Who Carries Uttarakhand’s Future? The Gendered Cost of Climate Change
- Ayushi Mehta
- Nov 9, 2025
- 4 min read
{This Blog is part of “Uttarakhand@25 Blog Series” in collaboration with SDC Foundation and The Analysis}
On 9th November 2000, Uttaranchal, now known as Uttarakhand, was carved out of Uttar Pradesh, marking the birth of the Republic of India’s 27th state. Twenty-five years later, it’s time to pause and reflect on : who has been truly liberated or left behind within the duality of the mountain state’s development and climate change?
The past decade alone offers a sobering insight into the region’s fragile ecology. Repeated environmental disasters, including but not limited to flash floods, landslides, forest fires, cloudbursts, the state has lived through one disaster after another. The year 2025 has been particularly devastating, with districts like Uttarkashi, Dharali, Chamoli dominating national headlines for their recurring climate crisis.
Having personally witnessed the aftermath in Kwarab, Almora and at the Ranibagh-Bhimtal bridge. What one needs to note is that behind these headlines and images of washed-out roads and broken bridges lives another version of the story, one that rarely makes it to the public discourse. The stories of women carrying the burden of survival in an already fragile mountain economy.
The Gendered Cost of Climate Change
In Uttarakhand, male outmigration is not a new phenomenon. Men leave villages in search of livelihood opportunities in the plains and cities, leaving behind women who shoulder additional responsibilities, including but not limited to tending to farms, livestock, households, and unpaid care work. The intensifying impacts of climate change have compounded these burdens.. When flash floods sweep away fields or forest fires destroy fodder, it is women who must walk longer distances for fuelwood, water, and grazing land. Their labour multiplies even as their rights, resources, and participation in decision-making fades into silence.
Despite international and national policy discourses that emphasize “gender sensitivity,” women continue to be framed narrowly; either as victims of disaster or as selfless custodians of nature. What remains overlooked is the diversity of women’s experience in the hills: some migrate, some stay behind, some innovate. Their realities cannot be boxed into a single narrative of sacrifice. To cast every woman as the stoic “mountain woman” is to erase the complexity of their choices, their labour, and aspirations.
Questions for the Future, Lessons from the Past
Women from the mountain regions have long been at the forefront of leading environmental movements. The ‘Chipko Movement’ of the 1970s, in which women ‘physically embraced’ (chipko to) trees to prevent their felling, became a global emblem of ecofeminism. While this movement offered symbolic power and visibility to rural women at the time, but in the long run, it also proved to be limiting.
Chipko created an enduring image of rural mountain women as innate protectors of nature; an image that, though inspiring, reinforced a stereotype that women are inherently “closer” to nature and therefore uniquely responsible for its preservation. This romanticised framing has often been more constraining than empowering. It transforms women into symbols rather than individuals with agency, reduces their struggles to moral duty, and obscuring the realities of unpaid labour, landlessness, and exclusion from decision-making. By portraying women as guardians of forests, such narratives shift the burden of adaptation onto women without challenging the power hierarchies that governs development. This at the end, leaves them unheard in the debates about development and justice that promises to shape their lives.
Today, as new highways carve through the mountains and dams rising across rivers, the pressing question emerges: what does development truly mean for the women living at the heart of these transformations? Are we listening to how their roles, responsibilities, and identities continue to evolve?
Why Policy Needs a Gender Lens
Discussions on sustainability and policymaking in the mountain regions must go beyond token mentions of women in policy documents. Unless such policies actively address the unequal burdens and power inequities that women face; restricted access to land, unpaid care work, and limited participation in decision-making, ‘development’ will remain an unfulfilled promise.
Applying a gender-lens to climate policy requires :
Recognising women not just as victims, but as active agents in designing adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Ensuring women's access to land rights, natural resources, and credit.
Strengthening women’s collectives, such as SHGs as centers of resilience and local innovation.
Moving from symbolic inclusion towards substantive participation in decision-making processes.
The last point is where the greatest challenge lies. Deep-rooted social hierarchies and systemic exclusions continue to influence governance structures; something which can only be realised through meaningful social and behavioural change that takes up time and space.
Uttarakhand@25 – The Road Ahead
As Uttarakhand marks twenty-five years of its formation, the state stands at a critical crossroads. It can either continue down the path of ‘development’ that puts undue distress on women’s lives in coping with the changes; or, reimagine a different future, one that centres resilience, care and justice.
We must remember that when floods wash away homes and fields, when forests burn, and when distress migration persists to be a reality, it is women who shoulder the weight of adaptation. Their quiet strength, and relentless labour in times of crisis form the unacknowledged backbone of the state. If progress is to hold any real meaning, it must begin with the communities which bear the greatest burdens of rebuilding lives from debris, ensuring that their knowledge, individual choices and aspirations shape the path ahead of Uttarakhand’s development.
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Ayushi Mehta is a Research Award Recipient at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.
[The opinions expressed herein are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University, SDC Foundation, and The Analysis.]
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The series is curated by an editorial team led by Anoop & Rishabh (SDC Foundation), with Kanha, Visakha, Gautam and Alind from SCLHR and the team at The Analysis.
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