Rural Women and Environmental Sustainability: Challenges and Contributions

In rural communities across the Global South, women are not passive bystanders to environmental change – they are at the centre of it. They collect the water, tend the land, gather the fuel, and hold generations of ecological knowledge in their hands. Yet when forests disappear and rivers dry up, it is these same women who absorb the heaviest blow. Understanding the relationship between rural women and environmental sustainability is not just a gender issue; it is a resource management issue, a policy issue, and ultimately, a survival issue.

How environmental degradation shifts the burden onto women 🔗

Environmental degradation does not affect everyone equally. When forests are cleared, topsoil erodes, and water sources dry up, the consequences fall disproportionately on rural women. This is because in most developing regions, women carry the primary responsibility for securing household resources – food, water, and fuel – a burden that expands dramatically when the environment deteriorates.

According to the FAO, on average women already spend four hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work, while men spend less than two. Climate change and land degradation add directly to this burden by making essential resources harder to access. What once took an hour now takes a half-day walk. What was once a reliable spring becomes a seasonal trickle.

The loss of forest cover intensifies this in a cascading way. Trees regulate water cycles, hold soil in place, and provide fodder and fuelwood. When they disappear, rural women must travel farther and work harder for the same resources. Research consistently shows that in the aftermath of droughts or disasters, women and girls are the ones walking farther for water and fuel, or skipping meals to feed their families. This is not an abstract statistic – it is the daily reality for millions of women in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.

Land degradation compounds the problem further. Degraded land produces fewer crops, which increases food insecurity and pushes women to work longer hours on shrinking productive plots. At the same time, energy crises in rural areas force women to rely on harmful fuel sources, exposing them to serious respiratory health risks from indoor burning of biomass. The environmental and health costs are deeply intertwined, and women sit at the intersection of both.

Water and fuel collection: the hidden labour of environmental decline 🔗

One of the most direct and measurable impacts of environmental degradation on rural women is the time and physical effort spent collecting water and fuel. These are not minor inconveniences. They are full-scale labour obligations that compete with income-generating work, education, and rest.

A growing body of research recognises women as the primary managers of natural resources, with studies citing women’s roughly 90% involvement in collecting water and fuelwood in developing countries. Despite this enormous contribution, the work remains largely invisible in economic data and policy frameworks.

The climate dimension makes this worse over time. Research published in Nature Climate Change found that historically, a 1°C rise in temperature increased daily water collection times by four minutes. Under a high-emissions scenario, daily water collection times for women without household water access could increase by 30% globally by 2050, and up to 100% in some regions. That is not a marginal increase – it represents hours of additional unpaid labour every single day, deepening time poverty and limiting women’s capacity to participate in economic or civic life.

Studies from sub-Saharan Africa document how declining water availability multiplies women’s workload while reducing their productive output. Women are compelled by entrenched gender divisions of labour to continue collecting water and fuelwood regardless of how far or difficult the task becomes, because the alternative – households without water or heat – is not a viable option. The work simply has to get done, and the social expectation is that women will do it.

Fuel collection follows a similar pattern. As forests are depleted, women travel increasingly farther to gather firewood. In many areas, the shift from nearby woodland to distant scrubland adds hours to a woman’s day and increases physical strain, the risk of injury, and exposure to violence during long solitary walks.

Women in environmental movements: organised resistance from the ground up 🔗

Rural women are not only victims of environmental decline – they have also been among the most effective and committed defenders of natural ecosystems. When their livelihoods are directly at stake, women mobilise with clarity of purpose and a depth of ecological understanding that comes from lived experience.

The Chipko movement: women who embraced the forests 🔗

No discussion of women and environmental activism is complete without examining the Chipko movement of 1970s India. Originating in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, the movement began when commercial logging companies threatened the forests that local communities depended on for firewood, fodder, and water. The word “chipko” means “to hug” or “to cling” in Hindi – a reference to the tactic of physically embracing trees to prevent loggers from felling them.

While the movement had male organisers including Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna, it was the women who became its most powerful force. In 1974 near the village of Reni, more than 2,000 trees were scheduled to be felled. When government officials summoned the village men away on a pretext, the women, led by Gaura Devi, stood in the forest and refused to let the loggers proceed. Their intervention forced the loggers to withdraw and prompted the state government to establish an investigative committee, eventually resulting in a 10-year ban on commercial logging in the area.

Women’s leadership in Chipko was not accidental. Women were primarily responsible for fetching water, collecting firewood, and ensuring food security – all resources directly threatened by deforestation. Their participation was driven by immediate, practical stakes. They understood better than anyone what forest loss would mean for their households and communities.

The movement achieved a decisive victory in 1980 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi issued a 15-year ban on tree felling in the Himalayan regions, allowing forests to regenerate. It also influenced the Forest Conservation Act of 1980 and inspired similar movements across India, including the Appiko movement in Karnataka. Internationally, Chipko became a foundational reference point for ecofeminism – the philosophical and activist framework connecting the domination of women with the domination of nature.

Beyond protest, Chipko women went on to set up cooperatives to guard local forests, joined land rotation schemes for fodder collection, helped replant degraded land, and established nurseries stocked with species they selected themselves. The movement was as much about building sustainable livelihoods as it was about resisting destruction.

The Green Belt Movement: reforestation as women’s empowerment 🔗

Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, founded by Wangari Maathai in 1977, offers another landmark example of women-led environmental action. The movement focused on restoring Kenya’s rapidly diminishing forests and empowering rural women through environmental preservation, with a particular emphasis on planting indigenous trees. It created a direct link between environmental restoration and women’s economic and social agency, demonstrating that conservation and empowerment are not separate goals – they reinforce each other.

Women’s traditional knowledge in land and water management 🔗

Rural women carry knowledge about local ecosystems that has been built and refined over generations. This is not informal or anecdotal knowledge – it is practical, tested, and ecologically sophisticated. It covers soil conditions, seasonal water patterns, plant species useful for medicine or nutrition, and sustainable harvesting techniques. In many communities, this knowledge is held primarily by women because they are the ones who interact with these resources daily.

Indigenous and rural women in developing countries produce up to 80% of food, and in doing so have developed adaptive practices for working with the land sustainably. These include switching to drought-resistant seed varieties, using organic soil management techniques, preserving crop biodiversity, and leading community-based reforestation efforts. These are not small-scale improvisations – they are structured knowledge systems that contribute directly to food security and ecological resilience.

The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action explicitly called on governments to promote knowledge and research on the role of women – particularly rural and indigenous women – in irrigation, watershed management, and sanitation. This was a formal recognition at the highest international level that women’s expertise in water management is not peripheral but central to sustainable resource governance.

In forestry contexts, women’s traditional knowledge of ecosystem relationships – which tree species hold water, which plants restore soil fertility, which harvesting practices allow regeneration – has proven invaluable in community forest management. Yet this knowledge is systematically underrepresented in formal decision-making processes, which tend to be dominated by men and shaped by externally imposed technical frameworks.

When women are excluded, things go wrong 🔗

The consequences of excluding women from resource management decisions are well-documented. In one case from Nepal, a community forestry user group introduced a rule permitting collection of only dry biomass fuelwood – without consulting the women who were the primary resource users. Women unaware of the new rule continued collecting both dry and wet biomass according to established practice. They were apprehended and could not cook dinner that evening because they had been left without adequate fuel. The story illustrates the cost of excluding women’s knowledge and consent from decisions that directly govern their lives.

Inclusive governance produces better outcomes. Studies show that when women participate in forest management committees, water user associations, and land rights negotiations, there are measurable improvements in both environmental and social outcomes. Women’s longer-term orientation toward resource sustainability, grounded in daily dependence on those resources, tends to favour conservation practices over short-term exploitation.

At the political level, research shows clear linkages between women’s leadership and climate action. Countries with higher proportions of women in parliament are more likely to ratify international environmental treaties and implement stricter climate policies. Gender-diverse firms tend to invest more in renewable energy and show better environmental governance. The pattern is consistent: where women have voice, environmental outcomes improve.

Closing the gap between contribution and recognition 🔗

The relationship between rural women and the environment is defined by a profound contradiction. Women are the primary users and managers of natural resources in much of the developing world. They carry the knowledge, do the work, and bear the costs of environmental decline. Yet they remain largely excluded from the institutions that make decisions about those same resources.

Closing this gap requires more than symbolic gestures. It means ensuring women have secure land rights, representation in resource governance bodies, access to labour-saving technologies, and formal recognition of their ecological knowledge. The Chipko movement showed what is possible when rural women assert their stake in the environment. Decades of research have confirmed what they demonstrated through action: sustainable environmental management and women’s empowerment are not separate goals. They are the same goal.

What do you think? If women’s traditional ecological knowledge is demonstrably effective in sustaining land and water resources, why has its integration into formal environmental policy remained so slow? And what might change if rural women had equal representation in the governance bodies that manage the forests, water, and land they depend on?

References

1. https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/the-climate-crisis-is-unjust-for-rural-women–fao-gender-expert/en
2. https://mediatorsbeyondborders.org/the-role-of-women-in-equitable-and-sustainable-natural-resource-management-governance-social-equity-and-democracy/
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652623026380
4. https://www.recoftc.org/stories/closer-nature-women-livelihoods-and-community-forestry
5. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02037-8
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378023000754
7. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chipko-movement
8. https://www.clearias.com/ecofeminism/
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipko_movement
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_the_environment
11. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/women
12. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/women-and-agricultural-water-resource-management