Gender and Climate Change in the Indian Hindu-kush Himalayas Printer-friendly Version Interactive Discussion Gender and Climate Change in the Indian Hindu-kush Himalayas: Global Threats, Local Vulnerabilities Esdd Gender and Climate Change in the Indian Hindu-kush Himalayas Printer-friendly Version 

Introduction Conclusions References Tables Figures Back Close Full Screen / Esc Abstract Introduction Conclusions References Tables Figures Back Close Full Screen / Esc Abstract Global climate change has numerous implications for members of mountain communities who feel the impacts in both physical and social dimensions. In the Western Himalayas of India, a majority of residents maintain a livelihood strategy that includes a combination of subsistence or small-scale agriculture, seasonal pastoral migration, 5 male out-migration, and localized natural resource extraction. Particularly under conditions of heavy male outmigration, but throughout the region, mountain women play a key role in providing labor and knowledge related to the management of local natural resources, yet often lack authority in related political and economic decision-making processes. This gap has important implications for addressing the impacts of climate 10 change: while warming temperatures, irregular patterns of precipitation and snowmelt, and changing biological systems present challenges to the viability of these traditional livelihood portfolios throughout the region, mountain women increasingly face new challenges in their roles as household managers that have not adequately been emphasized in larger scale planning for climate change adaptation and mitigation. These 15 challenges are complex in nature, and are shaped not only by gender issues but also interacting factors such as class, caste, ethnicity, and age (among others). In this paper, we review the main arguments behind the discursive gender/climate change nexus, discuss the implications for gendered vulnerabilities and transformation of adaptive capacities in the region, and suggest ways that researchers and policymakers seeking to 20 promote " climate justice " can benefit from the incorporation of gender-based perspectives and frameworks.


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Full impacts, such as droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events, but they also have a critical role in combatting climate change." -UNFCCC, "Gender and Climate Change" homepage (UN, 2014a) "No climate justice without gender justice!" -Activist banner calls at the COP-17 meeting of the UNFCCC (cited in Terry, 2009) More than 20 years after the watershed United Nations' 1992 Rio "Earth" Summit and creation of the UNFCCC, development scholars and practitioners are still lamenting the lack of adequate attention to gender issues in mainstream climate change discussions, policy negotiations, and adaptation/mitigation discourse.Two special issues of the international journal Gender andDevelopment (in 2002 and2009, respectively) have helped to provide seminal reference points and analyses of the core issues, framing a rich discourse that includes academic researchers, policymakers, donor agencies, governments, NGOs, and activists from civil society.This body of work reveals a growing consensus around the belief that climate change is likely to both disproportionately negatively impact the world's poor and "magnify existing patterns of inequality, including gender inequality" (UNDP, 2014).Nevertheless, we stand at something of a crossroads when it comes to confronting the intersections of climate change impacts, poverty and economic inequality, and gender-based inequalities.
While great strides have been made in terms of envisioning technical, market-based, and policy responses to the challenges posed by a rapidly changing planet, we argue that on-the-ground change has not progressed significantly enough in terms of addressing power imbalances underlying gender-based inequalities and related forms of discrimination against women, in particular.Culturally embedded and institutionalized forms of inequality such as denial of opportunities to healthcare and education, persistence of economic and political discrimination, and continued assaults on women's personal safety through sexual violence (to name a few issues) are indeed "sticky" obstacles, as phrased by the authors of the 2012 edition of the World Development Introduction

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Full Report (World Bank, 2012).However, as we discuss in this paper, for both practical and ethical reasons overcoming such obstacles must be part of a holistic approach to planning for climate change adaptation/mitigation.But how and why do these issues relate to the climate crisis?What is the rationale underlying the call for "gender justice" in the context of climate action?
As guests to ESD and participants in the 2013 workshop, "Adaptation and Resilience in the Hindu-Kush-Himalayas" we seek to help readers better under the linkages between gender issues and climate change adaptation/mitigation issues in the Indian HKH.We also aim to complement the quantitative, model-based approaches presented elsewhere in this special issue with perspectives "from the ground," which we hope will help to deepen others' understandings of the lived experiences in mountain communities dealing with a rapidly changing physical environment.
This paper is organized as follows: in the following section, we present a conceptual overview of the main issues from both a global and regional perspective.Next, we share results from a variety of village-level field studies in the Western Himalaya which document some of the ways in which local communities report how they have been responding to change, and which suggest how these impacts can be viewed through a gender lens.In the fourth section, we use the Sustainable Livelihoods framework (DFID, 1999) and the example of ecotourism around the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (NDBR) to discuss gendered aspects of mountain livelihood challenges, particularly as they relate to adaptive capacity, assets development, and transformation of policies/practices from approaches that are "gender-blind" to "gender-just."We close the paper, with a discussion of insights and research directions for climate science and adaptation policy.Ultimately, we hold that examinations of gender-differentiated experiences related to climate change are important not only for what they may reveal about "women's vs. men's" vulnerabilities and strengths, but that they are also valuable in terms of illuminating the deeply personal scales at which the impacts of climate change will be experienced.As we explain further in the following section, our focus on women throughout the paper helps to clarify that "climate justice" cannot be separated Introduction

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Full from the broader "gender-justice" issues that underlie differentiated vulnerabilities for any group.

Climate change impacts and differentiated vulnerabilities
It is by now widely accepted that we need both adaptation and mitigation measures to deal with the environmental changes already occurring and predicted to occur with a steadily warming planet (e.g.fluctuation and distributions of annual mean temperature and precipitation, glacial melt, ocean acidification, sea level rise, storm surges, monsoon variations, ecological changes including biodiversity loss, among other changes).The 2009 Copenhagen Accord acknowledged the dangers for global mean temperature rise above 2 • C, noting the particularly urgent threat for small island nations and coastal regions in terms of heightened vulnerability to both short-and long-term impacts of sea-level rise (UN, 2009).Meanwhile, at the so-called "third pole" of the Earth, there is a growing realization that environmental changes in the HKHthe "water tower of Asia" -threatens to undermine security and well-being for more than the South Asian population of 1.6 billion people, including 40 % of the world's poor (Rasul, 2014).In the industrialized nations of the Global North, a continued path of overconsumption and wasteful use of natural resources, combined with growing economic inequality, may well overturn any progress made by reduction of greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.
Clearly, climate change will affect every country in different ways.The details remain less clear, however.In one vision of the future, for example, a resource scarcity discourse predicts that water scarcity, intensifying heat and cold, declining crop yields, and related livelihood insecurities will create new forms of stress and hardship and promote increases in distress migration, regional and international flows of environmental "refugees", natural resource degradation and overexploitation, hunger, poverty, social exploitation, and landlessness.On the other hand, optimistic neoliberal and technologically-oriented visions project a future in which carbon markets, renewable Introduction

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Full energy sources, and "green" industries work together to address the underlying issue of greenhouse gas emissions and fossil-fuel based models of industrialization.Though not always immediately evident, each of these phenomena has important effects that can be more fully understood through a perspective of differentiated impact.At every scale, both between and within nations, social factors will be critical in determining sources of strength and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.
The suggestion that social position plays a key role in shaping strength/vulnerability to environmental change, in general, is not new.Geographers and other social scientists, for example, have been investigating the relationship between risk, vulnerability, and social position in the context of natural disasters for decades (e.g., Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987;Ives and Messerli, 1989;Wisner et al., 2004).Taken together, analyses of the loss of life, livelihood, and security associated with catastrophic, extremeweather events around the world such as Hurricanes Mitch (in 1994), Katrina (in 2005) and Sandy (in 2012) in the United States, the Asian Tsunami (in 2006) and Cyclone Alia (in 2007) in the Indian Ocean region, heatwaves across Europe and in China ( 2003) and the continuing droughts in sub-Saharan Africa -demonstrate a range of differentiated and distinct impacts, including along lines of gender, race, age, and class (e.g., edited volumes by: Enarson and Morrow, 1998;Enarson and Chakrabarti, 2009;Mearns and Norton, 2010;Dankleman, 2010;David and Enarson, 2012; and case studies reported by Poumadere et al., 2005;Huang et al., 2010;Seager, 2012;Sultana, 2013;Alagan and Aladukwaka, 2014; see also GDN 2014).Underscoring the relevance of "gender issues" for questions of vulnerability, some have found that in the aggregate women are 14 times more likely to die in a disaster scenario than their male counterparts due to differences in women's status (Neumayer and Plümper, 2007).While the figure itself is disputed (Arora-Jonsson, 2011), studies of survivors' experiences overwhelmingly demonstrate that impacts of hazard and the trauma of catastrophe are shaped as much by location as by social context -i.e., by gender, class, caste, race, ethnicity, age, ability, and so on.Indeed, the gender difference in disaster-related death rates noted above reportedly disappears "in societies where women and men enjoy Introduction

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Full equal rights" (Aguilar, 2010, p. 175).Most often, the factors contributing to vulnerability are interlinked and compound insecurity -for example, many of the victims of the deadly flash floods in 2013 near Badrinath, Uttarakhand (India) were from a single village nearby, where -in a high-risk livelihood strategy employed by very poor mountain communities -a collective of men drawn from each household set out to collect medicinal forest products in the flood zone and never returned (field interview, May 2014; see also news reports by Pand, 2013 andGusain andDatt, 2013).In this case, poverty, ethnicity, and gender conspire to create a heightened -and discriminatory -vulnerability that is literally embodied by an individual's social and economic status.Women's vulnerabilities also are often experienced through their physical bodies, as well: for example, the heightened exposure of poor or physically isolated women and girls to criminal predators (sexual and physical assault, rape, and human trafficking) that has been documented cross-culturally in the immediate aftermath of disaster events such as hurricanes and floods (Enarson and Chakraboti, 2012;David and Enarson, 2012;Kapoor, 2011).
Similarly, we can expect that the slow-onset events associated with global and regional climate change will also yield differentiated impacts.Early work in the gender/climate change arena (e.g., as in the seminal volume edited by Masika, 2002) demonstrated that implementation of Rio outputs such as the GEF and CDM needed to consider women's needs in the project of sustainable development.In tracing some of the key issues of the time, Denton (2002) argued that women should be positioned as key stakeholders across rural communities of Global South, due to their predominance as farmers and household fuel and water collectors.Reminiscent of Boserup's (1970) work, such work in the early 2000s cautioned that unless women's needs were directly taken into account, "sustainable" development could make life worse for women.

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Full climate change is neither "gender-neutral" nor just a technical problem.Rather, these scholars and observers argue, it is a problem for which technical solutions address only proximate causes and not root ones.As Stenhammer and Kelkar (2014) suggest in writing on behalf of UN-Women, increasing everyone's (but especially women's) access to technological interventions and markets is important, but will not alone be sufficient to address underlying causes of gendered vulnerabilities and related inequities.Even the IPCC and UNFCCC secretariat recognize the importance of integrating a gender perspective into climate change planning and research, noting for example, "If climate change increases water scarcity, women are likely to bear the labor and nutritional impacts" (IPCC-WG2, 2014) and suggesting that women's empowerment "will be a significant factor in meeting the climate challenge and achieving the long-term objectives of the Convention" (UN, 2014b).At the same time, the ability to successfully mitigate the impact of anticipated events or adapt to change over the long term depends on a secure and sustainable livelihood base -as well as on the social standing, economic security, and political voice required to maintain it.While securing and maintaining social standing, economic security, and political voice represent key challenges to overcoming discriminatory effects for all vulnerable groups, However, feminist studies of the gender/climate change discourse are somewhat discouraging (e.g., Sultana, 2013;Arora-Jonsson, 2011;MacGregor, 2010;Denton, 2004), in that they suggest that (poor) women are, once again, at the risk of being cast somewhat monolithically or simultaneously as "the problem" (as fuelwood collectors and imprudent resource managers), "the victim" (of climate change), or the "solution" (through their skills, activism, or presumed close relationship to nature).Worse, as MacGregor ( 2010) argues, predicating actions on the assumption and expectation that as a group, "poor women" are going to shoulder the burden not only perpetuates unhelpful essentialisms about a homogenous category of "Third World woman" (Mohanty, 1988), but also serves to naturalize rather than problematize the underlying reasons for differential impacts.In doing so, climate actions that focus too narrowly on the immediate needs of "vulnerable women" run the risk of missing this Introduction

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Full critical opportunity to prioritize, galvanize support around, and ultimately address the long-term and "sticky" issues noted in the World Bank's (2012) report.Finally, formal calls by delegates to increase the representation and participation of women in UNFCCC delegations and decision-making bodies at the national level have been met with only modest gains.Relatively early in the process, Denton (2002) suggested that climate change negotiation represented by the UNFCCC process was itself a parody of an unequal world power economy, where wealthy nations dominated the discourse and framed it in terms of issues of "poor" and "developing" country adaptation/mitigation -rather than about overconsumption in the global North.Those who set the agenda, she suggests, have both the privilege of prioritizing certain issues as well as of excluding others.This privilege, we would add, extends to issue problematization and framing.Through what processes, and under what rationales, are "gender issues" integrated into not only policy frameworks but also into decision-making structures?Who controls the climate change discourse?Although a few women currently hold prominent leadership positions within the secretariat-constituted bodies of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol (i.e., the Secretary-General of UNFCCC and heads/cochairs of the Compliance Committee facilitative branch, the Least Developed Countries Expert Group, the Adaptation Committee, and the Standing Committee on Finance), a recent report also indicates there is still a relatively low percentage of women represented in country delegations: at the COP-18 in Warsaw, for example, women comprised just 29.4 % of the 5090 total country delegates (UN, 2013, p. 7).The report notes: The gender composition of the constituted bodies varies: while women's representation is as high as 52 % in the Consultative Group of Experts on National Communications from Parties not included in Annex I to the Convention (a constituted body of 24 members mainly from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean), there is a clear gender imbalance in all of the other constituted bodies, with women's representation as low as 11-13 per cent in some cases (UN, 2013, p. 4).Introduction

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Full While increasing the participation of women into decision-making structures is often sought by institutions as a primary means for bringing gender issues to the fore in policy discussions, experience has shown that token participation is insufficient to bring about real change (Guijt and Shah, 1998) and the incorporation of women into pre-existing power hierarchies tends not to lead to structural change (on this point, see 2012 Gender and Development special issue on "gender mainstreaming").Hemmanti and Rohr explain that in the context of climate change, the call for "gender justice" references an approach "that goes beyond seeking an equitable share in the existing power system, which has been causing the current problems" and seeks to raise the questions, "What is just?" and "What kind of justice do we want?" (2009,(30)(31).In considering the concern that the negative impacts of climate change will be disproportionately borne by the most vulnerable and/or least capable of adaptation, we would add to this list of questions: "Justice for whom?" 3 Locally reported climate-change impacts in the Indian HKH Models seeking to understand the long-term effects of climate change in the HKH are discussed elsewhere in this issue, and suggest the depths, limits, and shifting terrain of our understanding of what lies ahead in terms of physical change.As we discuss further in the next section, the meaning of these changes from a social perspective will vary geographically and between groups of people, depending largely on the range of assets and capabilities available for coping and adaption.However, to first give context and a sense for the range of interconnected impacts of climate change already being perceived and reported by local residents, in this section we present a range of perceived impacts directly reported by HKH residents.Following Sweetman's (2009) call for research that seeks to further understand the meaning of climate change in people's daily lives from a gender perspective, we provide a simplified model below (Table 1) that summarizes results of some recent fieldwork in the region.Drawing from communities in the Western Himalaya of India (mainly Himachal Pradesh and Introduction

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Full Uttarakhand), the selected examples provided under the categories "direct impacts", "indirect impacts", and "gendered effects" help to illustrate that although women and men report a shared experience of environmental change in many respects, an additional layer of gender-differentiated outcome can be clearly discerned (particularly due to the gendered nature of indirect impacts).This insight holds throughout the region, comparable with patterns reported in Nepal in policy discussion documents prepared for WEDO (Leduc et al., 2009) and ICIMOD (Leduc, 2009).
We must also note that it is by now well established that poor and marginalized populations disproportionately experience the negative impacts of climate change (Mearns and Norton, 2010).Thus, although we have not further disaggregated impacts along lines of caste/class in the table, we assume that families characterized by persistent economic discrimination (e.g., Dalit communities) and single-headed households (e.g., female-headed households associated with distress migration of male members or widow status) would likely possess even fewer coping resources than their relatively socio-economically or politically privileged counterparts.Similarly, as gender inequalities discussed in the previous section generally lead to a "more severe experience" of poverty among women relative to men overall, female members of "non-poor" households may well be similarly disenfranchised through unequal distribution of household resources such as power, food, and property (Demetriades and Esplen, 2010).

Sustainable livelihoods and adaptive capacity
In this section, we present ways in which the Sustainable Livelihood (SL) framework (DFID, 1999) offers a robust base around which to further a discussion of differentiated vulnerabilities, adaptation and adaptive capacity, and mitigation of the livelihoodrelated impact of climate change.We illustrate the discussion using examples from our fieldwork and experiences in the Western Himalaya, specifically from the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (Uttarakhand state, India).As shown in Fig. 1a and discussed further below, application of the SL framework enables an examination of how different Introduction

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Full groups of people manage and combine varying livelihood assets available to them, and illustrates the varying influences of the institutions, policies and structures existing around them.
In mountain regions, where local livelihoods are highly vulnerable to failure due to the ecological shocks and uncertainties associated with climate change, adaptation is considered to be a fundamental response option.An adaptation-based approach aims at moderating the adverse effects of climate change through a wide variety of actions and adjustments in ecological, social, or economic systems and seeks to create benefits from opportunities associated with climate change (Fussel and Klein, 2006;Ellis, 2000).Because adaptation has multiple, interlinking dimensions that touch on ecological, economic, political, physical, and social dimensions, the adaptive capacity of local communities is governed both by internal, culturally-specific characteristics as well as by larger external social, economic, and political structures that empower or constrain action.In our view, capacity-building in adaptation is predicated on the privilege of choice: a community or person who lacks choice or alternatives in any situation has no real power.Thus, strengthening the adaptive capacity of communities by expanding the range of response options is central to the challenge of addressing local vulnerabilities to the impacts of climate change, and to the goal of empowering communities to be able to make meaningful and viable choices about adaptation, itself.
One important way to increase the adaptive capacity of local communities is to support initiatives which strengthen their combined set of livelihood capital assets (i.e., the arrangements of Natural, Financial, Physical, Human, and Social forms of capital illustrated above).While much attention to macro-scale, "transforming" structures and processes (e.g., international carbon markets, "green" energy infrastructure, expansion of hydropower grid, etc) is given in the mainstream climate change discourse, attention needs also to be paid to understanding the micro-scale factors that determine the lived experience of climate change.Asset analysis, in particular, needs to be achieved through the lens of differentiation in order to achieve finer-scale understanding of threats and opportunities (see Fig. 1b, which highlights the assets profile for Introduction

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Full generalized "poor" vs. "non-poor" households).As shown in Table 2, which briefly outlines the current condition of the livelihood assets observed villages in and around the NDBR, cultural and economic inequity plays a clear role in shaping asset distribution within and between gender groups.
A baseline understanding of differentiated livelihoods assets is essential to planning for adaptation, even in seemingly homogeneous communities.In applying the SL framework to rural communities at risk of livelihood failure in general, three broad clusters of livelihood strategies for the rural communities have been identified.These are: agricultural intensification/extensification, migration, and livelihood diversification (Scoones, 1998).The extent to which ecosystems and communities are vulnerable or resilient will depend both on exposure to changes in climate and physical changes, as well as on the ability of the impacted social system to adapt.Given the climate change impacts in Nanda Devi region (such as changing precipitation and vegetation patterns, unexpected pest infestations, changes in distribution range of domestic and wild floral and faunal species) -in addition to existing challenges related to geography and ecology (e.g., steep slopes, flash flooding, landslides and human-wildlife conflict) -neither agricultural expansion nor migration are viable, long-term solutions.Thus livelihood diversification is perhaps not surprisingly, the most prevalent strategy adopted by area residents.protection through a zonation approach.As a region, the NDBR is comprised of three main zones: buffer, transition, and two core areas: the Nanda Devi National Park and Valley of Flowers National Park.There are 47 villages in the buffer and 33 villages in the transition zone.Bhotia and Garhwalis are the main ethnic groups of the area.Historically, local livelihoods for both communities have been based on trade and marginal agro-pastoralism.As in many Himalayan communities where women's labor is critical to household viability, women have traditionally held a high status in both groups.However, daily responsibilities and expectations in NDBR generally follow gender-based divisions found throughout the region; in both ethnic groups, traditional practices tend to assign control of money and capital to adult men, while their female counterparts have greater control over household resource allocation in day-to-day living (Badola et al., 2013).

Livelihood diversification in the
In response to the growing demand for nature based tourism in the area and with an aim to develop stakes of local people in biodiversity conservation, ecotourism is currently being promoted by residents of several villages.Tourism is pertinent to the region because of the peculiar opportunities and challenges of the context.Key opportunities include, for example, sensitive ecosystems that require protection, communities that require alternative livelihoods to reduce dependencies on natural resources, and a landscape that has been traditionally attractive to tourists for religious and recreational purposes.Tourism can also present solutions to livelihood-based challenges in the region by offering alternative development trajectories leading to strengthening of assets.This is particularly relevant because the state-led development in the region has focused on transportation and hydropower infrastructure projects and failed to promote sustainable local livelihoods, while simultaneously creating additional threats to biodiversity and natural resources.
As a part of ecotourism, the facility of "homestays" is being promoted in the peripheral villages of the NDNP which provides monetary benefits to the communities.On the surface, it would seem that the benefits of this arrangement accrue inequitably: male members of the local communities are mainly involved in the monetized tourism-related Introduction

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Full activities in the area such as serving as trek guides, porters, cooks, and fee collectors, while women are typically only involved in unpaid, low-status domestic tasks such as preparing food and fetching additional firewood and other biomass resources.However, in the face of increasing pressures for men to out-migrate and in the context of increasing vulnerability of traditional agriculturally-based livelihoods to climate change, ecotourism has the potential to become an important part of a larger adaptation strategy that strengthens adaptive capacity for both women and men in the mountain regions.Below, we briefly examines the ways in which ecotourism appears to be changing the assets of hill women and men in different ways.Though we have intentionally limited the discussion to women for purposes of this discussion at the risk of (mis)representing them as a homogeneous group, intersecting vulnerabilities associated with economic status or age (for example) would certainly need to be included in a more comprehensive analysis.The narrative below is based largely on qualitative ethnographic fieldwork (e.g., open-ended and semi-structured interviews, group discussions, and personal observations) achieved through repeated co-author visits to the site since 1995, and incorporate related findings from a recent interdisciplinary study of 22 NDBR villages (conducted over the past five years by a team of researchers affiliated with the Wildlife Institute of India; see Badola et al., 2014Badola et al., , 2013)).

Ecotourism and gendered livelihoods at NDBR
For communities experimenting with ecotourism in the area, some improvement of livelihood assets for women has been observed.In the households that have homestay facilities, for example, the women had more opportunity to interact with the tourists due to their role in activities like cooking and cleaning.This resulted in their being more aware of conservation and development issues as well as a development of their own personal self, such as regarding personal hygiene, appearance and knowledge of their surrounding areas.Participation in ecodevelopment committees (new local institutions created to support ecotourism in the context of larger community-based development

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Full goals) provided a platform for women to develop participation capacities and leadership skills within formal institutional settings.Informally, women also cooperated more with each other and earned respect through recognition of their role in an activity which brought in direct cash income for the family.Moreover, these arrangements may result in emergence of new institutions or changes in existing ones, wherein the women may have a greater voice in decision making regarding their economic activities as well as the natural resource base, rather than remaining silent spectators, or limiting their participation to simply adding their names to member attendance rosters.We also informally observed that in families which were getting regular tourists for their homestays, there was less male migration.In addition, villagers reported that a diversified income base led to less reliance on natural resource extraction, due to practical reason of the extractors being "gainfully" employed.In the earlier tourism models in this area, the males were largely employed as porters and guides to accompany trekking parties leading to their absence for long periods of time.This resulted in additional burden of domestic and agricultural work on the women, without recognition of their extra efforts.It led to employment for only a small number of people, mostly men who were directly employed in such activities.However the involvement of women in ecotourism activities had broadened the spectrum of beneficiaries as also the skill base of the people engaged in such activities.In social terms, it is a more inclusive model where both the women and men work together.Although the tasks are still more or less well-defined and linked to gender, the overall approach is more complementary (as compared to the earlier version where both worked on different activities and there was little overlap between their works).In other words, women and men are both positioned to be valued contributors to a larger, cooperatively-based "productive" economic/domestic system.Figure 2 conceptually illustrates the ecotourism experiences of women in the NDBR study villages from the SL perspective, with a focus on genderdifferentiated assets development.

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Full This paper has been devoted to a discussion of the gender/climate change nexus, with a particular focus on women's differentiated vulnerabilities in the Western Himalaya.
We have offered details from regional ecotourism experiences to suggest ways that livelihood assets can be strengthened, as part of a larger climate adaptation approach that employs a differentiated framework as its basis.As suggested by Fig. 2, ecotourism can contribute to the promotion of non-consumptive use of mountain resources and can be an important tool for providing well-defined livelihood enhancement opportunities, but this is just one example of an alternative livelihood strategy.Indeed, ecotourism interventions in other areas have led to weakening of assets (Coria and Calfucura, 2012).We do not wish to suggest that any one adaptation strategy will be a panacea.Climate change obviously poses myriad challenges, which we believe will increasingly demand a team-based research approach that brings together climate scientists, policy scientists and practitioners, and social scientists.The range of observed physical changes already demand, as well, that as researchers we work collaboratively to conceptualize the problem at all scales -global/regional/local as well as intra-community/inter-community.It is perhaps from this latter perspective that differentiated impacts, as seen through a lens of gender (or other stratifying categories), can best help to inform the applied research agenda for climate scientists and adaption/mitigation policymakers, and vice-versa.Our examples illustrate that because women are clearly experiencing a gender-differentiated burden of climate change impacts, adaptation strategies will need to revolve around and respond directly to them (Fig. 3).
However, as demonstrated through the examples provided in Fig. 3, such changes cannot occur without enabling changes in the surrounding institutional, economic, and cultural landscape.This has implications for the research and policymaking landscapes, as well as for the communities we aim to support through our endeavors.

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Full

Suggestions for further research and concluding thoughts
In 2009, Hemmanti and Rohr argued that the conceptual notion of climate justice represented an effective entry point for larger reflection about the meaning of gender equality in the context of climate change impact mitigation as well as a concept that carries powerful implications for future climate negotiations regimes.They observed that gender equality is "finally beginning to be accepted as one of the core principles of mitigating climate change and adapting to its impacts" (2009, p. 25).Five years later, we close this article with a few examples of possible questions for HKH climate scientists that can reflect an interdisciplinary commitment to gender justice through new lines of research: how can models of changing monsoon patterns be improved to reflect possible implications for the food crops preferred by women cultivators, in comparison to cash crops promoted by state-based or corporate/multinational agricultural extension agents?Knowing that certain groups of individuals in the HKH (women farmers, elderly residents, and male trekking guides, for example) possess tremendous knowledge about agro-ecological, glacial extent, and forest-based biodiversity changes, how can models of environmental change more directly take into account gendered and local systems of knowledge production?Land use?Existing lines of climate change and livelihood research can also be reframed and enhanced by taking a team-based approach that reflects a commitment to gender justice/climate justice: in what ways can predictive models better reflect the hazards associated with "small-scale" disasters for different groups, or provide finer-scale data about shifting monsoons, wind patterns and land cover changes that have gendered impacts, as suggested by IPCC-WG2 (2014)?Can spatial models of flood hazard and disaster preparedness action centers incorporate practices from participatory GIS to reflect the location of activist networks, as contributions by Leduc (2009)  tenurial and natural resource management regimes are national and regional carbon sequestration goals best achieved?How are decisions taken regarding best practices for community-or household-level adaptive response to a changing climate?What will it take for economic growth or income-based models, disaster response plans, alternative livelihood strategy designs, integrated conservation-development initiatives, and other critical resources for sustainable development planning to be routinely implemented with reliable, sex-disaggregated datasets that not only include the formal sector but also take into account the vast informal sector that otherwise overlooks the tremendous economic contributions of women?What information do people need, in order to more effectively plan and make choices about adaptive response?
There is clearly still a need for research on the specific outcomes that climate change is likely to bring to the HKH, and we hope that this discussion stimulates readers to ask themselves how their own inquiries and methodological approaches can add to this short list.Moreover, we would urge that analytical models seek to employ frameworks that include differentiated vulnerabilities, wherever possible -and in particular, to analyze gender-differentiated vulnerabilities.It is with this foundation that we will be able to move more effectively toward adaptation/mitigation strategies that build, rather than weaken the livelihood assets for women -and in so doing, heed the UNFCCC's calls to conceptualize women's empowerment as a "significant factor" in meeting the climate change challenges ahead.
Finally, although, the sex-disaggregated data we call for here will continue to be critical for informed policymaking about how best to adapt to climate change events and long-term scenarios in "gender-transformative" and "gender-just" ways, we must stress that this is likely only the beginning of achieving true gender justice in the pursuit of sustainable and equitable development.This is not to diminish the value of the current trajectory within the gender/climate change arena, but simply to underscore the evolving complexity of the challenges that lie ahead.Eventually as researchers of environmental change, we will all need to move on to more sophisticated analyses of how gender functions as a social structure (i.e., not just treated as a "data" category) Introduction

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Full to shape vulnerability as well as to offer opportunities for strength and resilience; we also need to find a larger range of ways to analytically incorporate the intersectionality of gender with other socially stratifying and often discriminatory structures (such as race, class, caste, ethnicity, age, and so forth).These are critical methodological challenges which will require going well beyond sex roles and division of labor analysis.
It is in this arena that feminist scholars can be of particular value as part of interdisciplinary climate change research collaborations.Indeed, some such scholars in the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR) have by now dispensed with the simple, binary conceptualizations of gender employed in this discussion, advancing our understanding of how for example, transgender (e.g., hijra communities in India, meti individuals in Nepal, baklas in the Philippines) and LGBTQI individuals in the United States experience differentiated vulnerability to the impacts of disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and discrimination in their efforts to seek recovery/relief (Balgos et al, 2012;Knight et al., 2012;Dominey-Howes et al., 2014).Similarly, emerging work about the way masculinity is experienced offers valuable insights about what different groups of men are experiencing in the face of climate change, particularly with regard to the migration experience and what women's empowerment means for (especially male) members of their families (Cornwall et al., 2011).
The pursuit of gender justice, as part of the larger climate justice agenda, offers an opportunity for climate change researchers and policymakers to contribute to the ensured viability of the mountain communities by (a) avoiding the trap of gender-blindness in research, policy, and intervention designs, and (b) seeking to develop and strengthen livelihood assets of vulnerable populations, while simultaneously working to promote the transformation of enabling structures.In the HKH, this means first recognizing the productive contributions and knowledge systems of mountain women, and prioritizing their assets development to help promote adaptive capacity at a range of scales.Research and policy collaboration with local institutions will also be important to expanding forms of social capital and networks of support, in the face of livelihood uncertainty and ecological change.For researchers, increased dissemination of climate-related Introduction

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Full  -Increased mosquito bites -While men are primarily responsible for earning wage-based income, women primarily responsible for weeding fields.
-Increased temperatures in summer make this more arduous and increase risk of heat stress.
-Landslides and flash flooding associated with heavier and more intense monsoon rains ("natural disaster" events) Related to food security and erosion/loss of traditional agricultural knowledge held by women -Presently only 42 % people are cultivating some traditional varieties of crops.These did not bring in a lot of cash revenue for the household and as a result provided food security particularly for women and children.
-Development activities and climate change resulting in shrinking forest and agricultural lands and changing cropping patterns means that women have to travel more for fuelwood and fodder.The households' dependence is now on food material procured from the market, often low quality food coming from the plain areas.
Financial Capital -Cash flows controlled by men -Access to credit and collateral favors men.Although several schemes for women have been launched, most women are not aware of them.

Physical Capital
-Roads, built environment, technological interventions are directed to men's articulated priorities.Men are more likely to get employment in the development activities going on in the region.Roads etc. help men to commute and travel, and reflect their priorities for destinations.
-Machines for de-husking were given to women but these were too heavy and are useless.(Women not involved in machine design) Social Capital -Institutional networks favor men and presume male heads of household (e.g., Panchayati Raj), despite quotas for women's participation.Even if women are members they do not speak up in such meetings due to their minority presence as well as social and cultural taboos.The place and time of meetings often does not suit women.
-Women's organization not empowered to take any major decisions, their decisions are related to cleanliness drives or some other minor social activities.Where cash is involved, men take the decisions.
Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Screen / Esc Printer-friendly Version Interactive Discussion Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Screen / Esc Printer-friendly Version Interactive Discussion Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve: cultural context Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (NDBR) is a representative wilderness area in the western Himalayas, experiencing climate-induced pressures to both its physical and social systems.It is perhaps best well known for its role in protecting the world's fourthhighest mountain, Nanda Devi Peak (elev.7817 m) and constitutes an important reservoir of water (in the form of glacial ice and snow), forests, and high-altitude biodiversity.The zonation and human use categories are based on the United Nation's "Man and Biosphere" reserve concept of balancing basic human welfare and with environmental Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | and Gaillard et al. (2012) motivate us to ask?For policymakers and social systems modelers: how does climaterelated information flow throughout a community?Bearing in mind that land tenure and land rights are highly gendered and class-/caste-differentiated in the HKH, under what ESDD Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper |

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Loss of life Property and crop damage -Damage to road infrastructure -Loss of HH and family members/grief/trauma -Loss of HH labor sources -Loss of income in tourismdependent areas -Post-disaster (distress) migration -Women primarily responsible for care of others (especially elderly, children, and sick HH members) Male distress migration leads to work overload for female HH head, as manager + family care-giver -Distress migration of whole family increases risk of sexual violence against and trafficking of womenDiscussion Paper | Discussion Paper | Discussion Paper |Table 2. Livelihood assets profile in Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve study villages, with special reference to women's assets.Human Capital Sex ratio favors males, suggesting lower status of women/girls.Ultrasound technology since 2001 has coincided with a significant drop in the sex ratio for children.a Literacy rates favor males, suggesting lower status of women b Natural Capital Land tenure associated with men.Few women with land title.c Traditional crops dominated the agricultural land until 1975 but cultivation of cash crops currently dominate agricultural land.d This leads to narrowing of livelihood resource base as cash crops replace traditional crops.

Table 1 .
information and relevant research findings to all affected communities can be a related goal.Information supports choice, and choice is required for empowerment.By investing our time and inquiries to achieve both climate justice and gender justice, we can help to provide the support required for all HKH residents to envision and develop new sources of strength, themselves.Figures Reported examples of climate change indicators, impacts, and effects perceived by HKH residents * .
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