The climate crisis may be a collective problem, but its impacts do not fall equally. Women and girls often bear the heaviest burdens.

November 30, 2023

Editor’s note

This story is part of As Equals, CNN’s ongoing series on gender inequality. For information about how As Equals is funded and more, check out our FAQ.

Climate change acts as a threat multiplier, finding existing injustices and amplifying them. Women and girls already grapple with gender inequality, but when extreme weather devastates a community, the UN found that inequalities worsen: Intimate partner violence spikes, girls are pulled from school, daughters are married early, and women and girls forced from their homes face a higher risk of sexual exploitation and trafficking.

“When we look at who’s affected worse, who’s on the frontlines of the climate crisis, it’s primarily women — women in poor and vulnerable countries,” Selwin Hart, UN Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Action and Just Transition, told CNN. “And unfortunately, our policies or strategies are really not geared to address this challenge.”

To explore the complex links between gender and climate change, CNN worked with seven women photojournalists who spent time with women and girls in seven countries across the Global South to document the challenges they face.

This visual project gives a snapshot of the myriad ways the human-induced climate crisis is upending their lives, but also shows how they are fighting back. Every image shows both struggle and survival, the battle to live a decent life in a swiftly changing climate.

Girls’ education in Nigeria

The Center for Girls’ Education runs a series of programs in Nigeria to help girls stay in school. One in every five of the world’s children who are out of school is in Nigeria, according to UNICEF, and it is girls who are impacted the most.

Photographs by Taiwo Aina for CNN

More than 10 million children between 5 and 14 years old are absent from classrooms across Nigeria, according to UNICEF. For girls, the statistics are even bleaker: In states in the northeast and northwest of the country, fewer than half attend school.

This education crisis is the result of a tangle of factors, including poverty, geography and gender discrimination, the UN agency adds. But against the backdrop of these individual factors is the broader context of the climate crisis.

Nigeria is growing hotter and dryer, and extreme weather such as flash floods and landslides are becoming fiercer and more frequent. Climate disasters can make schools inaccessible and classrooms unsafe. Communities struggling to cope with extreme weather sometimes turn to their children to help or to earn extra money to support the family. And girls, whose attendance at school is already discouraged in some communities, are often most affected.

For every additional year the average girl attends school, her country’s resilience to climate disasters can be expected to improve by 3.2 points on an index that measures vulnerability to climate-related disasters, according to estimates from the Brookings Institution.

There are efforts to support girls’ education and equip them with the resources to cope with a fast-changing climate. The Center for Girls’ Education in the northern Nigerian city of Zaria runs programs to help girls stay in school and offers training on how to cope with the impacts of extreme weather.

“I feel when we give the girls education on climate change, how to mitigate it, it will go a long way in helping the girls in how to support themselves in times of difficulties, and even help them prepare for it,” said Habiba Mohammed, director of the Center for Girls’ Education.

Asiya Sa’idu, 17

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