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Abstract
Climate change that is translated to floods has caused enormous impacts on women. With focus on the 2015 floods, the study's objective was to analyse preand post- flood response interventions from different stakeholders on women where the effectiveness of the use of Climate Justice Approach in interventions to enhance women's resilience during 2015 floods in Malawi was also examined. The study had household interviews, focus group discussions (15 men and 15 women) and key informant interviews (2 experts). Through climate justice approach, the study adopted a qualitative method. However, where necessary some quantitative data was provided. Qualitative data was analysed through Thematic Content Analysis while quantitative through SPSS. The results indicated that women received response, recovery and resilience interventions. Though women received the response interventions (response, recovery and resilience) the study found that they did not fully benefit culture and tradition, rigid gender roles and stereotypes, increased workload and Gender Based Violence. However, the interventions that had climate justice lens proved to enhance women's resilience than the one without climatejustice lens.
Key words: floods, women, response interventions, climate justice, effectiveness.
Introduction
Climate change and development challenges
Globally, climate change and weather variability risks have received attention by policy and decision makers (Alam, Bhatia and Mawby, 2015). Frequency and intensity of floods, prolonged dry spells increased affecting the livelihoods of rural and urban communities (Bukhari and Rizvi, 2015).
Communities all over the world are impacted with climate change related risks in one way or the other (UNFCC, 1992). Floods for example, have greatly contributed to disturbances and system failures in agriculture, health and education and other sectors (Amelaw and Simalenga, 2015).
Studies have shown that climate change related risks especially floods have a huge impact on poor communities especially among women and other vulnerable groups (Bukhari and Rizvi, 2015; Davis, Roper and Miniszewski, 2015). These have affected property and other investments and have reduced crop and livestock production in many developing countries (World Bank, 2019). Whilst floods help in recharging ground water and increasing soil nutrients (Alemaw & Simalenga, 2015), wherever they occur they have caused a number of social and economic challenges (Bukhari & Rizvi, 2015), such as lack of food, shelter and other basic needs (Davis et al, 2015).
Developing countries face...