Nearly 300 million people are facing acute food insecurity, a context exacerbated by climate change. In fact, weather extremes are the main driver of hunger in 18 countries where 72 million people face acute climate change. Yet extreme weather is not only accelerating the hunger crisis, it is also laying bare and worsening gender and other inequalities.
A new CARE study, Breaking the Barriers, examined the lethal interconnections between climate change, inequality, gender and hunger to better understand and assess impacts and global/local responses. Among its key findings:
- Extreme weather events impact people’s food security for up to five years.
- Women are more worried than men about climate change, and they are more food insecure than men. This is because systems are not designed with women’s input or to meet women’s needs.
- Despite being the most impacted by climate change, women remain chronically underrepresented in disaster planning and they are overwhelmingly less likely than men to be asked about their needs.
Breaking the Barriers – which builds on insights from the World Risk Poll, the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, and The Unjust Climate from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) – also underscores how profoundly unequal the impacts of climate change are. Floods widen the income gap between the poorest people and less poor people by $21 billion a year. Heat stress and flooding widen the income gap between men and women by $53 billion every year. That’s an enormous amount. In 2024, 95 countries have GDPs lower than $50 billion.
We have to stop treating climate change and extreme weather events as something that only needs an immediate response. People who have faced extreme weather see lower food security for up to five years.Emily Janoch, CARE’s Associate Vice President of Design and Thought Leadership
“We have to stop treating climate change and extreme weather events as something that only needs an immediate response. People who have faced extreme weather see lower food security for up to five years. That means we need better preparedness that includes women, and we need to think about longer-term resilience and recovery,” said Emily Janoch, CARE’s Associate Vice President of Design and Thought Leadership, and one of the study’s authors.
Also, according to CARE’s analysis, the world is investing far too little in helping people cope with climate change—with only 7.5% of global climate funding going towards adaptation, and about $10 billion targeted to reach small scale producers.
“Globally, we’re not investing money in the right places because we’re not asking the right people about climate solutions. If we want to curb the impacts of climate change – and reduce climate change in the future – we have to look at the people who are already experiencing the most severe climate change effects,” said Janoch.
Rapidly warming temperatures, increasingly erratic rainfall, and the rise of extreme weather events mean we have to think differently about how to provide emergency response and how to address rising hunger.Emily Janoch, CARE’s Associate Vice President of Design and Thought Leadership
She also added that “Rapidly warming temperatures, increasingly erratic rainfall, and the rise of extreme weather events mean we have to think differently about how to provide emergency response and how to address rising hunger.”
Breaking the Barriers combines insights from women’s own voices with new analyses of global data sources from FAO and the World Risk Poll. It builds on years of CARE’s focus on the gender food gap and the intersections between climate, hunger, and equality.
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