NEW DELHI (AP) - Manju Devi suffered pain for two months last year as she worked on a farm near Delhi, unable to avoid tasks that sometimes involved standing for hours in the waist-deep water of a paddy field lifting heavy loads in intense heat and spraying pesticides and insecticides. When the pain finally became too much to bear, she was rushed to a hospital.
The doctors' verdict: Devi had had a prolapsed uterus and would need a hysterectomy. She had not said a word to her family about her discomfort due to the social taboo against discussing a "women's disease," and with two adult children and three grandchildren looking to the 56-year-old widow to help put food on the table, Devi had relied on painkillers to stay in the fields.
"I endured excruciating pain for months, afraid to talk about it publicly. It shouldn't take a surgical intervention to make us realize the cost of the increasing heat," she said, surrounded by women who said they had undergone a similar ordeal.
As the annual UN-led climate summit, known as COP, takes place in Dubai later this month, activists are urging policymakers to respond to the disproportionate impact of climate change on women and girls, especially where poverty makes them more vulnerable .
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EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is part of a series produced under the India Climate Journalism Program, a partnership between The Associated Press, the Stanley Center for Peace and Security and the Press Trust of India.
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Their recommendations include securing land rights for women, promoting women's cooperatives and encouraging women to take the lead in developing climate policy. They also suggest that countries - especially developing countries like India - put more money in their budgets to ensure gender equality in climate policy.
A group of 20 leaders meeting in New Delhi in September also recognized the problem and called for accelerating climate action, with gender equality at its core, by increasing women's participation and leadership in mitigation and adaptation.
Devi is a farm worker in Syaraul, a village of about 7,000 people a few hours southeast of Delhi, in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest and most populous state. Several other middle-aged and older women from the village described similar injuries that led to hysterectomies.
The link between phenomena like uterine prolapse and climate change is indirect but significant, says Seema Bhaskaran, who tracks gender issues for the nonprofit Transform Rural India Foundation.
"Women in rural, climate-affected communities are often the hardest hit by physically demanding agricultural work, which is made even tougher by challenges related to climate change, such as erratic weather and increased labor needs," said Bhaskaran . prolapse, it increases the underlying health conditions and conditions that make women more susceptible to such health problems."
About 150 kilometers away, in the village of Nanu, 62-year-old farm worker Savita Singh blames climate change for a chemical infection that cost her a finger in August 2022.
When her husband moved to Delhi to work as a plumber, she was left alone to tend the couple's fields. As rice and wheat yields declined due to changing climate patterns and a wave of pest attacks, Singh's husband, who retained decision-making power, decided to increase the use of pesticides and insecticides. It was up to Singh, who had opposed the increases, to apply the chemicals.
"With the increase in pest attacks on farms, we have started using more than three times the amount of pesticides and fertilizers on our farms. Without any safety equipment, my hand was burned by the chemicals and one of my fingers had to be amputated," she said.
In Pilakhana, another village in Uttar Pradesh, 22-year-old wage laborer Babita Kumari suffered a stillbirth in 2021. This year she attributes this to the hard work she had to endure every day working for hours in a brick kiln in intense heat. Climate change has at least doubled the chances of the heat wave that hit the state this year, according to an analysis by Climate Central, an independent, U.S.-based group of scientists who developed a tool to measure climate change's contribution to changing daily temperatures to quantify.
"My mother and her mother all worked in brick kilns all their lives, but the heat wasn't that bad, even though they worked more than eight hours like me. But over the past six to seven years, the situation has worsened and it has become unbearable to withstand the heat, but what option do we have but to bear it," said Kumari, who lives in a makeshift camp with her husband.
Bhaskaran noted that women in India often take on primary roles in agriculture, while men migrate to urban areas, making women particularly vulnerable to the direct impacts of climate change. A government labor force survey for 2021-2022 shows that 75% of people working in agriculture are women. But according to a government agricultural census, only about 14% of agricultural land is owned by women.
For Bhaskaran, this paints a picture of women sacrificing their health by working long hours in intense heat, exposed to insecticides and pesticides, and with uncertain access to clean water. In addition, many are malnourished because "within patriarchal structures they often eat last and least," she said.
Poonam Muttreja is a women's rights activist who also heads the Population Foundation of India, a non-governmental organization that focuses on issues of population, family planning, reproductive health and gender equality. She said it is essential that COP28, the meeting in Dubai, takes concrete action to help women.
She said COP28 should go beyond providing financial assistance and actively promote and facilitate the integration of gender considerations into all climate-related policies, initiatives and actions.
"It should prioritize awareness programs that highlight the specific health challenges women face in the wake of climate change, as a crucial step toward increasing public knowledge. These efforts will also serve as a call to action for governments, institutions and communities to prioritize women's health and well-being as a central part of their climate initiatives," she added.
Anjal Prakash, a professor and research director at the Bharat Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business, coordinated a working group that examined gender for a recent assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He said international pressure will be needed to overcome some countries that have quietly resisted gender-sensitive climate policies due to conservative ideologies and political barriers.
Finding money will also be a huge challenge, he said.
Shweta Narayan, researcher and environmental justice activist at Health Care Without Harm, said women, children and the elderly are among the most vulnerable to extreme climate events. She saw reason for optimism at COP28 due to a special Health Day at the conference.
"There is certainly a very clear recognition that climate has health implications and that health needs to be looked at more seriously," she said.
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