COVID-19′s Impact on American Women’s Food Insecurity Foreshadows Vulnerabilities to Climate Change

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on human lives and the global economy, laying bare existing inequities, and galvanizing large numbers to call for change. Women are feeling the effects of this crisis more than others. This paper explores the pre-COVID relationships and amplified negative feedback loops between American women’s economic insecurity, lack of safety, and food insecurity. We then examine how COVID-19 is interacting with these intersecting risks and demonstrate how climate change will likely similarly intensify these feedback loops. The COVID-19 pandemic may be revealing vulnerabilities that societies will face in the wake of an increasingly warming world. It is also an opportunity to build resilience, inclusiveness, and equity into our future, and can help inform how to include gender equity in both COVID-19 and climate recovery policies. Finally, we identify possible strategies to build resilience, specifically highlighting that gendered economic empowerment may create a buffer against environmental health hazards and discuss how these strategies could be integrated into a women-centered Green New Deal.

Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on refugee communities in San Diego, California: A participatory action research cross-sectional study

“…Female respondents in this sample reported more adverse community effects of COVID-19 than men, and those responses were significant for seeing more food insecurity and school interruptions. This is very much in line with findings from a wide range of settings which find that women's burden of unpaid care has escalated dramatically during this pandemic ( Chauhan, 2020 ; Seedat & Rondon, 2021 ; Xue & McMunn, 2021 ), and that food insecurity is of increasing concern to women trying to feed their families in the context of increasing food prices and mobility restrictions ( Belsey-Priebe et al, 2021 ; Hamadani et al, 2020 ). While the questions in this survey were asking respondents about what they noticed in their communities, rather than their personal experiences, women may be more aware of issues and concerns facing other women in their communities who are similar to themselves (the concept of social network homophily) ( McPherson et al, 2001 ).…”

COVID-19, Climate Change, and Conflict in Honduras: A food system disruption analysis

“…Gender-based violence, which affects household food security ( Okpara and Anugwa, 2022 ), can be impacted by changing social and economic dynamics within households as a result of both climate change ( Caridade et al, 2022 ) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Chandan et al, 2020); Honduras saw a 14% increase in reports of gender-based violence between February and May 2022 ( Fromm et al, 2022 ). Scholars have described “the three Cs” as “uneven crises” with compounding, inequitable impacts on vulnerable populations including women, lower-income households, racially/ethnically marginalized groups, and communities in climate hotspots ( Belsey-Priebe et al, 2021 ; Sultana, 2021 ).…”

Understanding Needs and Potentials for Gender-Balanced Empowerment and Leadership in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Africa

“…It is worth mentioning that 'COVID-19 and the associated terms/keywords were not included in any cluster, meaning that the number of works in this domain with a connection to the COVID-19 pandemic is still significantly low, even though there are works on climate change-gender without connection to leadership/empowerment, e.g., [105][106][107].…”