Global warming affects Vietnam's women hardest

And as farm wives and daughters then have to return to the family home to prepare meals and organize their children's activities, there is less time for them to relax or even to improve their positions through education or take advantage of health care.

“We suffer more, much more from the changing weather than men,” said Nguyen Thi Lanh, 52, from central Quang Tri Province, who spoke in Hanoi at an international conference on population and climate change.

Lanh, a mother of four, said typhoons hitting her commune, Hai Ba in Hai Lang District, were more frequent and stronger. After Ketsana storm in September, she said the devastation was depressing.

“When my children and I came back from the shelter, no pigs or chickens were still alive and part of the roof had been destroyed,” said Lanh. “I realized that I must start over again and asked for a new loan from the bank, to which I still owe 10 million dong (US$550).”

Lanh, however, said it was a double shock for her as she had lost everything in a storm 10 years previously. Lanh's husband and her two older children work in Ho Chi Minh City to help the family survive, particularly since the weather began to swing dramatically from floods to droughts. She works alone to pay for food and education for her two younger children.

“My husband usually sends me 1 million ($55) a month, but sometimes nothing when he can't earn enough,” said Lanh. “So I work harder and harder, seeking extra work.

“I can eat vegetables to fill my stomach,” said Lanh, looking thin in her dress, “but my children need both rice and meat to grow and study if they are to have a better future.”

With no male at home, Lanh must do everything — farming, cooking, taking care of the children and, in the storm season, climbing up to strengthen the roof.

“We all know how to climb onto the roof and wait to be rescued, so it is nothing to climb and strengthen the house with rope and string,” Lanh said. And as she cannot afford a ladder, she climbs up to the roof on one of the pillars supporting the house.

Bruce Campbell, United Nations Population Fund Representative in Vietnam, said the whole world was talking about carbon credits, carbon trading and emissions targets, “but hardly anyone has been talking about the people whose activities contribute to those emissions or about those affected by climate change.” He said it was important that the climate change debate was reframed, putting people at the center.

“Climate policies that fail to take people, especially women, into account will neither make climate change manageable nor shield anyone from the potentially disastrous impacts,” said Campbell.

“Over the past 100 years, the temperature of the earth's surface has risen 0.74 degrees Celsius. This seemingly small increase has already been linked to more severe and frequent storms, extended droughts, melting glaciers and rising sea levels, all of which are taking a toll on lives and livelihoods, especially in developing countries.”

According to the ministry of natural resources and environment, by the end of this century, the average temperature in Vietnam will rise 2.3 degrees Celsius, and the sea level will rise by at least 0.75 meters. Deputy minister Nguyen Van Duc said the changes would have negative impacts on Vietnam's poverty reduction, millennium development goals and sustainable development.

The impacts of climate change, which include rising sea levels in low-lying coastal areas as well as severe droughts and floods, also suggest that an increasing number of people will migrate in the future for mainly environmental reasons.

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