Climate and Gender Impacts of the Traditional Energy Sectors
- Halima Ahmed
- Jul 16
- 4 min read
While Women Working Worldwide’s focus is on improving the rights of women within global supply chains, we felt it would be useful to highlight the challenges and opportunities within the energy sector as world markets fluctuate due to the wars in Ukraine and Middle East. Energy, its price, extraction and use affects every part of our supply chains and our lives. Plus, the energy industry has a disproportionate impact on women through a lack of employment opportunities, lack of a gender-sensitive green energy transition, as well as its current environmental and climate impacts. In this blog, we draw attention to how these impacts affect women and highlight ways in which women’s rights can be realised and voices can be heard within this industry.
Traditional Energy Sector
As a main driver of the climate crisis, the traditional energy sector (coal, oil and gas)) continues to impact women - especially those in the global majority. The extraction of oil, gas and coal has localised impacts, including pollution caused by spills and flaring, land dispossession and reduced access to agricultural land for food production.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) report that women only account for 16% of the traditional energy sector, compared with 39% of the global labour force, however it is the climate impacts of this extractive industry that continue to be most strongly felt by women.
Let’s talk about pollution…
Pollution from the traditional energy sector shows itself in various forms, including oil spills, gas flaring and air particulate pollution, both localised to drilling sites and refineries and further afield. This disproportionately affects women, who are often highly exposed to pollution through their active roles in water collection and agricultural work.
Taking Shell’s long-standing presence in the Niger Delta as an example, we’ve seen how women who live and work in rural areas, closer to oil exploration sites, are worst affected by the pollution caused by frequent oil spills by Shell’s subsidiary company Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd. (SPDC). These spills dissipate into the soil on agricultural land and waterways. The gas flaring (nitrogen, methane, sulphur oxides) results in air pollution and acid rain; increasing cases of respiratory diseases, cancers, and reproductive health challenges, and acidifying soil, rivers and lakes, impacting crop yields and depleting aquatic life.[1]
Women, Land Access, and the Climate Crisis
It is all too common-place for governments to sell indigenous land for oil-related activities. The courts, and women’s access to them, are key to enabling cases like the ground-breaking judgement to stop the sale of 500,000 acres of Waorani land, in Ecuador, to oil companies - A win for the Waorani people and a glint of hope for land sovereignty at the mercy of the oil and gas industry.
A protest following an oil spill in Waorani land
In the Niger Delta, women’s lack of land rights in the Niger Delta hinders their access to compensation for the “adverse impact of oil-related activities on their farming” [2]. More widely, women often lack formal ownership of land and property, making them disproportionately vulnerable to losing access to compensation and resources during resettlement processes, driven by the expansion of traditional energy projects or climate events.
The Legacy of Polly Higgins - Defining Ecocide
Whilst on the theme of environmental justice, it would be remiss not to attribute the remarkable work of the late Polly Higgins, who coined the word ‘Ecocide’, defining it in her legal proposal to the UN Law Commission as “extensive loss, damage or destruction of ecosystems of a given territory(ies)… such that the peaceful enjoyment of the inhabitants has been or will be severely diminished.” This was to this definition that the late Pope Francis referred in his call for ecocide to become a crime (November 2019). The aim of this law is to disrupt human activity that is harming the natural world, as well as imposing a legal duty of care on all nations to address naturally occurring ecocide (e.g. tsunamis, floods, rising sea levels). This can help protect small island states such as the Maldives, requiring that all nations have a duty to act to prepare, and support nations impacted by climate change events.
In summary, the climate and gender impacts of the extraction of oil, gas and coal, feeding the global traditional energy sector are most concentrated in rural communities. These communities are situated near extraction sites, such as the Niger Delta, and have poor representation in the justice system, making them vulnerable to exploitation of land rights, and losing their land to corporations for resource extraction. The impacts of burning oil, gas and coal on both domestic and industrial scales have localised and global impacts specifically on women carrying out labour work such as water collection and agriculture. We can also see how changing the legal frameworks in which we function can help protect all people and the earth, especially when we start viewing the earth as a living entity which all nations have a duty to protect, as Polly Higgins proposed in her work on Ecocide.
What next?
We will continue to recognise our global supply chains’ reliance on energy and will promote, whenever possible, energy reduction and green renewable energy. We will also highlight the disproportionate impact the climate crisis has on women. We will continue to support those who are working to strengthen the voices of women in communities most affected by the extraction of oil, gas and coal, and those who fight for greater representation of women in environmental justice procedures, particularly looking at land rights. The failings of the traditional energy sector cannot be repeated if we are to achieve a just energy transition. Meanwhile, we will continue to work to enable women’s rights in existing traditional energy supply chains.
References
Ekhator, E.O., Obani, P.: Women and Environmental Justice Issues in Nigeria: An Evaluation. (2022)
Babatunde, A.O.: Oil exploitation and food insecurity in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. J Mod Afr Stud. 61, 165–187 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X23000010
FURTHER READING
Women must be empowered: https://news.mongabay.com/2024/10/indigenous-women-in-the-amazon-must-be-empowered-interview-with-nemonte-nenquimo/
Blog written by Louisa Winch March 2025 for WWW
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