The impact of climate change on women – particularly in the Global South- has been an urgent area of inquiry in multilateral spaces, with gendered discourses on climate change and action identified as a priority at the landmark 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that women are up to 14 times more likely than men to die as a result of natural disasters while simultaneously reducing personal food consumption during times of household food shortages, an inevitable consequence of climate change. Climatic changes disproportionately affect women’s employment due to their predominance in fields such as agriculture and tourism, sectors of the economy that are most susceptible to weather and climatic instabilities. The current body of empirical climate research illustrates that women are directly and disproportionately impacted by climate change; at the same time, women from marginalised communities continue to remain vital in caring for and protecting the environment.
Simultaneously, the last decade has seen a concerted push for the implementation of data-driven climate action as a quick fix to the rapid climatic crises, with many large corporations and Big Tech recognising the power of aggregated climate data in mitigating their climate risks. Though these initiatives highlight the unequal impact of climate change on women, they do not effectively enable equitable data infrastructures where fundamental control and ownership of data is vested in women and in communities. There is an urgent need to reframe both the ontology and implementation of tech-driven climate solutionism that recognises women and community-driven data sovereignty as a guiding principle to ensure people from the margins are the benefactors of data’s social and economic value.
Aapti Institute with their long-term collaborators Data2X are launching a year-long initiative with support from the United Nations Foundation, Inc. through a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation in order to examine bottom-up data infrastructures and data cooperatives organised by women in South Asia and Southeast Asia. Extending our efforts from the past three years to enable bottom-up data practices, this project will examine the nexus of climate change, gender, and data through a feminist constructivist lens, capturing the initiative of women through community action in the Global South to establish practices of data sovereignty in order to produce community-owned and embedded solutions to battle climate change, while critically reformulating climate change frameworks that affirm the autonomy of marginalised women.
Through the course of this collaborative participatory research, we aim to platform gender-critical bottom-up data infrastructures such as data cooperatives, trusts and community-designed tech which are recognised as a potential solution that allow for constant, reliable environmental data flows from women, producing innovative solutions for climate-related issues. Taking on feminist approaches to data, this collaborative project aims to highlight and appraise four data cooperative experiments across India and Southeast Asia through a series of case studies and multimedia pieces in order to create avenues for documenting women’s intersectional experiences with the climate crises and counteraction. Bottom-up infrastructures offer avenues for exploring new forms of data governance within climate data, which allows for unlocking critical data value while simultaneously reappraising the autonomy of data generators. Through a series of global multilateral convenings convening a transnational, grassroots network that advances gender-equitable climate data governance in the coming months, we aim to use these models to inform data regulatory and innovation policies in Asia.
If you are working on climate data governance, frameworks, and rights and wish to
collaborate on this project, please write to us at [email protected] and [email protected].
