Why representing gender (in)equality in climate change scenarios matters for the challenges space

Socioeconomic challenges to adaptation and mitigation partly hinge on gender (in)equality. A world of equal opportunities for self-realization would be a markedly different place, in ways that are of substantial relevance for adressing climate change. The opposite holds too: in a world of stagnating, or worsening gender inequality, differences in access to resources, education or employment may reduce capacities of societies to both mitigate and adapt.  

Integrated assessment and climate impact models rely heavily on scenarios to understand implications of different socioeconomic futures. In the context of gender equality, these models and scenarios can also serve as tools for broadening our understanding of how societies’ capacities to adapt to and mitigate climate change are enabled or constrained if, broadly speaking, half of their population would gain access to or be further deprived of resources and decision-making power.

In this paper, we propose that the dominant framework of socioeconomic scenarios – the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) – should be extended to explicitly represent indicators of gender equality and their interlinkages with other facets of development. The original narratives underlying the SSP scenarios do feature assumptions about gender equality as part of the demographic elements, with educational attainment and its effect on reducing fertility and therefore population size as the main driver of socio-economic changes (O’Neill et al., 2017). However, only a systematic incorporation into narratives and endogenization of gender (in)equality, can enable the scenarios to reflect ways in which different levels of gender equality could increase or reduce challenges to adaptation and mitigation, and the implications of these challenges for dealing with climate risks. This also applies for other scenario-based work in sustainability and climate change research, for example in devising local energy transition policies whose justice element might be contingent on whether they consider gender aspects. The need for more nuanced accounts of gender has also been highlighted in the context of representation of inequalities in Integrated Assessment Model (IAMs), where gender equality is highlighted as one of the crucial factors when considering climate impacts and policies, their distributional implications and costs (Emmerling and Tavoni, 2021).  

We cover some of the myriad connections between gender and climate from the literature to build the case for why comprehensive assessments of future risks of climate change and of socioeconomic development can benefit from more concrete incorporation of gender aspects in their analyses. We discuss adaptation and mitigation challenges and their interplay with gender. A particular focus is on quantitative models of future societal transformations and assessments of their implications for climate change. We then argue that scenarios can help imagine a world of parity or lack thereof, and show how the SSP framework may change after accounting for gender equality. At the end we discuss how these conceptual and practical advances can feed into more nuanced climate change research and better-informed policy options.