Most climate change literature tends to downplay the gendered nature of vulnerability. At best, gender is discussed in terms of the male-female binary, seen as opposing forces rather than in varying relations of interdependency. Such construction can result in the adoption of maladaptive culturally unfit gender-blind policy and interventions. In Egypt, which is highly vulnerable to climate change, gender analysis of vulnerability is almost non-existent. This paper addresses this important research gap by asking and drawing on a rural Egyptian context ‘How do the gendered relational aspects of men’s and women’s livelihoods in the household and community influence vulnerability to climate change?’. To answer this question, I draw on gender analysis of social relations, framed within an understanding of sustainable livelihoods. During 16 months of fieldwork, I used multiple ethnographic methods to collect data from two culturally and ethnically diverse low-income villages in Egypt. My main argument is that experiences of climate change are closely intertwined with gender and wider social relations in the household and community. These are shaped by local gendered ideologies and cultures that are embedded in conjugal relations, kinship and relationship to the environment, as compared across the two villages. In this paper, I strongly argue that vulnerability to climate change is highly gendered and therefore gender analysis should be at the heart of climate change discourses, policy and interventions.
Egypt is one Arab country that is vulnerable to flash floods caused by heavy and intensive rainfall. Different locations in Egypt are vulnerable to the hazards of flash floods, especially in Upper Egypt. Throughout history, Egypt witnessed a series of events of flash floods that lead to mortality, damages, and economic losses. The intensity and frequency of flash floods in Egypt vary from year to year according to a number of hydrological and climatological variables. Although several previous flash floods studies have been conducted in Egypt, studies on the governorate of Asyut are still limited. This study integrates the physical and social parameters in order to assess the vulnerability to flash floods. The objectives of this study are to shed light on flash floods in the study area, develop a vulnerability model to determine the regions vulnerable to the impacts of flash floods, and propose a flash flood alert system in the governorate of Asyut in Egypt to mitigate the impacts of flash floods and to avoid the loss of life and property. The AHP (analytical hierarchy process) is used for assigning the optimal criterion weight of the considered vulnerability parameters based on the responses of eight expert respondents to an online Google forms questionnaire. The highest weighted flash floods causative parameters are population density (27.4%), precipitation (22.1%), total population (16.4%), and elevation (10.2%), respectively. The results reveal that Asyut is one of the Egyptian governorates prone to flash floods’ impacts, especially in Dayrut, Al-Qusiyah, and Abnub, urban districts. The findings of this study are expected to be useful to policymakers and responsible authorities for better disaster risk management and for dealing with the flash floods events in the future.
Long endemicity of the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 subtype in Egypt poses a lot of threats to public health. Contrary to what is previously known, outbreaks have been circulated continuously in the poultry sectors all year round without seasonality. These changes call the need for epidemiological studies to prove or deny the influence of climate variability on outbreak occurrence, which is the aim of this study. This work proposes a modern approach to examine the degree to which the HPAI-H5N1disease event is being influenced by climate variability as a potential risk factor using generalized estimating equations (GEEs). GEE model revealed that the effect of climate variability differs according to the timing of the outbreak occurrence. Temperature and relative humidity could have both positive and negative effects on disease events. During the cold seasons especially in the first quarter, higher minimum temperatures, consistently show higher risks of disease occurrence, because this condition stimulates viral activity, while lower minimum temperatures support virus survival in the other quarters of the year with the highest negative effect in the third quarter. On the other hand, relative humidity negatively affects the outbreak in the first quarter of the year as the humid weather does not support viral circulation, while the highest positive effect was found in the second quarter during which low humidity favors the disease event.