include limited access to early warning information as well as the toxic expressions of masculinity by men against women in the localities, which in some circumstances result in gender-based violence. Related to this causal factor of vulnerability is the socio-cultural construction of gender, reflected in what some of the women referred to as ‘a common practice among men in the amaZulu culture’, which underlies Black women’s vulnerability in the study areas. Feminist political ecology and critical realism also offer insights into the intersection of race, gender and class in shaping the vulnerability of Black women in the study context. Adaptation policies also appear to contain remnants of discrimination regarding race, gender, class, and other demographic factors. To address any discrimination inherent in such policies, it is important to be intentional in addressing gender and racial equity and justice.
As highlighted in Chapter five of the study, agency plays an important role in gendered adaptation process. There could be a misconception to classify local (Black) women as the most vulnerable to impacts of natural disaster. However, the study also discovered—and this is in line with feminist thoughts—that women adapt to climate impacts not just as a vulnerable population, but also as people with agentic abilities and a situated knowledge, which when tapped, contributes immensely to a productive adaptation, not only for themselves, but also to benefit their communities. In this study, it was found that Black women carry a lot of responsibilities to meet the welfare of families, especially women-headed households, and the resilience in this translates, also into resilience to adapt to climate change impacts.
Chapter Six of the study sought to contextualise climate adaptation governance within the eThekwini municipality against the imperative of national adaptation governance in South Africa. The chapter explored the various policies in the country and how they attempt to incorporate issues of gender and class equity and justice into the policies. The chapter paid specific attention to South Africa’s National Adaptation Strategy, South Africa’s National
Development Plan vision 2030, South Africa’s Policy Framework, as well as the Durban Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. The discourse in the chapter revealed that though issues of gendered equity had been articulated in the different national policies, the practicalities of gendered adaptation that intentionally address issues of Black women’s experiences of vulnerability and adaptation to climate disasters were lacking in the governance of adaptation within the eThekwini municipality.
This study has emphasised intentionality. That is, any development approach that seeks to respond to Black women’s vulnerability to impact of natural disaster needs to be ‘intentional’
in recognising and addressing gender and class justice. Without intentionality, it is possible for an adaptation or development initiative that was meant to address the vulnerability of a certain group of population to exacerbate inequity instead. This point is applicable to the discussion in Chapter Seven of this study. From a feminist political ecology perspective, and in analysing the political economy of development in the study context, Chapter Seven was able to unpack and critique the impact of (capitalist-oriented) development on the vulnerability of Black women in the study context. The chapter showed that instead of alleviating inequality, a post- apartheid area-based approach to development in the study context overshadowed the rural economy from which the women were sustaining their livelihoods. Yet, the area-based development approach did not necessarily address the principal issue of rural women’s vulnerability, but instead tended to create a new rural inequality by not extending development to the interior floodplains of the localities. This was evident in uMlazi, where one section was developed infrastructurally while the other section was left unattended, with degraded infrastructures, a disaster-prone landscape, and quite uneven and difficult-to-navigate topography. Though such development does not readily reveal the gender implications on a general perspective, the history of racially segregated spatial arrangement in South Africa—
where many Black women were the most occupants of informal settlements—reveals the gendered implication of any rural development planning.