Researchers have found that women and girls in the conflict-torn nation of South Sudan are facing greater health risks and worsened inequality due to the negative impacts of climate change as the country battles record-breaking heat.
The findings published ahead of International Women’s Day marked on March 8, by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group of scientists, said February’s heatwave was made about 10 times more likely – and 2 degrees Celsius hotter – by human-caused climate change.
Last month, heatwaves in the country saw dozens of students collapse from heat stroke in the capital Juba, causing the country to close down schools for weeks, making it the second time the country has shut schools during a heatwave in the periods between February and March. It did the same when temperatures reached as high as 45 degrees Celsius in March last year.
These occurrences are unusual as the hottest temperatures of the year are not usually expected to occur as early as February, when this year’s extreme heat was observed, said the researchers.
Most schools in the country are built with iron roofs that trap heat and do not have air conditioning, creating very hot conditions for students, WWA said in a statement. High temperatures are expected to persist throughout March.
In the face of these extreme weather events, women and girls tend to suffer more as school closures disrupt children’s education and make it harder for girls to return to learning, the researchers said. Additionally, jobs and household chores typically done by women expose them to dangerous temperatures and increase the risk they will suffer heat-related illnesses, the analysis found.
Improving ventilation, planting trees and painting schools lighter colours can help reduce
temperatures in classrooms and keep schools open, said Kiswendsida Guigma, a climate scientist at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre in Burkina Faso. Adapting the school calendar and class schedules can also help avoid severe disruptions to education, he added.
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Persistent gender roles – as well as the need to care for children and a lack of other options to avoid exposure to excruciating heat – means that in South Sudan, which has high levels of poverty, today’s frequent heatwaves hit women harder, deepening the divide between genders, said Friederike Otto, WWA’s lead and a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.
She said the burning of fossil fuels has worsened extreme weather such that the people who are already struggling under unequal conditions experience the most harm. Globally women are more likely to “die during extreme weather events”, as well as experience food shortages and violence after them, she added.
The solution is to reduce these inequalities and cut planet-heating emissions from using fossil fuels, she said.
Miscarriages and stillbirths
The study, carried out by 17 researchers and scientists from universities and meteorological agencies in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Uganda, the US, the UK and elsewhere, found that the seven-day maximum heat in the South Sudan region this year would have been “extremely unlikely” if the world had not warmed by roughly 1.3 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial times. A similar week-long heat event would have been around 4C cooler without global warming of 1.3C, they added.
The researchers also found that the intensifying heatwaves increased the chance of miscarriage and stillbirths, making pregnancy and childbirth even more dangerous in South Sudan, which has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, with 1,223 women dying for every 100,000 births.
Emmanuel Raju, one the study’s authors from the University of Copenhagen, said women and girls continue to bear disproportionate climate change impacts globally as a result of existing social inequities.
In the Global South, this “vicious cycle” often places an ongoing debt burden on women and leads to increased responsibilities and hardships such as care-giving, reduced work – particularly in the informal sector – and walking longer distances for water.
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Intense heatwaves with temperatures as high as 40C are no longer rare events in South Sudan because of climate change, the researchers found. In today’s climate, with around 1.3C of human-caused global warming, similar extreme heat events in February can be expected about once a decade, they added.
Unless countries rapidly move away from fossil fuels, such heatwaves are expected to occur every year once warming reaches 2.6C as expected by 2100, they warned.
Sarah Kew, a WWA researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, said dangerous 40C-plus heatwaves are becoming the new normal in South Sudan.
“Once rare, these episodes of high temperatures are occurring every two years,” she said, posing huge challenges for people in South Sudan and particularly women. “Without a rapid transition to a world without fossil fuels, heatwaves will continue to get even more dangerous.”
