Gender Dynamics in Climate Change-Induced Disasters in Bangladesh: Early Warning to Build Back Better
摘要
Climate change-induced disasters are gender-neutral; however, the effects are not. Males, females, children, disabled persons, or any other marginalized groups face separate levels of vulnerabilities, risks, and emergencies to extreme climatic disasters, driven by different humanitarian standards, gender-based interactions, and lack of protections, socioeconomic factors, and discriminations in the society. This study explored gender dynamics in preparedness to response phases on alerts and early warning stages in Bangladesh. In the emergency stage, due to various types of risks, all catastrophic incidents are always gender-sensitive in place, on time, and for people. Steps for completing evacuation, search, rescue, relief, and short-term rehabilitation are also necessarily synchronized by gender dynamics from the phases like response and recovery to build back better. Gender dynamics are also important to maintain humanitarian principles such as humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which are vital to humanitarian action. To recognize the gender dynamics due to climate-induced disaster risks, the minimum humanitarian standards for disaster response are WASH (WASH: water supply, sanitation, and hygiene promotion), food security and nutrition, shelter and settlement, and health action. Therefore, in the reduction phase, to build back better to mitigate disaster risks, the governmental and non-governmental disaster risk reduction (DRR) plans, policies, and institutional frameworks should be gender and child sensitive. Gender dynamics are successfully regulated and affected by women’s empowerment, capacity development, need-based education, child protection, gender friendly employment, stopping violence, child marriage, child labour, climate displacement, and so on. As one of the most disaster-prone countries, Bangladesh also faces gender-focused challenges by climate change-induced disasters in several natural outcomes, including life expectancy, corruption, unemployment, inequalities, labour force re-entry, and relative asset losses. Therefore, this research review aims to summarize the gender dynamics and it’s prospective in climate change-induced disasters in Bangladesh.