Financial toll of climate crisis hitting women harder, UN says

Biban, a pregnant farmer, clears unwanted grass at a muskmelon farm during a heatwave, on the outskirts of Jacobabad, Pakistan. Photograph: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

Women in rural areas suffer substantially greater economic losses from the impacts of climate breakdown than men in developing countries, research has shown, and the gap is likely to widen further.

Households headed by women in rural areas lost about 8% more of their income to heat stress than male-headed households, and their reduction in income when floods struck was about 3% greater than the loss to men, according to data released by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Tuesday.