Drought and disproportionate disease: an investigation of gendered vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS in less-developed nations
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Drought and disproportionate disease: an investigation of gendered vulnerabilities to HIV/ AIDS in less-developed nations Virginia Kuulei Berndt 1
& Kelly
F. Austin 2
Accepted: 15 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Environmental change and climate-related disasters are an under-examined factor impacting women’s health, globally. Drawing on ecofeminist theory, we conduct analyses examining if the HIV burden among women is higher in nations that experience suffering from droughts. Specifically, we posit that droughts, which typically impact more people and for greater lengths of time than other climate-related disasters, have a unique impact on women’s vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. We use a cross-national dataset of less-developed countries and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to explore and compare relationships between suffering from drought and total HIV prevalence and suffering from drought and women’s proportion of HIV cases. Overall, the results demonstrate that while droughts have an inconsistent impact on total HIV prevalence, suffering from drought significantly increases the proportion of HIV cases among women in comparison to men, net of the impact of common economic, social, cultural, and political predictors. The findings suggest that suffering from drought differentially impacts women’s health in less-developed countries, where a number of mechanisms, such as transactional sex or displacement, likely underlie the associations identified. Keywords HIV/AIDS . Gender . Drought . Disaster . Cross-national
* Virginia Kuulei Berndt [email protected] Kelly F. Austin [email protected]
1
University of Delaware, 18 Amstel Avenue, Newark, DE 19716, USA
2
Lehigh University, 31 Williams Drive, Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA
Population and Environment
Introduction Despite some improvements, HIV/AIDS remains a key threat to health and well-being in many less-developed countries.1 Recent trends also document the increased burden of HIV particularly among women in poor countries (WHO 2018). Although underexamined and seemingly unrelated, environmental changes resulting from climaterelated disasters, or disasters linked to extreme meteorological events (Tschumi and Zscheischler 2020), may have a powerful influence on women’s vulnerability to HIV in less-developed nations. Ecofeminism offers that women and the environment bear mutual oppression stemming from patriarchal structures that subjugate both, framing them as expendable and in need of domination and control (Gaard 2011; King 1999; Mies 1998). Central to this approach is that men and women hold different connections to the environment because of gendered expectations. Such socially constructed expectations are key in defining responsibilities and resource access, particularly in lessdeveloped nations where individuals are more directly dependent upon the environment in meeting daily necessities. While women are more reliant upon such environmental resources in providing food and sustenance, they are simultaneously denied access to lan
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