Poverty, subsistence agriculture and climate

Poverty has a thousand faces, but one of the most frequent and persistent throughout History is that of rural subsistence families.

As in the rest of Southeast Asia, the women in Pakistan carry out most of the agricultural work, often very hard and unproductive when they live in ecosystems with frequent droughts, climate threats and natural disasters. The vulnerability of women and their families is reduced when they are included in planning policy for resilience to climate change. The term resilience is used both in sustainability sciences, to indicate the capacity of ecosystems to absorb disturbances, without significantly altering their structural and functional characteristics, and bysciences on human behavior, which expresses the ability of people to overcome positively traumatic or difficult circumstances.

Women from the vast Pakistani desert of Thar have to walk long distances to get water and fuel, which they carry on their heads. Their children have the highest rate of chronic infant malnutrition in the country, where between 2005 and 2015, 45% of children under 5  showed growth retardation , (at that time the world average was 23%)