Climate Change Is Forcing American Women From Their Homes

Climate Change Is Forcing American Women From Their Homes
4/26/2022 by Jena Brooker
Financial instability, housing insecurity and greater caregiving responsibilities make U.S. women more vulnerable to climate disasters.

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Erin Hillman, a member of the Karuk Tribe, takes in the damage to her home in the devastation that left scores of structures destroyed and thousands of acres burned by the Slater fire in Happy Camp, Calif., on Sept. 30, 2020. (Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)


On Sept. 8, 2020, Ashley Diaz and her two small children were asleep in their beds when Diaz heard a knock on the door. It was a neighbor warning them about an approaching wildfire. Diaz, who was seven months pregnant at the time, hesitated at first. She lived in Happy Camp, in northern California, where fires were commonplace. Twenty minutes later, she got a “bad feeling.” She hurriedly gathered what she could: some children’s clothing and her father’s ashes. As Diaz drove away from her home of 16 years, she saw the flames advance. “The house was literally going to be on fire,” she said. “If we had slept in another 10 minutes, I’m sure we would not have made it out,” she said.

The Slater Fire tore through the small community of Happy Camp (population 844), the homeland of the Karuk tribe, killing two and destroying some 200 homes, including Diaz’s. (Diaz is not a member of the Karuk tribe.) In losing her home to wildfire, Diaz and her family joined the growing ranks of Americans displaced by climate-related disasters. In 2020, disasters displaced people 1.7 million times in the U.S., according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a Switzerland-based organization. (The figures reflect the number of displacements and not the number of people affected, as some people are displaced multiple times in a year.)
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And women bear most of the burden. According to the United Nations, 80 percent of those displaced worldwide by climate change are women and children. There is limited gender-specific data on climate displacement in the United States—the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, does not break down data on those who seek out assistance in the wake of disasters by gender—but experts say the same factors that make women vulnerable to climate change globally, namely poverty and caregiving responsibilities, are present in the U.S.

Nearly 13 percent of women live below the poverty line in the U.S., compared to 10.6 percent of men. Nationally, 80 percent of single-parent households are headed by women. “Women are often impacted because they just have fewer resources, due to systemic inequity and injustice,” said Margaux Granat, founding director of EnGen Collaborative, a Washington-based consultancy. She pointed to Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, as an event that showed the disproportionate impact of climate-related disasters on women, particularly women of color. Women were more likely to live in poverty and head up single family households before the storm. Afterward, they experienced a spike in gender-based violence, they were more likely to be unemployed and had the greatest difficulties in returning to their homes.


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https://msmagazine.com/2022/04/26/climate-disaster-change-usa-women-homes/