CHALLENGE

Gender and Climate

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a series of targets designed to promote human development and protect the environment. Two of the goals concern gender equality and climate action. While most people might consider these two topics to be quite disparate, they are actually closely related. Your challenge is to model the relationship between climate change and gender inequality, and propose a solution that promotes equality and action to support sustainable development for all.

Background

The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by all UN member states in 2015, provide a blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet. When establishing these goals, the UN recognized how climate-change-driven disasters can harm people and the planet, and how gender inequity is exacerbated in situations of instability. After catastrophes like natural disasters, marginalized groups, such as gender minorities, are more likely to experience greater negative effects, creating a “crisis layered on top of a crisis” situation. Gender inequality and climate change are often examined separately, but to achieve sustainable development it’s important not only to understand how these two challenges intersect to create further displacement for marginalized communities, but also how solutions that build gender equity and mitigate the effects of climate change depend on each other.

Objectives

Your challenge is to use open-source data on gender inequality and climate change to model the relationship between these two topics, and propose a solution that promotes both gender equality and climate action. How will you address this challenge? Will you approach this problem at a macro level by studying global trends such as the economic impact of climate disasters on marginalized groups? Or will you examine one localized case study, such as the impact of climate-change-driven drought on the gendered division of labor for pastoralist societies in an African country? Your modeling of the gender and climate intersection could take many different forms. You could develop an interactive dashboard or informative website, or something else. Don’t forget to identify not only the problem at hand, but potential solutions for how it can be solved. Your proposed solutions could also take a variety of forms, depending on the issue you focus on. For example, if your model shows that the gendered impacts of climate change are underreported, your proposal could suggest methods to better collect and display this data in a useful manner. If you modeled how a local community is impacted by climate change—for example, the effects of environmental degradation on indigenous women in a particular region—you could propose a community-specific climate mitigation plan.

Potential Considerations

You may (but are not required to) consider the following:

• As you think about the gendered impact of climate change, it may help to consider the impacts of security and economic factors. Consider reviewing the relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals, and then using your favorite search engine to further explore the social components of environmental issues.
• Open-source, publicly available data on gender inequality and climate change is abundant online, but you may want to begin your search with the data available from NASA’s Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC).
• Make sure you understand algorithmic bias—particularly the gender bias in data sciences—to critically understand the stories your selected datasets do or don’t tell. To learn more about this topic, you could use your favorite search engine to search key words such as “gender data gap.”
• When identifying your problem, modeling it, and designing your solution, think about the specific community you are looking at and the traditional knowledge and expertise the members of that community hold. This information is often just as important as information collected from academic sources.
• Get creative! This is a very interdisciplinary topic, and in addition to your skills in data analysis and Earth sciences, you may also find yourself drawing from sources concerning gender studies, politics, sustainability design, economics, peace and security, anthropology, natural resources, energy, and more!