Gender and climate change: from impact to discourses

This article examines how dominant discourses frame the climate change debate as a scientific, gender neutral problem, and thus obscure the fact that it has significant gendered dimensions. An analysis of how these discourses emerge from and work to perpetuate prevailing gender roles and relations is useful in exposing the sets of unquestioned assumptions that inform the climate change debate. The author also argues that the literature contributes to a narrow understanding of gender, a fixation on ‘impacts’ that are material and measurable, and the view of women from the South as primarily victims of ecological crises.