Across the world, women are often the first to experience and suffer the horrors of human caused climate change. After a natural disaster strikes for example, women are the last to leave a devastated area because they take care of elderly parents and/or young children who are physically unable to just walk away to safety. Child marriage is also a known factor with climate change. When agriculture fails due to drought or floods, it is young girls who are taken out of school and forced into marriage. The family can no longer afford to feed themselves and marrying off a daughter or more is one less mouth to feed in a desperate response to the deteriorating environmental conditions for daily survival.
Gethin Chamberlain writing for The Guardian, makes the case that “As global warming exacerbates drought and floods, farmers’ incomes plunge – and girls as young as 13 are given away to stave off poverty.”
Why climate change is creating a new generation of child brides
Everyone has their own idea of what climate change looks like. For some, it’s the walrus struggling to find space on melting ice floes on Blue Planet II. For others, it’s an apocalyptic vision of cities disappearing beneath the waves. But for more and more girls across Africa, the most palpable manifestation of climate change is the baby in their arms as they sit watching their friends walk to school. The Brides of the Sun reporting project, funded by the European Journalism Centre, set out to try to assess the scale of what many experts are warning is a real and growing crisis: the emergence of a generation of child brides as a direct result of a changing climate.
And time and again, in villages from the south of Malawi to the east coast of Mozambique, the child brides and their parents told an increasingly familiar story. In recent years they had noticed the temperatures rising, the rains becoming less predictable and coming later and sometimes flooding where there had not been flooding before. Families that would once have been able to afford to feed and educate several children reported that they now faced an impossible situation.
None of the villages had any way of recording the changes scientifically, or indeed felt any urge to do so. All they knew was that the weather had changed and that where they used to be able to pay for their girls to go through school now they couldn’t. And the only solution was for one or more daughters to get married.
Sometimes it was the parents who made the decision. For the good of the rest of the family, a daughter had to be sacrificed. She would be taken out of school and found a husband, one less mouth to feed. Sometimes it was the girl herself who made the decision and forced it upon her parents. Unhappy, hungry, she hoped that a husband might be the answer.
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In 2015 the United Nations Population Fund estimated that 13.5 million children would marry under the age of 18 in that year alone – 37,000 child marriages every day – including 4.4 million married before they were 15. Across the whole of Africa, Unicef warned in 2015 that the total number of child brides could more than double to 310 million by 2050 if current trends continue.
There are many reasons for children marrying young. In some societies, it is regarded as simply practical; when children reach puberty, sexual behaviour starts to carry with it the risk of pregnancy. Elsewhere, poverty is the driver: when parents cannot afford to feed several children, it tends to be the girls who have to go.
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