“Before the famine my life was better. I was a man in my own country,” Abdi Abdullahi Hussein, a Somali refugee living in Kenya, tells The Climate Reality Project. “When you have livestock and a farm and it all disappears, it feels like falling off a cliff.”

Hussein is not alone. For many men around the world, the ability to provide for their families remains the measure of their social standing. In a 2012 study conducted by the World Bank looking at what defines men’s familial roles in 19 countries from Poland to Burkina Faso, income generation was the first and most likely mentioned definition of a good husband in every country. “A husband who is not a good provider has no power at all in his family,” said a respondent from Vietnam. So what happens when shifting weather patterns prevent men like Hussein from meeting these expectations?

Development and humanitarian interventions are increasingly adopting a “gendered” approach to climate change adaptation, hoping to reduce the ways that rising temperatures and changing weather patterns leave women vulnerable to violence and economic ruin. Women’s issues certainly deserve a bigger platform given such a long history of disenfranchisement. But to address gender issues fully, climate interventions must go beyond the current “add women and stir” approach.

For one thing, it requires broadening the current definition of gender, which functionally often refers only to women rather than addressing the full spectrum of gender identities. It also means grappling with how expectations for men and boys affect gender dynamics. Women and girls have not ended up where they are in many cultures – systematically excluded from land rights, finance, education, health services, and political leadership – in a vacuum. Yet the role of men and boys remains largely invisible in narratives around gender and climate change.

Examining masculinity, or the social norms around which male identities are centered, is therefore crucial for a nuanced exploration of the nexus between gender and climate change. Indeed, men and boys face very real gender and climate-related challenges of their own.

Feeling Powerless

A socially constructed category, rather than simply a label designating biological sex, “gender” refers to the roles, responsibilities, and relations between men and women of different social groups or classes. Both perceptions of risks and actual vulnerabilities are shaped by these roles, responsibilities, and relations, causing them to vary across time, place, and social position.

Men and women perform the roles ascribed to their gender in order to fit into their respective social categories. For men in most traditional societies, this means assuming the role of the breadwinner. But failure to perform this role leaves room for their masculinity to be called into question. With droughts, famines, and floods challenging agriculture around the world, this phenomenon has been observed in many places experiencing climate-related disruptions.

In Somalia, a common refrain among young men and women interviewed by researchers from the Rift Valley Institute was that, after God, men are responsible for the world. Their statements indicate the position of power men hold in society, but also the extreme pressure placed on them to both provide for and maintain control of their families.

In a paper published in Global Environmental Change, Seema Arora-Jonsson suggests that the powerlessness associated with being unable to provide for their families can leave men uniquely vulnerable to climate change in certain contexts. She points to the uptick in farmer suicides in India as an example of the magnitude of stresses faced by male breadwinners in times of food insecurity. Some have taken the ultimate drastic measure to escape the constant demands of their familial responsibilities in the face of drought or other changes beyond their control. 

Feelings of powerlessness can also cause men to lash out at women. A 2013 World Bank report cited examples from India and Tanzania that showed a positive correlation between domestic violence and decreasing male household power. In both cases, men who lacked resources associated with the breadwinning role used violence to assert their dominance over women and validate their masculine identities. These findings suggest women’s exposure to this type of violence could intensify in the future as climate changes accumulate.

Sometimes, how men generate income can be just as significant as their ability to do so. In some Bambara-speaking communities of southern Mali, researchers have observed that even men who earn substantial income from professions other than farming continue to maintain millet fields on the side – not because it is particularly profitable, but because it remains a marker of their social standing. Efforts to improve the uptake of climate-smart agriculture techniques in the area have faced resistance for this reason. Men in these communities are not interested in diversifying their crops, even when it may increase their climate resilience and agricultural profits to do so, because they fear losing their status as a man.

From Victim to Ally?

In fact, many of the consequences that women experience as a result of climate change can be traced back to societal expectations of masculinity. In Valerie Nelson and Tanya Strathers’ Gender and Development study on how changing patterns have affected crop production in Tanzania, it is clear the gendered division of labor has left men and women exposed to different levels of risk and opportunity.

Due to the increasing unpredictability of rainfall, subsistence farmers in villages across Tanzania are cultivating larger areas of land in order to grow enough food for their families. Similar to other subsistence farmers worldwide, this phenomenon has led to a rising trend in seasonal male outmigration. According to the authors, despite increasing their overall work burden, male outmigration can have positive outcomes for women by challenging some gender roles, such as assuming more control over household cash in their husband’s absence. But in at least one case, negative gender outcomes outweighed the gains.

In the village of Dodoma, male outmigration undermined familial bonds and increased the risk of female exposure to HIV as more men sought sex outside of marriage while away from home. Women in Dodoma also reported eating fewer and poorer quality meals as a result of food scarcity and further noted their inability to secure sufficient food during times of drought in comparison to men, either due to social norms that dictate men and children should eat first or their lack of participation in the food production process. In this case, while men felt compelled to leave the village and take up extra work to fulfill their familial responsibilities, it was the women who disproportionately suffered the consequences.

The current narrative around gender and climate change generally focuses on female victimhood, overlooking other types of gendered vulnerabilities. Applying a full gender lens to climate issues could help us understand how levels of vulnerability can be influenced by social norms around masculinity and femininity. As Arora-Jonsson notes, “generalizations make it impossible to meet the highly specific needs of particular groups of women or men and to take advantage of the potential for climate change mitigation in different contexts.”

Finding ways to influence expectations for men or creating alternative paths to masculinity may help reduce the problems faced by women, potentially turning male victims into allies. Taking a closer look at dominant perceptions of masculinity is then one way to begin constructing more sophisticated – and effective – climate policies.