Gender-differentiated adaptation and social protection: Applications and future directions for analysis and policy

Background

Global temperatures have already risen by around 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels and are projected to reach 1.5°C in the near term if emissions continue on their current trajectory. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense, including worsening heatwaves, shifting seasons, and droughts and flooding. These changes have well-documented impacts on agricultural systems and the wider economy.

In response, a growing body of empirical research has examined the socioeconomic effects of climate shocks, highlighting persistent inequalities in adaptive capacity, particularly among women and young people in rural areas. Social protection may offer a scalable pathway to strengthen climate resilience.

By improving the resource endowments of poor households, and in some cases incorporating components that target women, social protection programmes can support adaptation. However, there remains limited understanding of how existing programmes promote adaptation practices among women, and which design features are most effective in advancing women’s climate adaptation and contributions to mitigation.

Description

This workshop will explore methods for measuring climate shocks, from rainfall variability to floods and heatwaves, followed by applications in two contexts (Mali and Bangladesh) that focus on how weather shocks affect poor rural households and the role of social protection in supporting men’s and women’s adaptive responses. It will open with a brief overview of different approaches to identifying and defining climate shocks, discussing the features of robust climate indicators, and reviewing gold-standard measurement practices in the socioeconomic literature.

Building on this discussion, the session will examine recent developments in the field. These include the increasing use of objective measures - such as rainfall records, satellite-derived flood maps, and hydrological modelling - rather than self-reported shock exposure, enabling more accurate and spatially granular definitions of exposure to extreme weather. Forecasting methods have also evolved to better align with policy objectives, including the improved targeting of beneficiaries in flood-vulnerable areas. This enhances the potential for social protection to support ex ante risk mitigation strategies, such as anticipatory cash transfers.

Session 2 and 3 will zoom in on applications in Bangladesh and Mali, which use high resolution remote sensing data to evaluate the impact of social protection programs on gender-differentiated adaptive behavior and outcomes. The speakers will discuss the relevance of the heavy-rainfall shock and flooding indicators in both studies and how they were constructed and applied in the analysis. They will present the findings, with particular attention to the role of social protection in improving the ability of men and women to adapt and their subsequent outcomes.

Session 4 will provide conclusions and policy recommendations, encouraging discussion around future directions for policy analysis. It will highlight the importance of social protection in enhancing the adaptive capacity of men and women and current knowledge gaps that prevent optimizing program designs. It will also outline how certain design features may improve outcomes for men and women based on preliminary evidence, and how new climate data products could be integrated to improve the targeting in future designs.