Across the world, women are often the first to experience and suffer the horrors of human caused climate change. After a natural disaster strikes for example, women are the last to leave a devastated area because they take care of elderly parents and/or young children who are physically unable to just walk away to safety. Child marriage is also a known factor with climate change. When agriculture fails due to drought or floods, it is young girls who are taken out of school and forced into marriage. The family can no longer afford to feed themselves and marrying off a daughter or more is one less mouth to feed in a desperate response to the deteriorating environmental conditions for daily survival.
Gethin Chamberlain writing for The Guardian, makes the case that “As global warming exacerbates drought and floods, farmers’ incomes plunge – and girls as young as 13 are given away to stave off poverty.”
Why climate change is creating a new generation of child brides
Everyone has their own idea of what climate change looks like. For some, it’s the walrus struggling to find space on melting ice floes on Blue Planet II. For others, it’s an apocalyptic vision of cities disappearing beneath the waves. But for more and more girls across Africa, the most palpable manifestation of climate change is the baby in their arms as they sit watching their friends walk to school. The Brides of the Sun reporting project, funded by the European Journalism Centre, set out to try to assess the scale of what many experts are warning is a real and growing crisis: the emergence of a generation of child brides as a direct result of a changing climate.
And time and again, in villages from the south of Malawi to the east coast of Mozambique, the child brides and their parents told an increasingly familiar story. In recent years they had noticed the temperatures rising, the rains becoming less predictable and coming later and sometimes flooding where there had not been flooding before. Families that would once have been able to afford to feed and educate several children reported that they now faced an impossible situation.
None of the villages had any way of recording the changes scientifically, or indeed felt any urge to do so. All they knew was that the weather had changed and that where they used to be able to pay for their girls to go through school now they couldn’t. And the only solution was for one or more daughters to get married.
Sometimes it was the parents who made the decision. For the good of the rest of the family, a daughter had to be sacrificed. She would be taken out of school and found a husband, one less mouth to feed. Sometimes it was the girl herself who made the decision and forced it upon her parents. Unhappy, hungry, she hoped that a husband might be the answer.
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In 2015 the United Nations Population Fund estimated that 13.5 million children would marry under the age of 18 in that year alone – 37,000 child marriages every day – including 4.4 million married before they were 15. Across the whole of Africa, Unicef warned in 2015 that the total number of child brides could more than double to 310 million by 2050 if current trends continue.
There are many reasons for children marrying young. In some societies, it is regarded as simply practical; when children reach puberty, sexual behaviour starts to carry with it the risk of pregnancy. Elsewhere, poverty is the driver: when parents cannot afford to feed several children, it tends to be the girls who have to go.
How climate change is making drought and humanitarian disaster worse in East Africa
In a changing climate we can expect the unexpected – more extremes, more often. As David Carlson of the World Meteorological Organization said recently: ‘Even without a strong El Niño in 2017, we are seeing other remarkable changes across the planet that are challenging the limits of our understanding of the climate system. We are now in truly uncharted territory’.33 Today global average temperatures are one degree above pre-industrial levels and the effects in the region appear to be profound.34 Inertia in the climate system means that even if emissions are cut dramatically today, further increases in temperatures are still inevitable.
Even if global temperatures are limited to the 1.5 or well below 2 degrees set out in the Paris Agreement, it is highly plausible that this will still result in higher temperatures in East Africa.35 Temperatures are set to rise, but there is uncertainty on what long-term precipitation trends will be for the region.36 Most climate models, as set out in the IPCC's last assessment, suggest the region will get wetter due to climate change.37 Yet, in what is known as the ‘East Africa Climate Paradox’ observed trends show the opposite happening (see Box 4).38 Even if ultimately the drying trend goes into reverse, East Africa faces higher temperatures and decades of disruptive climate change. The impact that temperature increases alone will have on agriculture and livestock are likely to be significant, regardless of rainfall changes.39 What happens in the next two to three decades is a crucial question for science to study and governments to prepare for. Governments urgently need to help their communities to adapt to the possibility that the current devastating droughts will continue for years to come