The climate crisis is deepening across Southern Africa. Thousands of people have been killed by increasingly frequent and brutal cyclones, with those surviving now living in perpetual crisis unable to recover between disasters. Rainfall patterns are changing, and Southern Africa has been particularly impacted by extensive droughts leading to massive food insecurity and resulting displacement and conflict. Sea level rise is threatening small island nation states and the extensive coast of the mainland.
Yet African countries are often less equipped to adapt to climate change because of poverty, weak infrastructure, poor governance, debt distress and limited access to resources with those most dependent on agriculture to survive, including a majority of peasant women farmers, finding themselves highly vulnerable to these climate shocks. The legacy of colonialism and the ongoing exploitation of resources from the Global South by the Global North have deepened existing vulnerabilities and exacerbated climate impacts on the region.
And the tragic irony is that despite being disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis, the continent has contributed less than 3% of all global carbon emissions over time. Across the continent, it is working class and peasant women who carry the greatest burden of climate crisis impacts because of the dominant patriarchal division of labour in which women and girls are primarily responsible for feeding rural households, supplying water and energy, taking care of the young, sick and elderly, and supplementing food production with other livelihood forms. In this, women’s unpaid labour stands in for absent or destroyed social and public services, and the cost of environmental clean-up following natural disasters. When communities are displaced and living in refugee settlements these demands of care are deepened, and in addition, women and girls face increased risk of gender-based violence.
It is against this backdrop that in September 2025, a hundred women from communities in the frontline of the climate crisis in Southern Africa met in Johannesburg. The Southern Africa Convening on Climate Debt and Reparations followed months of collective work involving La Via Campesina, Rural Women’s Assembly, CRAAD-OI, Women and Land in Zimbabwe, and WoMin Africa Alliance, and participatory action research (PAR) initiated at country level looking into the impacts and losses of the climate crisis.
Country delegations from South Africa, Mauritius, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia, Malawi, DRC, and Tanzania shared painful experiences of loss because of droughts, heatwaves, floods, and cyclones. The research undertaken by the delegations in the build up to the convening had revealed the full range of the impacts at personal, family and community level across the region. It also provided insights into the impacts on ecosystems, livelihoods, cultures and identities, now at risk.
A reality that some of us survived
“It was a normal day like any other when the storm came,” shared a participant from Zimbabwe. “We were home with my children and parents in law, and we could tell the weather was not friendly, something we had never met before. Just near my home there are two rivers, the storm came and the water started to rise from those rivers. The buses and cars could not pass either side of the river. The surrounding people were washed away and I could not do anything. My parents-in-law were carried away while I was watching. We spent nearly five days with those dead bodies, we could smell them. We could tell life is meaningless, life is too short.
You will think the cyclone is just news but it is reality that we survived. Some of us survived. But we lost most of the homesteads. Livestock washed away, topsoil washed away, seed banks washed away. We could not take care of the seeds.
Child pregnancies developed those days, as 15 families were staying in one house. I was a farmer: I could do farming, I could take my children to school after harvesting. Yet after the cyclone, I could not manage to do what I did before.”
Defining the costs carried by women and communities
Informed by the above collectively defined costs absorbed by women and their communities in the frontline of the climate crisis, the group moved to deepen the analysis and understanding of the science behind climate change and the disasters striking Southern Africa. We collectively explored the historical and current drivers of the climate crisis, and what false solutions are being imposed in the global South in the name of profit. Solutions that do not work for people and the planet, but rather delay urgent action.
The concept of climate debt was then collectively defined, acknowledging the historical and moral responsibility of the Global North (in other words, those who caused the climate crisis), to make reparations for those most impacted by the consequences of climate change. There are two parts to this debt – the first part is the debt owed by the Global North for using up the ‘carbon space’ in the atmosphere for their own – destructive – development and denying a full range of transition paths to places like Southern Africa in the Global South. The second type of debt that is owed by the Global North is for the destructive impacts of the climate crisis – impacts to our lives and livelihoods, ecosystems, cultures, and future generations. Even though regions like Southern Africa have not caused the crisis they are being hit by cyclones, sea level rise, droughts and so on as described above and have little to no capacity to withstand or adapt to these impacts. Climate debt is then also about acknowledging the unfair burden placed on the countries of the Global South, taking responsibility and making amends for harms done. There are moral, political, material and financial obligations on behalf of the polluters.
The fight for climate reparations
The convening was a firm step towards building movements led by communities for climate reparations, centering a gender justice perspective. We emerged from the process clear that women belong to the climate justice struggle; that our struggle is one of justice for all, not just women. That the struggle for climate reparations is a feminist issue. There are differentiated impacts on women because of our roles as providers and carers for family, community and the eco-system. There are also differentiated impacts on the girl child and women’s health. “We live in a system that has abandoned us economically; yet when disaster strikes, we have less tools available, yet we are still expected to absorb these costs with our time, our health, our mental health, our unpaid labour,” denounced one participant. They face stigmatisation and blame for things they do not control. “Women face stigmatisation and blame for things they do not control.” We spoke of the climate crisis as a source violence.
Last but not least, we pledged to fight for climate reparations, to protect life for all, now and in future generations. And we started to map out what grassroots driven and women-led campaigns for reparations could look like. As the climate crisis wages on, it is time for reckoning and for the building of collective power and action for climate justice. From climate injustice to feminist futures, we demand reparations!
