Around 500 African women boarded buses to Durban, South Africa, for the U.N. climate talks last week. They came to have to their concerns heard, not just as residents of some of the most vulnerable countries in the world, but as women of those countries, who are disproportionately affected by climate change.

"They all came in order to voice their opinions about the extent to which women's voices have been missing in the climate change debate," said Lamia El-Fattal, liaison officer with Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Women often experience the brunt of the suffering associated with climate change, yet they play a subjugated role in solving the problem. Women are also particularly vulnerable to the ways a warming world will affect agriculture, said El-Fattal, speaking at a workshop in Washington, D.C., on the integration of gender and climate change adaptation, hosted yesterday by the Society for International Development.

Unlike men, who can migrate to find work outside of agriculture, women are often tied to rural areas where they are solely responsible for their families and their farms. Add climate change, said El-Fattal, and it magnifies women's vulnerability.

Climate change "wreaks havoc on their crop and their livestock, their production [decreases] or fails, their workload increases, the health of their family is taxed and they have less opportunity to participate in decisionmaking," she said.

When drought reduces a female farmer's agricultural output, for instance, it affects her livelihood, because there's less for her to sell. It also directly affects her family's food supply and nutrition levels. Or, as water and fuel become scarcer, women have to make longer treks to find these resources, increasing their labor burdens and putting them at risk of gender-based violence.

"These challenges make them more vulnerable, but we don't want to think of women just as victims of climate change, but also agents of climate change," said Danielle Mutone-Smith, panel moderator and a director at Women Thrive Worldwide. Women work closely with their families and agricultural resources, she said, which actually means they're often in the best position to make critical climate adaptation decisions.

Climate change is becoming an increasingly prominent issue that women want their governments to address, said Mutone-Smith, particularly as it concerns agriculture and food security. But while women of the world are slowly gaining a voice, the development community isn't necessarily responding fast enough or in the right ways.

Climate change cuts farm productivity

"Food security challenges facing the world are really unprecedented in the history of us as a species," said Gerald Nelson, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Climate change, he told yesterday's forum, is a "threat multiplier."

"It will reduce productivity of existing species and existing farming systems everywhere, without exception," he said.

Nelson went on to discuss modeling research IFPRI conducted in 2009 and 2010 on agriculture and climate change, which found that by 2050 there would be major spikes in childhood malnutrition and the cost of principal food commodities, such as maize, due to climate change.

When it came to gender issues, all Nelson could say was that a lack of data on women's roles in farming made it almost impossible to conduct any female-specific studies on food and climate change.

His comment highlighted the tension among donors, international policy groups, governments and researchers over how to collectively address the issues of climate change, agriculture and women's well-being.

"There was tension today between the macro and the micro," said El-Fattal, such that climate change models are better applied on a broader, regional level, whereas gender work is often most successful at the lowest, local levels of society.

"I think we're still speaking in different languages," she said of big-picture research using climate models and her work on food and gender issues at the community level. "But there is a lot of scope to be working together."

One place to start could be via the new forum created to address the issue of agriculture and climate change by the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban.

The climate talks did not produce a work program on agriculture, a blueprint that would help allocate funds to help small farmers adapt to climate change, as many stakeholders anticipated it would. But countries and civil society groups have been invited to submit recommendations on agricultural policy to be addressed next year at the COP in Qatar.