HAVE you ever considered if or how environmental disasters impact women and men differently?

Local resident Mary Picard, United Nations consultant and international law expert, has been questioning this for many years. And you’re invited to come along to her latest Worthwhile Conversations at the Portland Library tomorrow at 11am to find out more.

So, why is it important, how does it affect you, and how does it affect others?

For starters, if you are one of the many volunteers in Portland, a city which boasts one of the biggest percentages of volunteers in Victoria, then it affects you. And if you have ever been involved in disaster management or recovery, from either side of the fence, then it affects you.

Learning about disasters and climate change with a gender equality lens can help to make your community and the wider world a better place by sharing the knowledge and empowering others to help themselves.

For the past two years, Ms Picard has been working on a gender action plan for an international agreement on disaster risk reduction for the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) office.

The agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, provides relevant countries with concrete actions to protect development gains from the risk of disaster. The research work behind the new Gender Action Plan exposed a post-disaster factor not previously considered from a traditionally paternalistic viewpoint.

“What we were finding was that women’s lives were being disproportionally impacted following disasters because their specific issues weren’t being planned for,” Ms Picard said.

“And their issues weren’t planned for because traditionally, emergency services both in Australia and overseas have been run by men, who often fail to recognise the roles and needs of women in disasters.

“Some women are doing direct response work and a lot are doing unpaid recovery work and not being integrated into the formal recovery systems (and because) they are busy supporting the community and their families, this sets them back economically each time.

“This happens because women generally aren’t involved enough in the planning and preparedness and the different impacts on women and girls aren’t being noticed,” Ms Picard said.

This includes things such as basic access to sexual and reproductive health (e.g. contraception and obstetrics) because the traditional medical response focuses first on trauma care and not, for example, how pregnant women will cope in times of crisis.

“During the Pakistan floods two years ago, women were giving birth in the pouring rain beside the road, with no shelter.”

But it is also about economic recovery. “A lot of people don’t understand why, if you have gender inequality before a hazard hits, you’re going to have worse inequality afterwards because of who has got access to resources and who’s got access to power and decision making.

 “For example, in Fiji following Cyclone Winston in 2016, many women who had been supplementing the family protein and providing most of the fruit and vegetables from their gardens, and doing offshore fishing, gathering sand crabs, coconuts et cetera, found all this was devasted by the cyclone. But none of it was counted as an economic loss in the way the statistics were calculated, so women didn’t get compensation for these losses. They still needed to go and buy the things they used to grow and replant their food gardens.

“More women need to get in there and say, ‘No, that really was a loss and we need to be compensated to renew that and replace it’.”

While the UNDRR action plan is primarily internationally focused, much of it is relevant to Australia, Ms Picard said. For example, the increase in gender-based violence in the immediate follow-up and recovery period after disasters.

“The extreme stress of disaster puts massive strain on any cracks that were already there in families with any behavioural issues around violence and control, and it gets worse.

“After the Victorian Black Saturday fires in 2009, a research study done on men who were traumatised from fighting fires and didn’t have adequate follow-up services, found some developed violent behaviours towards their partners where they never had before.

“The women found it really hard to get support because people were saying ‘he’s a hero’ … But in the fire services now they’re offering more proactive support for the men and women who’ve been fighting to ensure they don’t carry on these traumas, so that’s one of the good things that are happening.

“Another good thing is that the numbers of women involved in emergency response are increasing, and there are efforts to make those workplaces much more friendly for women. There is an Australian group of women and men in the emergency services called Champions for Change who are doing a good job on advocacy for gender equality in the services and their approaches to response.

“If you don’t plan around the different work roles and the different economic situations with men and women then you’re not planning properly, and if you don’t involve women in that process then you’re also not planning properly because men won’t know everything about women’s perspective.”

Ultimately, Ms Picard hopes Worthwhile Conversations will help people to make the connection between disasters and climate change, and between what’s happening in other countries and in Australia with a whole-of-society approach to emergencies and recovery.

“It’s important that we understand that disasters don’t affect everyone the same way and that they’re not gender neutral; that we understand the different needs in a community and have everyone involved in the planning and the recovery.

“It’s all about making those connections between increasing disasters and climate change in Australia, who’s involved in the planning, and who is affected differently so we can have a better planning response.”

People coming along to Worthwhile Conversations tomorrow can expect to walk away with a new view of the world, how to apply it to their own roles, and how to help women feel empowered to break away from the traditional model of disaster response, Ms Picard said.

“The idea is not to disrupt societies, but show how having separate consultations with women is important in empowering them about what their needs and rights are and that they’re entitled to have these needs met.”