"Women paying the cost of the climate crisis with their wombs: quantifying loss and damage faced by women battling drought, debt and migration"

New research links climate change to the scandal of female farm labourers in India undergoing hysterectomies to avoid having to miss work and lose pay. Experts have now called on administrators of the COP28 'loss and damage fund' to consider how they can help. 

Women from Beed district in India’s Maharashtra state are being forced to leave their homes to work in the sugar cane industry elsewhere because climate change is increasing the frequency of droughts and decimating their own crops, according to the new paper from IIED. 

Many female labourers suffer debilitating menstrual periods due to the demanding nature of this work, which entails shifts up to 16 hours long. Exploitative informal contracts incorporate financial penalties for missing work, causing women to feel they have no choice but to have their wombs removed so their periods don’t prevent them from working. Hysterectomies of this kind are still taking place despite widespread outcry in India. The procedure, performed mostly in private clinics, can leave women with lasting pain and mental health problems.

Ritu Bharadwaj, a principal researcher for IIED, said: “When we talk about the losses incurred and the damage done by climate change, we’re not just talking about flooded apartments in New York, or scorched hillsides in Greece. These women’s experiences are also a result of climate change which has decimated their livelihoods, and some of what they have lost – their dignity, good health, in some cases their lives – is difficult to quantify.

“Those in charge of the loss and damage fund agreed at COP28 last year should work with Indian officials to create a social support structure for labourers, to prevent more pain and heartache in future."