Climate change could spike the time women around the world take to collect water for their households by up to 30 per cent by 2050, a new study has found.
In South America and Southeast Asia, higher temperatures and less rainfall, driven by climate change, could double the time spent on collecting water in households without running water, according to the research published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Globally, for the period between 1990 to 2019, researchers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany, found that women in households without running water would on average spend about 23 minutes everyday collecting water, considered primarily a women’s responsibility.
The researchers found that collecting water each day took anywhere between four minutes in parts of Indonesia to 110 minutes in regions of Ethiopia.
Compared to these numbers, we found that women will have to spend up to 30 per cent more time each day collecting water by 2050 under a high-emission scenario. This can be reduced to 19 per cent, if global warming is kept below 2 degree Celsius, said study author Robert Carr, a guest researcher at PIK.
For regions in eastern and central Africa that currently have the longest water collection times, temperature rises in a high-emission scenario would cause increases of between 20 and 40 per cent, said author Maximilian Kotz from PIK.
The results presented a gendered dimension of climate change impacts, highlighting how women are particularly vulnerable, according to author and PIK researcher Leonie Wenz.
They show how strongly climate change will affect women’s well-being, causing them to lose time for education, work and leisure, Wenz said.
Estimating welfare losses, Wenz said, By 2050, the cost of lost working time, calculated at the country-specific minimum wage, would be substantial, reaching tens to hundreds of millions of US dollars per country and year under a high-emission scenario.
As of 2016, women over the world spend up to 200 million hours a day on this vital task of collecting water, according to the authors.
