Insecurity of land tenure and women vulnerability in climate change

Climate change is a serious problem all over the world which has been attracting more concern over last decades. Consequences of climate change with both short-term and long-term effects are becoming more obvious, and mostly one can feel the effects on the natural ecosystem, land use, land suitability and supply of land for settlement and agricultural productive activities. Although these effects are felt by the whole society, there are other factors that make some groups such as women more vulnerable than others. Many kinds of literature suggest that women insecurity of land tenure is the factor of women vulnerability in climate change, but the linkage of women land tenure security with their vulnerability is not clear, and needs further investigation. The objective of this paper is to explore the factors of women vulnerability in the rural area of developing countries, and then to find how land tenure insecurity reduce women adaptive capacity and make them especially vulnerable to effects of climate change. In order to achieve this objective, secondary data from the different case studies are used and discussed by the comparative analysis. Results of these cases confirm the importance of both quantitative and qualitative parameters of secure access in women vulnerability to climate change. Quantitative parameters in terms of inadequacy in the range of land right make women vulnerable mostly in facing with long-term effects of climate change on livelihood, natural resource use system, crop yield, and resource productivity. And qualitative factors in the protection of land rights for women increase their vulnerability by putting them at risk of being landless, homeless and facing with violence especially in facing with short-term effects of climate change. In addition, the result of this research highlight the important of social aspects as a link between women security of tenure and their vulnerability; Social norms, culture and religion are factors which affect the level of women vulnerability in climate change directly, and indirectly through insecurity of tenure.