21 November 2025, NIICE Commentary 11951
E. V. A. Dissanayake
The global pursuit of sustainable energy and climate resilience is fundamentally hampered by an overlooked reality: the energy system and the impacts of climate change are not gender-neutral. Due to deeply rooted socio-economic and cultural inequalities, women worldwide face a dual vulnerability—magnified challenges as both the primary consumers and managers of household energy, and as disproportionate victims of environmental shocks. The World Health Organisation notes that this intersection of gender, energy poverty, and climate vulnerability creates a self-perpetuating cycle of marginalization. This essay will argue that women, as consumers, encounter significant, unique challenges concerning access to clean energy, exposure to health risks, and heightened vulnerability to climate change impacts, all of which necessitate a fundamental shift toward gender-responsive policy and technology implementation.
The Core Challenge: Energy Poverty and Health Impacts
The most immediate and life-threatening challenge women face as energy consumers is the reliance on polluting fuels and technologies for domestic needs. Despite global progress, over 2 billion people still rely on traditional biomass—wood, charcoal, animal dung, and crop waste—for cooking, resulting in severe Household Air Pollution (HAP). The primary users of this polluting energy are women and children.
Disproportionate Health Burden
As the primary cooks and caregivers, women spend hours each day tending fires in poorly ventilated spaces. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that HAP is responsible for an estimated 3.2 million premature deaths annually, with a disproportionate burden falling on women in low- and middle-income countries. Exposure to the resulting particulate matter and carbon monoxide leads to a higher prevalence of respiratory illnesses (like Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, or COPD), lung cancer, and cardiovascular diseases in women.
The Time Poverty Trap
The reliance on traditional biomass creates a severe time poverty trap. In many developing regions, the duty of collecting fuelwood falls exclusively to women and girls. As local resources dwindle due to deforestation and climate-induced environmental degradation, the time spent collecting fuel can increase from a few hours to up to 20 hours per week. This arduous, non-productive labour directly limits their opportunity for education, paid employment, or engaging in community decision-making, thus reinforcing the cycle of economic dependence and energy poverty. Furthermore, the necessity of travelling long distances to search for scarcer resources exposes women and girls to increased risks of physical injury and gender-based violence.
Financial and Social Barriers to Clean Energy
Even when clean energy solutions, like Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) or solar home systems, are available, women face structural barriers to adoption. They often lack control over household finances or the necessary collateral to secure micro-loans for purchasing new technologies. Furthermore, many energy programs are designed without consideration for the specific needs, physical realities, or cultural practices of women, leading to low adoption rates and a failure to transition away from polluting fuels.
Heightened Vulnerability to Climate Change Impacts
The challenges women face as energy consumers are amplified by their status as primary natural resource managers, making them acutely vulnerable to the destabilising effects of climate change. Globally, women are heavily involved in subsistence farming, fetching water, and managing household food security—activities that are intensely climate-sensitive.
Resource Scarcity and Increased Workload
Climate-driven events, such as prolonged droughts and desertification, lead to the rapid depletion of water and arable land. This scarcity places a direct and immediate burden on women. As resource availability decreases, their daily workload significantly increases, necessitating longer journeys to secure water, food, and fuel. This intensification of unpaid labour exacerbates the time poverty noted earlier and further compromises their health and safety.
Disproportionate Impact of Extreme Weather Events
During extreme weather events like floods, hurricanes, and heatwaves, women face heightened physical and economic risks. Social norms can restrict women's mobility, access to public warnings, and ability to flee to safety. Post-disaster, climate change-related economic losses often fall most heavily on women, who may have limited land rights or access to emergency funds and are often excluded from relief and reconstruction planning. Furthermore, women and girls in temporary shelters or disrupted communities face increased risks of gender-based violence and exploitation, an overlooked yet critical challenge in climate adaptation.
Health and Nutritional Consequences
Climate change impacts directly threaten household nutrition, and gender roles dictate that women are often the first to sacrifice their own food intake to protect their children and husbands. Increased ambient temperatures and altered precipitation patterns also drive the spread of vector-borne diseases (e.g., malaria, dengue), placing a greater caregiving burden on women and diverting scarce household resources towards healthcare. These cumulative environmental and economic pressures underscore that women are not merely passive victims, but are rendered highly vulnerable consumers of vital resources—water, food, and energy—by climate change.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the challenges women face as consumers in the energy and climate sectors are multifaceted, rooted in pervasive socio-economic and institutional inequities. The core issues range from the daily, life-threatening health risks posed by reliance on traditional fuels and the entrapment of time poverty, to their disproportionate vulnerability to climate shocks and exclusion from the resultant policy and financial mechanisms. A failure to address these gendered burdens means that energy access programs will remain incomplete and climate adaptation strategies will fail to protect the most vulnerable populations. Achieving a truly just and sustainable future requires a fundamental paradigm shift. Policy must transition from being merely gender-aware to actively gender-responsive, recognising women as critical agents, innovators, and decision-makers in the transition to clean energy and a climate-resilient economy, rather than simply as consumers or victims.
E. V. A. Dissanayake is an Independent Researcher from Sri Lanka. She is a Robert Bosche Stiftung Fellow and a Visiting Scholar of Columbia University, USA.
