The Unjust Climate: Bridging the Gap for Women in Agriculture

This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on March 8, 2024. Watch the full video here.

Caitlin Welsh: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to CSIS and happy International Women’s Day. I’m Caitlin Welsh, director of the CSIS Global Food and Water Security Program.

Just about one year ago we helped launch the U.N. FAO’s status of women in agrifood systems report. In November we held the Washington, D.C., launch of the 2023 SOFI, or State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, and today we’re proud to partner with the FAO once again to help launch the “Unjust Climate: Measuring the Impact of Climate Change on the Poor, Women, and Youth.”

The issues addressed in these three reports are closely connected, of course. Persistent inequalities in agrifood systems have reduced output – have led to reduced output and lower incomes for women.

Food insecurity and malnutrition remain at historic highs with women suffering from greater rates of food insecurity than men, and as we’ll discuss today women in agrifood systems are often less equipped to withstand the climate-related shocks, which reinforces all of these outcomes – reduced output, lower incomes, and worse food security.

The organizations represented here are not only aware of these dynamics but are working to reverse them. It’s our distinct honor to host the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Xochitl Torres Small, who I’ll introduce and welcome to the stage in a few minutes.

From the FAO we have three representatives all the way from Rome, Máximo Torero, chief economist at the FAO; and Lauren Phillips and Nicholas Sitko from the U.N. FAO’s Rural Transformation And Gender Equality Division.

From USAID Ann Vaughan, deputy assistant to the administrator in USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security; and from the Department of State Christina Chan, senior adaptation advisor in the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate.

In addition to this esteemed group we’d like to welcome our audience in person and online to CSIS. Before we begin three very quick announcements, safety first. Our emergency exits for this room are behind me to the right and in the corner of the foyer behind you and to the right. Should the need arise, and we do not expect it to, please follow my instructions and move toward the exits.

Second of all, following our panel discussion today we will welcome questions from the audience in person and online. If you have a question and you’re online you could submit it at the ask questions here button on the event page and if you have a question and you’re in the room we’ll have a QR code that you can scan and then you can enter – submit your questions that way.

And, finally, following today’s event we’ll welcome all of you to a reception on our second floor foyer just outside the room. And now on to our program.

It is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the stage and welcome back to CSIS Lauren Phillips, deputy director in the U.N. FAO’s rural transformation and gender equality division. Lauren, the floor is yours. (Applause.)

Lauren Phillips: Thank you very much, and good morning. Welcome to those of you who are here and those of you who are online.

I’m very pleased to be back at CSIS, as Caitlin mentioned, and to be here on International Women’s Day. Last year here in Washington and at CSIS we presented and discussed FAO’s report “The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems,” which underline just how important agrifood systems are for women’s livelihoods, particularly in low and middle income countries globally.

And one of the chapters of that report was focused on the experience of women to shocks and crises and that included shocks related to climate change and how women were particularly vulnerable to those shocks and what the impacts of those shocks were on their livelihoods.

And while we know and we emphasized in that chapter of the report that barriers such as lack of access to assets and resources, services, and employment opportunities as well as discriminatory social norms negatively impact women’s capacity to adapt to climate change and to cope with climate change, we were a bit frustrated when we were writing that chapter because we had limited quantitative data about just how much greater the impact of climate change was on women working in agrifood systems than on men. And personally, I was struck by the number of times I heard well-meaning people say things like climate change was having an impact, quote, “multiple times greater” on women than men without having data to back that up.

And so that’s why I’m very proud to be here today to introduce my colleague Nick Sitko, who’s going to present a new FAO report from our division called “The Unjust Climate: Measuring the Impact of Climate Change on the Rural Poor, Women, and Youth,” because this report quantifies for the first time the impact of extreme weather events like heat and precipitation, characteristics of the changing climate, on women in rural areas who work in agriculture and who also work off the farm in agrifood systems. And as you will hear, the impact is actually shockingly large, and it is, indeed, multiple times greater than the experience that men are having from climate change.

But I’m also really happy to have this report presented today because it underlines the urgent need to increase actions – and by that I mean both policies and investments – that would mitigate the impact of climate change on rural women and other vulnerable groups. Rural women’s vulnerabilities are distinct. The report contains excellent recommendations about how to adapt policies and investments to meet their needs, and how to empower women to adapt better to climate change.

So, this year, International Women’s Day is focused on investing in women to accelerate progress. And I want to highlight just how important it is to try to put together investments on climate action and investments for gender equality, and I think there’s two reasons to underline that point. First, because we now know, thanks to this report, how large the losses that women are facing are, and we know that the size of financing reaching those women in rural areas is much, much smaller than the size of the losses that they’re experiencing. And secondly, because there’s a multiplier effect on working on these two issues together.

FAO has shown in last year’s report, “The Status of Women in Agrifood Systems,” that women who are empowered are more resilient to climatic shocks. This means that it’s critically important to increase the amount of money that goes towards addressing asset and resource gaps, but also helping women to be empowered to face and adapt to climate change so that they can have more resilient households which also have higher levels of income and better nutrition security for their families – food security and nutrition.

So now I’m going to show – we’re going to show a video which will start to give you sort of a sense of just how big these numbers are. And then my colleague Nicholas Sitko will present the report. Thank you. (Applause.)

(A video presentation begins.)

Voiceover: Climate change is causing widespread disruption to nature and societies, threatening our ability to ensure global food security, eroding years of development gains, and impacting people’s lives everywhere. When it comes to climate change we are all vulnerable, but some of us are more vulnerable than others. Extreme weather events disproportionately affect rural communities, with the poorest, the elderly, and women taking the heaviest blow. Climate change is widening the global gap between the poor and those who are better off by 20 billion U.S. dollars every year. Because of floods and heat stress, poor families can lose up to 5 percent of their income annually. A one-degree increase in global temperatures can cause a 34 percent reduction in the incomes of female-headed households.

When disasters strike women and girls pay an unbearable toll, but they are barely visible when it comes to climate actions. Only a small fraction of climate funds reach those who need them the most. This unjust climate is inflaming all types of inequalities.

We need to change direction now and forge together a world where no one is left behind. We need to place people at the center and develop inclusive climate policies, sustain livelihoods with social protection, create more job opportunities, ensure equal access to finance and resources, and bring all people into decision-making for a more just transition. Focusing on people now is the right direction toward a sustainable and equitable future for all.

(Video presentation ends.)

Ms. Welsh: And now, joining us from Rome is Nicholas Sitko, senior economist in the U.N. FAO’s Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division. Nicholas, over to you.

Nicholas Sitko: OK, thank you. And good morning, everyone. A pleasure to be here today to present some of the key findings from this report.

Today I’m going to really focus on some of the key findings related to gender differences in climate impacts. But as the title of the report suggests, we also disentangled these as they relate to people living in poverty and youth. So I encourage you all who are interested in take a look at the report for more information.

So the kind of foundation of this report is building on this emerging consensus coming out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in 2022 started really forcefully arguing that differences in climate vulnerability are really – between people are really the result of intersecting associated economic-development disparities, as well as historical legacies of inequality and marginalization.

And the IPCC is increasingly arguing that in order for us to transition towards a more climate-resilient development pathway, we need to start implementing climate actions that address these inequalities in a more inclusive and integrated way.

However, as Lauren mentioned, understanding and evidence on the magnitude and the nature of people’s different climate vulnerabilities is actually more scarce than you might think, and particularly rural areas, low- and middle-income countries, where vulnerabilities tend to be higher, there’s very little evidence for us to understand how the impacts of climate change differ across sub-segments of the rural population.

And so that’s what this report really sets up to is to quantify these differences in how they vary across people with different wealth statuses, gender and age. And we do this with a data set that we’ve assembled that, as this foundation uses household-survey data from 24 low- and middle-income countries, these data include household respondents, more than 100,000 household respondents, which are statistically representative of more than 950 billion (sic; million) rural people worldwide.

Now, most of this data is at a household level. So in order for us to differentiate impacts, we often have to focus on differences between household types; male and female head of household, for example. And, of course, that’s not – that doesn’t give you the depth of understanding that we need.

Now, fortunately, in six countries, all of them in sub-Saharan Africa, we do have individual information related to individuals’ labor and management of agricultural plots, which allow us to dig a little bit deeper into these impacts.

Now, what we’ve done is we’ve taken the socioeconomic data and we’ve merged it in space and time with over 70 years of daily precipitation and temperature information. This data we’ve manipulated in a way to allow us to identify extreme weather events – like heat stress, droughts, and floods – that are relevant for the diverse geographies included in the study and are relevant for the people who are interviewed in this study.

We’ve also been able to calculate a longer-term measure of climate change in terms of the long-run changes in temperature experienced by these people. And so by combining the socioeconomic and climate and weather data together, we’re able to better disentangle how these events are differentiated effectively.

Now, before I move to the results, what I want to talk about quickly is the ways in which climate change may affect people differently. And so the way that we can think about it is in terms of direct and indirect impacts. Now, in rural places, direct impacts of climate stressors can include reductions in agricultural productivity, reductions in labor productivity as it becomes harder to work in outdoor environments, for example, during heat waves, and reductions in the functionality of the ecosystems that rural people and their agricultural systems depend on.

So, now, as these direct impacts unfold, they tend to ripple through rural economies. They affect the prices for foods and inputs. They affect the opportunities in nonfarm employment, particularly jobs in agrifood systems. They may shift household structures, as someone household members may be forced to migrate away in search of work. And they damage critical infrastructure.

Now, of course, these direct and indirect impacts are always mediated through social differentiation. So rural women, for example, often experience structural barriers in terms of their ability to access and control critical resources that they need to adapt to and cope with climate change, including land, agricultural technologies, and credit and insurance. They also face disproportionate burdens in terms of care and domestic responsibilities due to discriminatory gender norms around this, which limits their ability to access off-farm employment, may make their work more informal, and contributes to a persistent wage gap between men and women in agrifood systems.

So now let’s turn to the results that we find from our reports. So starting first at the household level, what we find is that extreme weather events are having a really adverse effect on women-led households, compared to those that are normally termed in these surveys male-led. So, for example, heat stress in an average year is reducing the income of female-headed households by 8 percent compared to male-headed households, and extreme precipitation events by 3 percent compared to male-headed households. So when we aggregate these impacts across all low- and middle-income countries, what we find is that heat stress is contributing to a reduction in the total income of female-headed households of about $37 billion more than male-headed households and extreme precipitation events by $16 billion more per year. And it’s not just extreme weather events, although that’s what we often think about. It’s also long-term changes in climate change, right – in climate. So, for example, a 1 degree Celsius increase in average temperatures we found to contribute to a 34 percent reduction in the total income of female-headed households compared to male-headed households, mostly driven by reductions in farmland.

Moving now to individual women and the agricultural plots that they manage: We find that exposure to extreme weather events is increasing the work burden on women. They tend to work more than men in response to these crises, almost an hour more per week, coming on top of already a disproportionate labor burden, and that this experience of women working more is strongly correlated with children also working more. So we find that children increase the amount of time that they work relative to adults by nearly 50 minutes more per week, in response to these extreme weather events. This is coming at the expense of education and play.

When we shift now to the agricultural plots managed by women, compared to those managed by men, we find that women tend to respond to extreme weather events by adopting climate-smart agricultural practices like irrigation, soil-water conservation structures, et cetera, roughly at equal rate or sometimes greater than male farmers, but yet their systems still remain more sensitive to climate extremes than male farmers, due to a bunch of other constraints that they face in terms of time and capital and access to technology. So we find that, for example, one additional day of extreme heat is associated with a 3 percent reduction in the total value of women’s plots relative to men.

Now, despite the kind of increased focus on marginalized people and more inclusive climate actions coming from the IPCC, and in light of the evidence we’ve presented here, the fact remains that most climate – or much climate financing and policies ignore these populations. So it’s estimated that in 2017-2018, of all tracked climate financing, only 3 percent was targeting the agriculture sector and only a fraction of that went towards adaptation. Only 1.7 percent of all that financing went to small-scale producers. This totaled about $10 billion, so not even sufficient to cover many of the losses being experienced by these groups, much less to cover the costs of adaptation.

When we look at the climate actions proposed in the nationally determined contributions, the national adaptation plans of the 24 countries in this study, we identified more than 4,000 explicit climate actions, but of which only 6 percent mentioned women, 2 percent mentioned youth, and 1 percent mentioned people in poverty. So these groups are largely being ignored.

Now, of course, we need more financing, we need policies directed at these groups, but we also need better-designed and better-targeted programming. The report really shows that rural women’s vulnerabilities to climate change are distinct and diverse. They’re coming through both farm and off-farm elements of people’s livelihoods. So we need really integrated approaches that are both gender-responsive and gender-transformative.

Now, we go into much more detail on the report, but I want to highlight kind of five key points.

The first is that we need programs that specifically address disparities in terms of resource access. This includes land, credit, technologies, et cetera. We also need to improve the delivery of our climate services and our extension services in ways that are cognizant of women’s specific needs and the time burdens that they face. We need to invest in mechanisms to reduce the risks and losses associated with climate change. This could be, for example, through scaling up and scaling out of social protection programs, programs that can be made more climate adaptive as well as gender sensitive. We need to invest in enabling/offering opportunities for women. This means investments in hard and soft skills, infrastructure, education, and credit for women-run businesses. And we need to move beyond just mercurial support and think about creating programs that explicitly challenge discriminatory norms through gender-transformative approaches that bring men and women together to make these norms visible and come up with solutions.

It’s our hope that the – that the evidence that we’re presenting here today starts to be translated into meaningful policies of investments and programs that leave no one behind, policies that acknowledge and prioritize people and their vulnerabilities, investments that address disproportionate losses and enable adaptive actions, and actions that challenge and make visible discriminatory norms and historical legacies that have left some people more vulnerable than others.

The report has shown clearly that climate change is unjust, and only through addressing these injustices can we chart a path to a more sustainable and resilient future. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

Ms. Welsh: Thank you very much, Nicholas. Thanks for joining us from Rome.

It is now my pleasure and distinct honor to welcome to CSIS the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s deputy secretary of agriculture, Xochitl Torres Small. The deputy secretary was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in July 2023 and is the first Latina to hold this position. Before assuming this role, she was a U.S. representative for New Mexico’s Second Congressional District, which is the fifth largest in the country. She brings many years of personal and professional experience with the issues we’re discussing today.

Deputy Secretary, thank you for joining us. The floor is yours. (Applause.)

DEPSec Torres Small: Thank you all so much for being here. It’s an honor to be here. It’s also, as you can tell from the conversation that we just heard, from the description that we just heard, and if any of you have started to read the report – or helped author the report – (laughter) – it’s also a really somber conversation that we’re having today.

And you know, last year I got to be here as well. The report was focusing on women’s role in food systems, and that really spoke to both the challenges and the opportunities that exist in those food systems. I have to tell you, I had a little bit more trouble with this report because it was a lot more about the challenges. And although there were clear recommendations about how to start taking on those challenges, those opportunities are a little bit harder to find. Instead, it’s really forcing us to take a look at the inequities when it comes to the impact of climate change – the inequities when it comes to the impact on rural people and specifically people living in poverty, young people, and for women.

There is not a whole lot of optimism in the report. It takes on the widening income gap among rural people due to the differences of people’s wealth, gender, and age in the stark way that only statistics and numbers can do. And in the midst of catastrophe, it shows us that when there’s a flood or when there is heat stress, the impact that that has on women’s – women-headed households is much more severe and disproportionately affects those households compared to male-headed households.

Even more disturbing than that, as you saw, when you look at the policies to combat climate change, that stark, disproportionate impact that climate has is not being recognized by policies that are being made, where only 6 percent mention farmers and rural communities, for example. Similarly, only 6 percent of the policies reviewed mention women specifically, 2 percent mention youth, and less than 1 percent mention poor people specifically. So as hard as this report was to read, I commend you for making us look at these truths.

Here's the thing: We know that the impact is disproportionate for women and youth. But here, as well as abroad, we also know that much of the work that is being done to fight climate change is being done by poor women and youth and people who are at the greatest brunt of facing these challenges. So I’m looking forward to working with you on solutions to the injustices of the disproportionate impacts of climate change.

This year’s FAO report has me thinking in particular about the unique role that women can play in combating climate change. And maybe it’s not a coincidence – I trust that FAO was thinking very far ahead of this – that some of those unique opportunities come from last year’s report.

While climate change is what keeps me up at night, and I imagine it keeps many of you up at night, our call is to think about what’s going to get us up in the morning. What’s the hope that we can find to forge solutions? And for me so much of that is how do we take these challenges and turn them into opportunities.

Secretary Vilsack’s vision, which sometimes has been depicted on a whiteboard, shows that how can we recognize food systems and when we invest in small and midsized farmers and the connection to those food systems we can invest in rural communities. We can help increase farm income in a more equitable way.

I see that as also true when it comes to investing in women farmers, that by investing in women farmers we are investing in that connection of a food system more intentionally and to a solution that might be available.

It’s also calling us to think more broadly about what agriculture is. I recently had the chance to meet a woman in Mozambique, and I’ll speak a little bit more about that trip shortly, but Vilma stuck with me this past week being home because of her experience – her experience growing up in Mozambique and her experience growing up along the shore and always living nearby mangroves, always depending on them as a source of wood when there was construction, but also knowing practices about when and how to pick them and how to care for them, something that she didn’t know why she did but she just grew up doing it.

Well, she very fortunately had the opportunity that is not always provided to go to college in Mozambique where she learned about why she had grown up taking care of mangroves, and even more importantly she had the chance to then teach others at the college about her cultural practices and why they were important and to expand those practices.

Now she’s a United States Forest Service employee living in Mozambique caring for mangroves, doing work that she has always done but in a way where the impact is far greater because now the multiplying effect of being a woman and teaching through extension she is passing on those practices to others.

She’s also working with researchers, also from Mozambique, who have identified ways to start measuring that impact so that the work that has always been taken for granted in uncompensated communities might someday be compensated or recognized.

I see that opportunity in the work of Vilma. I see a future where women are the leaders in addressing the very challenge that is harming them so much right now.

Now, I mentioned that this was a pretty transformative trip for me. Although I’m still fighting jetlag I think I’ve got two more days and I’ll be done with it. But it was transformative for me for another reason.

Growing up in high school I had the incredible opportunity to get to study in what’s now Eswatini in sub-Saharan Africa, and I hadn’t been back to the entire continent of Africa in 20 years so when I first landed in Ethiopia this wave of emotion hit me and I was so excited to get to see what was similar and what was different.

And when I finally ended in Mozambique, which is right next door to Swaziland, or Eswatini, and I spent a lot of time there studying – on vacation when I was studying, I was struck by what had changed and what hadn’t changed.

So we know that the climate has changed dramatically. We know that certain types of foreign influence has changed dramatically. But we also know that many things haven’t changed in terms of gender norms or poverty, in terms of opportunities for kids to get education, and I struggled too with this tension that we sometimes see.

What brought me first to Angola and then to Mozambique was a trade mission and so the tension between international development and sometimes trade, and made me take a look at that head on because what I realized is that when trade is done right there are opportunities for international development. There are opportunities for shared knowledge. So getting to visit McGovern-Dole school feeding program, where U.S. commodities are paired with local production and efforts to increase local production, there’s an opportunity for more kids to learn and an opportunity for more farmers to grow.

I also saw what it means to invest in the next generation of women and youth when it comes to taking on the challenges that we have presented to them.

So I know you will appreciate this. In Angola, the prime minister gave me a beautiful gift. He gave me a statue of a woman. And I asked him, well, why did you give me the statue of a woman? And he said, well, because the majority of farmers in Angola are women.

Now, this woman was working incredibly hard. She had a baby on her back, she had a tool in her hand, and she was working. And he said it’s to our shame that mostly women are the farmers in Angola, but for me it’s to our opportunity, because she is working not only for – to feed herself, but to feed that child on her back. And the practices that she forges will not only be her practices, but practices for future generations.

I see that with climate change as well, that women in agriculture will be able to pass on those practices and those changes to the future. So women like that woman in the statue and Vilma are a powerful reminder that with so much of the innovative work that’s happening in ag, we are relying on women. It may sound like a burden, but with this resilience there is terrific opportunity.

When it comes to transitioning from subsistence to added value and more and better markets, the opportunity to support women who drive this change is truly incredible. Women must be at the front and center of these new markets, of these opportunities. We need a Vilma in every community.

So in order to support the efforts of women to lead fundamental changes in agriculture, the United States is campaigning at the United Nations for the U.N. General Assembly to pass a resolution declaring 2026 as the international year of the woman farmer. Specifically, this initiative would highlight actions that can close the gender gap and move us closer to achieving food security, gender equality, and the U.N. sustainable-development goals.

This initiative is also an opportunity for FAO member states – the private sector and NGOs, as well as civil society – to work together to achieve better outcomes for women farmers across the world, as women continue to adapt to the changing climate.

This is a big deal. Some of you may recognize this, but the United States has never before sought to sponsor an international year. Let me say that again. For the first time in history, the U.S. is seeking to sponsor an international year. And that international year is an international year of the woman farmer. (Scattered applause.)

I’ll clap for that. Thank you. (Applause.)

I am so excited to lead this effort and to partner with other countries and stakeholders to ensure that women’s contributions to agriculture are recognized. I believe that we can use this opportunity to not only recognize and amplify the role of women in agriculture, but also to better listen to their voices, and therefore drive more effective policy solutions that address the inequality exposed in the report today.

We have a unique opportunity to be the change we want to see in agriculture and to build on the incredible legacy of women like Vilma on their stewardship, their innovation and productivity. They are the future of climate resilience. They are the future of innovation in ag. And because of this exciting future, we have a reason to get up and do this work every morning.

Thank you so much for including me in this important event. And I look forward to working with all of you to make the international year of the woman farmer a reality. (Applause.)

Ms. Welsh: Wonderful. On behalf of all of us, I would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the deputy secretary for those truly inspiring remarks.

We’ll return to these themes in our discussion right now, but we would love to revisit a lot of the themes that you introduced perhaps through another engagement with you. So thank you again for your time and for your inspiring remarks.

It's now my pleasure to introduce our panelists, Lauren Phillips, Deputy Director in the Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division at the U.N. FAO, joining us from Rome; Ann Vaughan, Deputy Assistant to the Administrator in the Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security at USAID, joining us from L’Enfant Plaza – (laughs) – and Christina Chan, Senior Adaptation Adviser in the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate at the Department of State, joining us from Foggy Bottom. (Laughs.)

Welcome back to CSIS to each of you.

Lauren, I’ll start with you. It was just about a year ago that we hosted you last, and that was on the occasion of the launch of the Status of Women in Agrifood Systems report. How does this report that we’re discussing today relate to that report? So let’s connect the dots between those two.

Dr. Phillips: Thanks, Caitlin.

So as I mentioned in my opening remarks, I think the first thing is putting some numbers around something that we knew was true when we wrote the previous report, which is that, you know, climate change is having a more and deeper impact on women than on men. So that’s sort of the first point.

But the second and third points I wanted to make are about the calls to action that were in the Status of Women in Agrifood Systems and some of the policy recommendations of that report.

So the calls to action for that report, the first one was that we continue to need better data. We need better sex-segregated data around women who are working in agrifood systems. And while this report is extremely impressive and the numbers are very large, as Nick mentioned, as the author of the report, we still are relying on survey data which is talking about female head of households rather than having a lot of individual-level data about women farmers.

And female head of households, we know, are more likely to be extremely poor. They represent households maybe where there are widows or single mothers, where men have migrated. And so we already knew that their circumstances were likely to be very difficult. So I appreciate the effort that Nick and his team made to also look at individual-level plots, but I think that this still underlines the need to have better data in the sector. And so that’s something that FAO is really committed to.

And another one of the calls to action that I tried to reference also in my opening remarks were about the need to have projects which are intentionally trying to empower women in order to improve resilience to climatic shocks, as well as improve incomes and livelihoods. And I do think that this report also underlines that very important nexus between women’s agency decision-making capabilities, and in general the decision-making capabilities in agency of the poor in order to participate in processes, because that empowering approach really can translate into higher levels of resilience for families and households.

And just quickly on the policy recommendations, if you’ve heard both of these reports presented, you’ll see that there’s a lot of overlap around the need for gender, the sensitive social protection around approaches which are – we call the gender-transformative, but it really means addressing underlying discriminatory social norms which hold women back and on empowering people to participate in group approaches so that they can access better technologies to adapt to climate change. Those are very similar between the two reports.

Ms. Welsh: OK. Well, thank you. Thank you for that.

Let’s turn to the policy recommendations that you’ve just introduced. It seemed to me, in reading the report, that there were two bodies of recommendations, those targeting essentially the agriculture and food-security-focused programmers and policymakers, and those targeting the climate-change-focused program implementers and policymakers.

Can you briefly describe and introduce those two sets of recommendations?

Dr. Phillips: Yeah. I think the first thing to say is we’d really like those two groups of policymakers to talk to each other and work better together. (Laughter.)

Ms. Welsh: Wish they would, too. (Laughter.)

Dr. Phillips: Yeah. But apart from that, I think that the importance about these is that, for the agricultural ministries, you know, some of the findings really highlight the fact that it’s great to make people have access to technologies, to resources and assets that can help them bridge the gap to have more adaptive practices, but that bundling those kinds of approaches with approaches that are sensitive around training needs, around social protection, can be really critical. And the question is why.

So when you are a small farmer, whether you’re a woman or a man, you’re taking some degree of risk in using new technologies and practices. And if you take a risk that doesn’t pay off, you’re talking about not having enough food for your family and for your community to eat. And so instruments like social protection, which can provide cash or training for people, can really help to offset some of the risks that people face when they’re trying to adapt to new technologies. So that’s the sort of – those are the underlying messages for the ag side.

On the climate side, climate policies, as you saw in the report and as the deputy secretary also mentioned, are really not focused enough on people and on inclusion. And so here the message is very clear as well: What we need to be doing is to consider the fact that the people that are bearing the brunt – bearing the brunt of the climate crisis are vulnerable people – poor people, women – and therefore the policies and actions need to be more focused on the livelihood impacts on climate change and making sure that those actions reach down to rural communities where people are being very strongly impacted.

Ms. Welsh: I think that is a perfect way to introduce the conversation that I’ll have with Ann and with Christina. But thank you again for being with us, Lauren.

Ann, my first question for you is – welcome back to CSIS – (laughs) – is something that we’ve talked about as really underpinning successful adaptation to climate, which is access to finance. And I read an interview with you on the Feed the Future website where you – where you talked about there are many challenges, but access to capital is a major hurdle. And in The New York Times article about the launch of this report, The New York Times also said access to capital is crucial. So can you talk about what Feed the Future – USAID is doing through Feed the Future to improve women’s access to capital?

Ann Vaughan: No, great, thanks so much. And let, maybe, me take one second to say sort of what Feed the Future is for those that may not know about it. It’s the U.S. government’s anti-hunger program. And the deputy secretary raised a great example of the McGovern-Dole program, the school feeding program, in Mozambique that’s doing great work with children. But we also partner with State Department and about 11 other agencies.

And it’s 14 years old. It’s a teenager now – (laughter) – but it has had some great success over those years, including helping lift 23 million people out of poverty. We’ve helped stop stunting in 3.4 million children, and stopping stunting is a really – it’s very difficult to do. So really proud of that statistic. And then to get – (clears throat) – excuse me – into the finance numbers, unlock 6.2 billion in financing for food security and then help generate 28 billion in ag sales. So we’re proud of those numbers. Those are great numbers. But we also know we need more. We need to get finance especially to female smallholder farmers who really are the back of a lot of the 600-odd million smallholder farmers.

So we also really appreciate the work of FAO. And after last year and the great event we had last year with you all launching the women in agrifood system – or, excuse me, before that, when the report came out, we read this report that said there had been no movement, basically, for women in agrifood systems in 10 years. And our administrator does not – we don’t like to sit on our laurels, and so this is not acceptable. How do we focus on this? And then launched – had a – had an event with you all last year to help launch something called GROW, the Generating Resilient (sic; Resilience) and Opportunities for Women, to try to address and close some of those gaps, including in financing. So we’ve committed to increase the amount of money in our USAID portfolio Feed the Future, which is about a billion dollars; to have 325 million (dollars) of that also be working on gender across the board.

We also – we have a lot of numbers and stats for Feed the Future. And we had dug in and said: OK, what have we done since we’ve been a teenager, in the last 14 years? And looked at – well, it’s great. We’ve increased the number of women who have access to capital. But guess what? Of that amount, women are only getting 47 cents on the dollar to what men get. And that is not – that’s just not acceptable in terms of how we try to close some of this gap. So have set a north star and target for us to close that gap by 20 percent in the next three years, and have set some bigger targets for ourselves in the out years. So those are – if you don’t set a target, you’re not going to get there. So I think that’s really important for us to make sure we have a north star, and would encourage everyone else and others and other donors to think about where the money’s going and how to make sure that we’re getting it to women.

But some of the programmatic examples in things that we’re trying to do. Smallholder farmers, farmers across the world, they’re also businesspeople. They have to have financing and money for inputs. And what happens, especially in sub-Saharan Africa right now, and what we’ve seen is it is very risky for investments to happen into ag. So we’re working on helping to de-risk those investments, and then working with our great partner Norway back at the U.N. General Assembly in September, launched something called FASA, the Financing for Agricultural Small-and-Medium Enterprises, which are the backbone of what helps smallholder farmers get the inputs they need and the financing they need to be able to buy the right type of tools, seeds, and fertilizer to be more productive.

About a third of those ag SMEs are women – women-owned small and medium enterprises. So what this FASA financing facility is doing is screening for gender and climate to make sure we’re kind of injecting more cash into the system, if you could, so that there’s greater access to capital for what will trickle down in many good ways to smallholder farmers. So that’s one example.

We’ve also launched a climate gender equity fund. And then have some great work that our missions are doing around the world to make sure we’re opening up and unlocking finance for these smallholder farmers.

Ms. Welsh: Great. Wonderful. Thank you, Ann. We’ll return to a couple of those themes, certainly, as our conversation continues.

In addition to Feed the Future, a whole of government initiative, another is PREPARE. Christina, I’ll talk to you about that and thank you again for joining us today. PREPARE, of course, is the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience, which was launched in 2021. Under PREPARE the State Department is investing in partnerships, initiatives, and funds that support adaptation among the world’s most vulnerable communities and countries. Can you speak to us about what – to what extent is PREPARE putting into practice policies and priorities for inclusive climate action?

Christina Chan: Thank you so much, Caitlin, and also just happy International Women’s Day to everyone and it’s wonderful to see the panel of women and the deputy secretary earlier speaking. I just want to thank CSIS for also organizing this and FAO for the report.

I think the report is really significant because – and I was struck by what the deputy secretary said earlier about going back to the African continent after 20 years and what had changed and what hadn’t.

For me, I’ve been working on climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction for about 20 years and this notion of differential vulnerability I’ve been talking about for 20 years, and the fact that your report “An Unjust Climate” is putting numbers behind it and finally quantifying it and putting dollar amounts on it I think is – hopefully, will make a significant impact in terms of making the case that we – that folks in our community have been making for two decades now about the importance of understanding differential vulnerability. So I just wanted to thank you for that.

In terms of PREPARE, PREPARE we launched it, as Caitlin said, in November of 2021. We now have 20 agencies that are part of PREPARE. Ann was talking about North Stars and for PREPARE our North Star is to help more than a half a billion people in the most vulnerable developing countries adapt and manage the impacts of climate change by 2030.

We have three pillars. The first pillar is on climate information services and information. Information is power. The fact that one-third of the world’s population does not have access to early warnings is just – it’s unacceptable. The fact that 60 percent of the population on the African continent do not have access to early warnings is unacceptable and so with PREPARE we are aiming to help close that early warning gap along with the rest of the world and under the leadership of the U.N. secretary general.

We also have the second pillar, which is integrating adaptation into key sectors like food security and agriculture but also infrastructure, health, and water. Underpinning this integration of adaptation and climate considerations in these key sectors is the importance of locally-led adaptation.

So not just this point in the report about very, very few of the climate finance dollars reaching the local level. I think it’s whether rural or urban is a significant challenge that we are trying to overcome with this push and objective for locally-led adaptation.

But it’s not just about channeling the finance to the local level, right? It is about who is at the decision making table and who’s getting to decide what the solutions are and who’s getting the information to inform their decisions. So that’s the second pillar.

And then the third pillar is mobilizing capital and this is the point about access to finance. It’s mobilizing more finance both public and private but also ensuring that there’s access to that finance including on the private sector side.

I just want to say really quickly, though, that that is – those are our goals and when it comes to gender and then the differential vulnerability the key is how we approach this work, right. Like, the main point that I took away from the presentations earlier on the report is that if we do not take deliberate action, if we’re not deliberate and thoughtful in the way in which we do our work, it’s just going to be the same. Twenty years from now we go back and it’s the same.

And just to give some examples, right, on climate information and early warnings who gets the alerts? How do people get the alerts? I’ve worked with communities where – rural farming communities where typically it is the man of the house who gets the radio and he takes the radio and he goes out and he listens to that radio during the day.

If alerts come about flooding who’s getting the alert? If the alerts – if information on climate information comes through cellphones, who has a cellphone? If we’re talking about extremely vulnerable populations, it’s not like everyone in a household has a cellphone. So how we do both the co-production of climate information but also how we work with users and who are those users and how is that information being distributed is key.

This locally led adaptation piece: It sounds great; it’s really hard to do, as everyone has talked about. When I worked on disaster risk management and climate adaptation in rural communities in Nepal about two decades ago, women were not going to school, so they could not read and write, and therefore, if there was a training on disaster risk management, their communities would not send them to the training because the training was a day walk away – one, they couldn’t go by themselves – and two, the assessment was, because they can’t read and write, they can’t take notes; why send that woman because when she comes back she can’t share that information? Also, the fact that she has to walk by herself for a day. What we were trying to do in our program was bring the trainings to the communities. Now, that costs more money, right, because you actually have to bring the training to a really isolated rural community, as opposed to the community center, closer with roads. But these are the types of things that make such a huge difference in terms of actually getting access to solutions in training to women.

The final piece is on resources and access to innovation and technology. We are supporting – so sorry. The locally led – we are supporting LIFE-AR, which is the least developed countries adaptation and resilience initiative. Our hope – they are prioritizing gender and gender equality in their efforts to help channel resources to the local level. And the types of examples I gave of just, like, how you do that is critical. And they are fully committed to making sure that there’s gender equality and gender-transformative approaches.

On the private sector, just really quickly: We are providing funding to the Africa Adaptation Initiative’s Food Security Accelerator, as well as something called the climate resilient and adaptation financing facility – transfer facility. But basically these two initiatives under PREPARE are trying to enable in Africa – with the food security accelerator, it’s African entrepreneurs and helping African entrepreneurs identify and scale innovation when it comes to food security and climate change. Gender is a key priority in the food security accelerator and the effort that the accelerator and AAI are making to ensure that the access to those resources is there for women is critical for us and just an example of how we are ensuring that gender equality is cross-cutting with respect to everything we’re doing on PREPARE.

Ms. Welsh: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Christina.

We have some great questions from the audience and we have time just for one or two. I’d like to pick up on the theme that you mentioned about importance of reaching communities in rural and urban areas to improve their adaptive capacity, which also is a theme that was woven throughout the report, the importance of off-farm employment to improving resilience to climate change impacts. So this is a question for all three of you or for anyone who would like to take it up, but can we talk about the importance of increasing opportunities for off-farm employment, and then, perhaps for another discussion, but how to even climate-proof those opportunities? Because even many other types of employment, apart from agriculture and food security, are also impacted by climate change. But maybe I’ll start with you, Lauren.

Dr. Phillips: Yeah, so the report has some interesting findings about how people become more dependent on either agricultural income or off-farm income depending on climate shocks, so the poor, for example, are becoming more dependent on agriculture when there are climate shocks, and that’s really problematic because agriculture is sort of the first line, right, where the impacts are going to be greater. So that’s worrying. And the other thing that I think that we found is that, surprisingly maybe, we were expecting perhaps to find that young people were particularly vulnerable to climate shocks and the report finds something slightly more nuanced, which is that they actually have greater adaptive capacity to generate off-farm income when there are shocks, and I think that’s important because it means that, you know, a household – which is composed of young people or older people, women, men, et cetera – may have different strategies for generating income, and so having climate-proofed off-farm income opportunities is also extremely important for infrastructure and for safe jobs, decent work, et cetera, because what we would like to avoid is that, you know, the diversification strategy means people are displaced or that they’re migrating against their interests and will. So I think that there’s a lot of important sort of findings around off-farm income in the report.

Ms. Vaughan: Yeah.

Ms. Welsh: Thank you. Thank you for that.

And, Ann, in reading about GROW, I was reminded that one of the goals of GROW is to support opportunities in food and water systems, including in value chains beyond production. So –

Ms. Vaughan: Yeah, no, a hundred percent, and I really appreciate it. When you are – when you are on the ultra-poor, how hard it is. The data from this report is quite depressing on you lose even the opportunity to do processing and diversify more. Because that’s – when we talk about – subsistence farming is quite challenging. It’s in the name. It is very hard. What we want to try to do is help get farmers to be able to do more. If they want to transition out of farming or have their children transition out of farming, they should have that option. So to build the off-farm employment opportunities, entrepreneurial activity is incredibly important; processing, value-add along the whole value chain. Working on things like food loss and waste reduction; we lose about half the vegetables before they even get to market in most of – a lot of the Horn of Africa, for example. Making sure we have different ways to prevent that loss before it gets to farmers, before it gets to children who will get more nutrients from those vegetables. Or, there’s a lot of job opportunities in that. It also reduces methane, so it’s also a triple win where it helps the climate when we don’t have food rotting on the side of roads.

So the value add for different types of processing along the value chain is something a lot of our missions are working on, and think it really helps get people to be able to have different options and opportunities to grow out of – out of poverty. But making sure we have that social protection that we talked about earlier, because some farmers will not be able to do that. So we’ve had some real success in Malawi working with the World Bank in a social protection system that – even during COVID – and being able to inject a little bit of funding into social protection systems has been able to really have – help people who are not able to be able to make the leap to working on processing or other off-farm activities.

Ms. Welsh: Thank you.

Christina, anything you want to add here?

Ms. Chan: No, just –

Ms. Welsh: OK.

Ms. Chan: – in terms of the – as the climate is changing, I could just support the notion of diversification and off-farm.

Ms. Welsh: Yeah. Certainly.

One last question, then – Ann, I’ll direct it to you, but welcome input from Lauren or Christina. But USAID makes explicit that in order to achieve gender equality in agrifood systems we intentionally engage with men and boys as partners to empower women and girls in their different roles on and off the farm. Can you speak to that?

Ms. Vaughan: Yeah, and I appreciate it. All the behavioral change aspects that were in the report on “Unjust Climate,” because there’s been horrible studies that sometimes, if you just empower women, and – there can be backlash where you have increased domestic violence. So you really need a systemic behavioral change, community-led, so that we have – empowering women and men to be agents of change. Fathers that send their girls to school are some of the best dads in the world. (Laughter.) And how do we work across different sectors to really make sure we’re empowering everyone for the food-security impacts?

And again, I think it’s setting these targets. When we start level-setting, if we don’t think about the targets and then what are some of the real important interventions at the community level in programming and be incredibly intentional, or we won’t be able to reach the level-setting. Just even on the finance, again, getting women with parity with men on how much finance they’re able to access. We have our work cut out for us. So welcome others to join us in this effort.

Ms. Welsh: Great. Well, that’s a great place to conclude our panel discussion. Lauren Phillips, Ann Vaughan, Christina Chan, thank you so much for joining us at CSIS. Thank you.

And it’s now my pleasure to welcome back to CSIS Máximo Torero, chief economist of the U.N. FAO, for closing remarks. Máximo, the floor is yours. (Applause.)

Máximo Torero: So thank you so much for hosting us here, and it’s a pleasure to be with you. And let me, first, start to congratulate everyone from the International Women’s Day, 8th of March, today. And I am happy that we are launching a report with a strong focus on impacts on women.

So, clearly, as you have heard today, the report has four main areas. First, we identify the problem, which is climate. Second, we quantify the consequences of that problem, especially on women and youth, and what are the impacts that we have to have a number attached to it. Third, we look at how we are treating that problem and how far we are from really touching the solution to the problem that we are facing. And finally, we make some policy recommendations which are linked to our previous report on women in the agrifood systems, and relates both reports and the importance that we do a transformation in the way we implement policies so that we can make a difference.

On the impacts on climate, which is the problem, we know that there are five dimensions in which climate at least will impact us: extreme temperatures, lack of rain or excess of rain. The report measures the first two, 8 percent in difference in income and 4 percent for the case of excessive water. But then we also know that there will be an evolution and variability of the climate variables which will make decision(s) for farmers more complex.

Fourth, we know it will affect pests and diseases because they will evolve, and fifth, we will also change migration, migration of our species and migration of human beings.

So those impacts will be substantial. But especially, as the report shows, it will impact more the most vulnerable today. That is central and that is something that we need to realize and we need to find solutions, and if we don’t target our policies to women and youth we won’t be able to cope with this and here is where social protection programs and agrifood system programs that are targeted to these populations will make a big difference and that’s where we need to work carefully together.

And understand that we are looking at one stressor to these households, which are human beings that we are looking at, and I think we had a very nice description today of impacts that are happening.

These points – these data points that we are describing, that when we quantify our center , because it make(s) us realize what is the real impact on these human beings and how much the initial condition, the inequalities in which they are today, are affecting them. But the whole thing on the positive side is that it’s showing us that they are very resilient. They are the ones which immediately adapt, work more hours to be able to get more income to feed their kids. They are the ones which are using technologies which are climate smart technologies to be able to create a transformation.

So that’s the solution. Every dollar I invest in them will give us the highest return. So we need to take that solution forward and we need to move forward in the transformation we need to have today.

It’s very important for us at FAO and I think all the agencies in both that we start that process and that we change the way we present the agrifood systems. The agrifood systems provides the right to food to people. These women working in rural areas in the agricultural sector and in the whole value chain – because many of them specialize in the transformation, the packaging, the processing – are making a difference, and they are the ones who assured, despite the shocks we have faced in the last years, that we will have food for today – the right to food.

And for sure agriculture will create externalities. As anything good you do, there is always an externality. It creates externalities on emissions. It creates externalities on soils and water.

But we provide the right to food, and how it’s possible that in this context only 3 point something percent of climate investment is coming to this sector and a lot less, as it was mentioned in the report, to a smallholder and even a lot less to female-headed smallholder households and farmers.

That doesn’t make any sense. Two sectors are going to change what we have in climate today, energy and the agrifood systems. Energy will be resolved by the private sector. The agrifood system is the one that gives you the highest opportunity to make a transformation, and women and rural youth are the ones who truly help enormously to create this transformation.

So we need to change the way we think. We need to link to a way to move forward. We have developed the roadmap through SDG2 and 1.5 to do this. But we need to keep working together with this type of analysis and these type of real impactful numbers.

Yes, they are sad to see those numbers but we need to see them, but especially we need to see the opportunities. So thank you very much.

FAO will keep working very hard to create this transformation that is needed and we will keep bringing these numbers up because it’s the only way that we can change policies to achieve what we need.

Thank you. (Applause)

Ms. Welsh: That was a fantastic way to conclude today’s event, and with this I’d like to thank all of our speakers – Máximo Torero, Lauren Phillips, Nicholas Sitka, Ann Vaughan, Christina Chan, and Deputy Secretary Xochitl Torres Small for joining us today.

Thanks to the U.N. FAO for your partnership in today’s event and in so many events with special thanks to Ali Richter and Jocelyn Brown Hall, of course. As always, thanks to my team – Anita Kirschenbaum, Lucy Terry, Emma Dodd, Zane Swanson, and David Michel – and to this very fantastic CSIS External Relations team for your support and producing today’s event.

To our audience, thank you for joining us in person and online and if you’re here in person we welcome you to our reception outside in the foyer. This concludes our event. Thank you.

 (END.)