Disasters Are Gendered: What’s New? - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 262

(UNEP) and the UN Offi ce for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), as well as local
governments everywhere, are eager to improve systems of warnings, and “early
warning” is one of the most robust areas of attention and funding in the domain of
disaster risk reduction (DRR).
A commitment to gender awareness in developing and deploying early warning
systems is given an offi cial nod in many discussions of approaches to early warning.
For example, a recent early warning “checklist” for developing a “people-centered”
warning approach notes the importance of gender:
In developing early warning systems it is essential to recognize that different groups have
different vulnerabilities according to culture, gender or other characteristics that infl uence
their capacity to effectively prepare for, prevent and respond to disasters. Women and men
often play different roles in society and have different access to information in disaster situ-
ations. In addition, the elderly, disabled and socio-economically disadvantaged are often
more vulnerable. (UNISDR 2006 , p. 3)
And later in this document, the expectations of specifi c gender-sensitive early
warning systems are mentioned:
Warning alerts and messages [must be] tailored to the specifi c needs of those at risk (e.g. for
diverse cultural, social, gender, linguistic and educational backgrounds) (UNISDR 2006 , p. 6).
But despite policy exhortations, the implementation of gender-aware early warn-
ing lags far behind.
For disasters for which there is a reasonably long forecast horizon, manual and
localized systems of warnings are still widely used and may represent the most
practical means of disseminating warnings. Posting notices in public spaces, for
example - or conveying warnings verbally, at centrally located public spaces - is
still a favored low-tech method of notifi cation for slow-onset disasters such as
typhoons. However, in many cultures women are excluded from public spaces, so
notices posted or warnings conveyed in “men's spaces” won't be seen by women.
The high death rate of women in the Bangladesh fl oods of 1991 is often attributed
to this double disadvantage: in a highly sex-segregated society, warning information
was transmitted by males to males in public spaces where males congregated on the
assumption that this would be communicated to the rest of the family - which by
and large did not occur (Fordham 2001 ; Khonder 1996 ). Further, almost everywhere
in the world, more women than men are illiterate. In communities where women's
illiteracy is high, relying on written notices posted in public will further skew the
gendered effectiveness of early warning.
Using “village crier” systems to broadcast alerts has proven more effective in
bringing information literally to the doorsteps of households. In Bangladesh in
2007, for example, 40,000 Red Crescent volunteers with megaphones were mobi-
lized on bicycles to warn about Cyclone Sidr (PreventionWeb 2007 ). In tandem with
a cyclone shelter system the government had built after 1991, the megaphone warn-
ings were credited for the sharply reduced number of deaths from Sidr. There is no
gendered analysis of the effectiveness of these efforts, although anecdotal reports
suggest that they did little to improve the gender skew in deaths; the women:men
ratio of deaths from Sidr was 5:1, about the same as in 1991 (Ahmad 2011 ).