Women's limited access to resources and decision-making processes increases their vulnerability to impacts of climate change. Despite their own vulnerability, women are often responsible for caring for close relatives, extended families and friends during hazardous and traumatic events (whether its famine, floods, drought or forced displacements). Based on experience and knowledge it is believed that women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than men, primarily as they constitute the majority of the world's poor and are more dependent for their livelihood on natural resources that are threatened by climate change. The paper proposes a gender sensitive vulnerable assessment framework that is scaffolded by three key concepts: exposure, temporality and resource base. Because the study is grounded in the Capability Approach Framework it captures multi-dimensionality and intangible goods which are emotions such as fear, anger, shock or shame. It seeks to better understand the differentiated responses of men and women to climate variations and stress such as extreme heat, cold, droughts or floods in a specific site, Lambani, in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. The main aim is to understand different responses of men and women to climate change in order to design and populate a vulnerability assessment (VA) framework. In order to do so the Capability Approach (CA) is applied as a theoretical frame with its lens on diversity and social justice. The CA thus provides an expanded notion of human well-being that taps into the emotional life of women and men in Lambani.

Attention to gender and equity has lagged behind in climate change research, programming, national policy-making and in the international negotiations. Studies on climate change and gender links with climate change have initially and by necessity been somewhat speculative in nature. While all societies are affected by climate change, the impacts also vary by location, exposure, and context specific social characteristics, identity, power relations and political economy. This draws attention to recognition of difference and sameness and the way in which common, confusing, contradictory results emerge across and within terrains. In its concern for gender-blindness, this paper specifically considers the way in which climate variability impacts on men and women in a given locale and captures the enriched narratives and voices of both rural women and men in two selected villages in Lambani, Limpopo Province, South Africa. To build women's participation in national climate change adaptation planning and to take heed of the multiple entanglements around this topic, participatory processes are required that enable diverse groups of disadvantaged women's as well as men's voices to be heard by policy-makers. We use participatory action research (PAR) to capture people's emotions and perceptions around climate change. In our context, difference is not positioned as the opposition to sameness. It is also incorporated into the self as difference within and is seen as a means of becoming. We consider climatic impacts to be moments where the human and non-human rub up against each other and where human affect becomes tangible. Here our attention to affect is twofold. Not only does it allow for a more realistic reflection of entanglements with nature but also we see affect as being more than emotion as it is a dynamic opening up to possibilities that can effectuate change.