Supporting Women Farmers in a Changing Climate: Five Policy Lessons

Climate change demands new approaches to agriculture: farmers’ practices will need to change in order to adapt to and mitigate changing conditions. Gender is central to this change. Agriculture is a fundamental part of women’s livelihoods globally, most markedly in least developed countries, where four-fifths of economically active women report agriculture as their primary economic activity (Doss 2011). More women are moving into agriculture as men move out to seasonal or paid labour elsewhere. At the same time women farmers have less access to productive inputs and resources to improve returns from their farming activities and to meet the challenges of climate change (FAO 2011). Policies, institutions and services to help farmers develop new approaches to deal with climate change will need to produce results for women farmers as well as men. This brief provides five policy lessons to support this process, based on evidence from research in low- and middleincome countries and offers guidelines for crafting gender-responsive climate policies at global and national levels. This research was presented in March 2015 at a seminar in Paris on ‘Closing the gender gap in farming under climate change’, co-organized by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and Future Earth.