The impacts of climate variability and change on the rural poor in the Global South become more pronounced with each passing year. While entire communities and regions will be exposed to the same changing temperatures and precipitation, the ways in which they are vulnerable to these changes will vary greatly. As the contemporary literature on adaptation now acknowledges, the patterns of vulnerability to climate change impacts we see today are largely, if not principally, shaped by social factors ranging from gender roles to class to ethnicity. In short, these social factors have broad ramifications for the ways in which people experience and address the impacts of climate variability and change in their lives.
This report presents three case studies (on Ghana, Mali and Malawi) that illustrate the importance of this contemporary approach to gender when applied to climate change adaptation in rural, agrarian settings. Each case demonstrates that in studies predicated on simple gender categories, the particular challenges and vulnerabilities of a significant portion of the population in question become difficult to identify.
This report concludes that:

identity categories most relevant to understanding vulnerability in a particular place are contextually specific. In the Ghana case, it was the intersection of gender with livelihoods strategies and household situation that brought out the identities most responsible for the production of different livelihoods vulnerabilities to climate change impacts. In the Mali case, the salient intersection was gender and seniority. In Malawi, distinct and differentiated vulnerabilities within gender groups only become visible when gender is understood in the context of the village of residence, and its proximity to the unique livelihoods opportunities and resources in the Mount Mulanje Forest Reserve (MMFR)
the use of binary gender analysis to explore vulnerability to climate change impacts risks glossing over important intra-community and intra-household vulnerabilities, including those of the most marginal and vulnerable
in the Ghana case, it is very difficult to identify and address the specific livelihoods vulnerabilities of women in female-headed households, and women in diversified households, via a binary gender analysis, as such analysis aggregates the situations of all women into something that most resembles the situations of women in market households
in the Mali case, binary gender analysis suggest gendered patterns of livelihoods activities that are produced through specific intersections of seniority and gender. A vulnerability analysis built on this generalised pattern would overlook the specific vulnerabilities and capacities of senior men in this cluster by ignoring their gardening activities.
in Malawi, a binary analysis of gender suggests that vulnerability is evenly distributed across the married study population. Yet there are distinct and differentiated vulnerabilities within married households that are tied first to location, and then to gendered emphases with regard to crop selection and livelihoods activities