1. Headline finding

 

Overall: Climate change perceptions and adaptation are highly contextual and considerably varied by gender and different intersections. Women and men have different adoption strategies.

 

Women and girls-related: Female farmers were tend to be more concerned and fatalistic about climate change which reminds us the urgency of culturally appropriate climate change communication to obtain informed decision regarding climate change. Women adaopted differently to climate change as compared to men.

 

2. Short summary (approx. 150-200 words)

 

Existing gender role, farmers’ age, education, knowledge, marital status, intra-household power structure, religion, social status and ethnicity were intersecting with gender and climate change perception and adaptation. Apart from gender and intersectionality, access to resources, social network and local institutions are found to be important correlates of adaptation strategies by farmers. Among the financial adaptation strategies, selling assets and taking credit was most preferred financial adaptation. Women were found adopting different structural adaptation strategies like water harvesting, pen reinforcement, digging wells and boreholes, building water tanks and construction of trenches to control bushfire. Managereal adaptation strategies included change in cropping, and use of fertilizers. Socio-cultural adaptation

 

included reducing consumption of number and amount of meals and using wild plant to make traditional food to fight against drought. Livelihood adaptation included diversifying income through temporary non-farm activities. Seasonal or temporary migration was another form of adaptation.

 

Long summary

 

3.1 PICOS 

 

Peer-reviewed journal articles– those discussing gender disaggregated perception and/or adaptation to climate change in agriculture around the globe published from 1 January 2005 to 18 April 2019 and written in English were considered for this systematic review.

 

3.2 Risk of bias : Not done

 

3.3 Publication bias : Not done

 

3.4 Findings (up to one page)

 

Technical adaptation

 

• Technical adaptation strategies yielded six broad strategies . Twenty-seven among the 35 studies discussing gendered adaptation examined technical adaptation strategies. 

 

• Change of crop varieties, diversification of agriculture and improved agricultural technology were the most considered technical adaptation strategies in these studies. Both men and women adopted diverse adaptation strategies. Adoption of improved crop varieties was highly contextual and differed by study locations.

 

• Men in Kenya mentioned requirement of little rain as a motivation for changing variety, while women identified fast maturity (Ngigi et al., 2018). Improved livestock breed was adopted differently by men and women in Africa. Women from Tanzanian highland preferred improved livestock breed as most important adaptation practice, while men from Ugandan highland and Tanzania opted for the same (Mwongera et al., 2017; Wangui & Smucker, 2018). Adoption of diverse agriculture varied by gender and place. In Bangladesh, women were found to adopt diverse agriculture more than men (Hossain & Zaman, 2018; Naz et al., 2018), while in Ghana men were adopting more diverse agriculture than women (Jost et al., 2016; Kumasi et al., 2019).

 

Financial adaptation

 

• Financial adaptation resulted in four broad strategies. Seventeen studies examined financial adaptation, and among the strategies, selling assets and taking credit was most preferred financial adaptation.

 

• Selling assets in the face of climate change gives temporary relief to the farm families. In Ghana and Kenya, men preferred selling assets (e.g. livestock) to cope with drought but women chose borrowing from neighbours (Assan et al., 2018; Tongruksawattana & Wainaina, 2019). Women in extreme cases were found even selling their wedding ornaments (Tesfamariam & Hurlbert, 2017).

 

• Financial adaptation strategies may even vary from climatic events or impacts and gender. As for example, in Kenya, more male-headed households sold assets during drought but in case of increased pest infestation, more female-headed households sold their assets to adapt (Tongruksawattana & Wainaina, 2019). In case of taking loans, in Bangladesh and Malawi women got involved in saving scheme, depended more on savings (though earned and saved less) and took loan more often than men for starting micro enterprises (Hossain & Zaman, 2018; Limuwa & Synnevåg, 2018; Naz et al., 2018) while in India, more men than women took loan, borrowed from neighbours and utilized savings (Mehar et al., 2016).

 

Structural adaptation

 

• Farmers build or modify different structures to adapt to different climatic situations. Findings from the 35 adaptation studies identified three broad structural adaptation strategies.

 

• Structural adaptation strategies were mostly the role of men. Preventive structures such as raising land, house reinforcement, micro-irrigation and construction of community drains were done by men as adaptation to floods (Afriyie et al., 2018; Codjoe et al., 2012; Jost et al., 2016). Women were found adopting different structural adaptation strategies. Water harvesting, pen reinforcement, digging wells and boreholes, building water tanks and construction of trenches to control bushfire were some of the adaptation strategies adopted by more women than men (Arku, 2013; Chah et al., 2018; Codjoe et al., 2012; Kumasi et al., 2019; Su et al., 2017).

 

Managerial adaptation

 

• Almost all of the studies except one had considered managerial adaptation. Twelve broad adaptation strategies were considered by the studies.

 

• In Tanzania, women mentioned change in cropping, and use of fertilizers as important climate smart agriculture (CSA), while men opted for conservative agriculture, improved feed and composting (Nyasimi et al., 2017). Opposite to this finding, women from Tanzania and tribal women of Ghana were more conservative in using natural resources than men (Smucker & Wangui, 2016; Wrigley-Asante et al., 2017). In Ghana, fishermen scored rearing fish in pond and lakes as the most important adaptation strategy for adapting to drought and women mentioned about seasonal forecast and post-harvest technology (Codjoe et al., 2012). 

 

• In Kenya, while husbands looked for limiting number of livestock and diversifying livestock feeds, wives diversified livestock portfolios through rearing of small ruminants and non-ruminant livestock during extreme climatic events (Birhanu et al., 2017; Ngigi et al., 2017).

 

• In Bangladesh, India and Nepal both, men and women found lending land to sharecroppers as the most important strategy (Naz et al., 2018; Sugden et al., 2014). Similarly, in Benin, women wanted to sell livestock earlier than men during food shortage caused by drought (Dah-gbeto & Villamor, 2016).

 

Socio-cultural adaptation

 

Eight studies discussed about gendered socio-cultural adaptation.

 

• In Ghana and Eritrea, women were found reducing consumption of number and amount of meals and using wild plant to make traditional food to fight against drought (Kumasi et al., 2019; Tesfamariam & Hurlbert, 2017), while in India, more men ate less or changed food habit than women (Mehar et al., 2016; Ravera et al., 2016)

 

• In Mali, agriculture was mainly men’s job, which had transformed to small-scale livestock rearing and added as a new role to play for women while men left agriculture and preferred migration or sharecropping due to changing climatic conditions (Djoudi & Brockhaus, 2011).

 

Livelihood adaptation

 

Twenty studies were found exploring livelihood adaptation strategies.

 

• Diversifying income through temporary non-farm activities could be seen as critical adaptation against climate change. While both men and women preferred diversifying income through nonfarm activities (Afriyie et al., 2018), they varied by gender as in Malawi, men opted for fisheries and agriculture-related initiatives, while women were more interested in petty business initiatives (Limuwa & Synnevåg, 2018).

 

• Women were involved in many non-farm activities in climate affected period, such as non-agricultural labour, house-help, cleaning sales assistant (Chandra et al., 2017), charcoal production (Djoudi & Brockhaus, 2011) and hired labour in food processing (Arku, 2013). Accordingly, men had some exclusive alternative income diversifying activities, such as fishing, crab-fattening, herding, collecting Nipa palm leaves (locally known as golpata), wax and honey, selling labour and pulling non-motorized three wheelers in Bangladesh (Hossain & Zaman, 2018), and carpentry, blacksmithing or masonry, and hired labour in Ghana (Arku, 2013). At times, farmers abruptly changed their livelihood to adapt to climate change. In Mali, men changed their livelihood to pastoralism, while women took small-scale sedentary livestock management in homestead and forestbased livelihood (Djoudi & Brockhaus, 2011).

 

Migration as an adaptation

 

• Seasonal or temporary migration is another option for farmers. In pastoralist community, shifting or relocation is very common, but it varies by location. In Kenya, men followed a traditional shifting pattern from one pasture to another during drought (Rao, 2019). In Malawi, more women than men adopted circular migration between the fishing areas to allow fishes to regrow (Limuwa & Synnevåg, 2018), while in Ghana, both men and women preferred shifting farm area to a neighbouring higher land (Afriyie et al., 2018).

3.5 Sensitivity analysis

 

4. AMSTAR 2 assessment of the review

 

1.		Did the the review state clearly the components of PICOS (or appropriate equivalent)?	Yes
2.		Did the report of the review contain an explicit statement that the review methods were established prior to the conduct of the review and did the report justify any significant deviations from the protocol?  (i.e. was there a protocol)           Yes
3.		Did the review authors use a comprehensive literature search strategy? Yes
4.		Did the review authors perform study selection in duplicate? Yes
5.		Did the review authors perform data extraction in duplicate? Yes
6.		Did the review authors provide a list of excluded studies and justify the exclusions?                                                 Yes
7.		Did the review authors describe the included studies in adequate detail?  (Yes if table of included studies, partially if other descriptive overview) Yes
8.		Did the review authors use a satisfactory technique for assessing the risk of bias (RoB) in individual studies that were included in the review? No
9.		Did the review authors report on the sources of funding for the studies included in the review? Yes
10.		If meta-analysis was performed did the review authors use appropriate methods for statistical combination of results? Na
11.		Did the review authors provide a satisfactory explanation for, and discussion of, any heterogeneity observed in the results of the review? No
12.		If they performed quantitative synthesis did the review authors carry out an adequate investigation of publication bias (small study bias) and discuss its likely impact on the results of the review? No
13.		Did the review authors report any potential sources of conflict of interest, including any funding they received for conducting the review? Yes
		Overall (lowest rating on any critical item)

 

5. Count of references to  

 

Sex	1
Gender	24
Women	3
Intra-household	0