Making waves: Data for advancing gender-responsive ocean sustainability

Making Waves provides a novel evidence base on the gender–ocean nexus, spanning all three dimensions of the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. The report shows that exposure to coastal flooding, sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion can compound existing social and economic inequalities, including through increased unpaid care responsibilities, livelihood constraints and health impacts. This reinforces the importance of integrating gender analysis into disaster and climate risk assessments rather than looking at hazard exposure alone.

Coastal flood risk can translate into substantially greater unpaid care burdens. Flooding and saltwater intrusion can damage health facilities and transport, contaminate water and increase illness, shifting more care responsibilities into households. Across the countries for which time-use data are available, women undertake substantially more unpaid work than men. The average gender gap in unpaid work rises from 2.6 times among people living alone to 6.1 times among lone parents with children.

Climate-related displacement and relocation can generate gender-specific non-economic losses. Evidence from Fiji points to heightened concerns around violence against women and adolescent pregnancy in relocation-affected communities, highlighting impacts that extend beyond the economic or physical costs of displacement. This underlines the need to integrate gender-responsive protection, health, education and safety considerations into planned relocation. This is particularly relevant to discussions on how non-economic losses associated with climate mobility, health and wellbeing can be better understood and measured, including impacts that may be experienced differently by women and other groups.