WUNRN
GENDER & CLIMATE FINANCE: DOUBLE
MAINSTREAMING
FOR
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
By Liane
Schalatek, Heinrich Böll Stiftung North
May 2009
Click here for the publication (pdf) -
29 Pages
Click here for the
presentation "Gender and Climate Finance Post-Copenhagen: 'Double
Mainstreaming' for Sustainable Development" (updated April
21st, 2010) (20 pages, pdf, 2MB)
Executive Summary
Climate change is real, it is happening
already, and its impacts on people are not gender-neutral. It is affecting men
and women all over the world differently, especially in the world’s poorest
countries and amongst the most vulnerable people and communities. As women and
men have different adaptive and mitigative capabilities, the financing
instruments and mechanisms committed to climate change activities in mitigation
and adaption need to take these gender-differentiated impacts into account in
funds design and operationalization as well as concrete project financing.
So far, environmental financing mechanisms
have provided only limited benefits for the Least Development Countries (LDCs)
and the poorest and most disadvantaged within those countries. Women as a group
are generally least considered by modern environmental financing mechanisms.
The reasons are manifold and can be found among those impeding women’s
development all over the world. They range from a lack of access to capital and
markets, to women’s unrecognized and uncompensated care contributions, to
lacking legal protection and ownership rights to cultural and societal biases
against women’s engagement in learning, political participation and
decision-making processes.
The last few years have seen a proliferation
of several dozen new instruments for climate financing with a multitude of
actors. These new mechanisms range from bilateral and national funds to
multilateral ones under the auspices of the UN and the World Bank and the
Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), carbon funds as well as the prospect and
promise of regional and national cap-and-trade schemes where auctioning of
pollution permits could yield billions of dollars in proceeds to be used for
mitigation and adaptation efforts. Yet, so far none of these new financing
initiatives has been engendered. The challenge and the potential is to ensure
that gender differentiated impacts and capabilities are an important consideration
in ongoing climate finance discussions and in fund operationalization.
According to the UNFCCC’s Bali Action Plan,
financing for climate change has to fulfill a set of non-negotiable criteria to
convince the developing world to do its share in reducing (largely future)
greenhouse gas emissions: it has to be adequate, sustainable, predictable, and
new and additional (not replacing existing flows of Overseas Development
Assistance, ODA). Several financing proposals have discussed the need to base
such financing on the “polluter pays” principle. In climate talks, negotiators
have honed in on the “3 Es” – efficient, effective and equitable – as important
attributes for any future global climate financing agreement. The demand for
equity – climate justice in other words – in particular points to the “common
but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities…” that poor and
rich countries share in combating global climate change according to the UNFCCC
preamble.
These efforts will have to address linkages
between development, poverty eradication and climate action head on. So far
completely missing, if sorely needed, from the normative set of climate finance
fundamentals and any international discussion thereof is the gender dimension. The
time to act is now: many of these new climate funds are currently rolling out
their first pilot projects. Gender guidelines and criteria need to be an
integral part of operating procedures and project outlines, not an afterthought
or an artificial add-on.
The experiences of mainstreaming gender in
development efforts can be instructive, and tools developed in this context can
likewise be adapted and utilized for making climate financing instruments more
gender equitable. These include, but are not limited to gender sensitive
indicators; gender analysis of project and program designs; gender-inclusive
consultation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation; possible gender
finance quotas or set-asides via gender responsive budgeting processes applied
to project funding; as well as mandatory gender audits of funds spent .
However, the single most important tool in advancing fair and gender-equitable
climate finance mechanisms– and apparently still the most illusive – is a
political commitment on every level to take gender seriously in combating
climate change.
There can be no fair and equitable global
climate agreement without a comprehensive global climate financing
understanding. And this understanding can only be fair, equitable and
comprehensive when it incorporates gender awareness and strives toward gender
equitable climate financing solutions. No doubt: the proliferation of funds and
actors in global climate finance will continue for the foreseeable future. As
there is still a lot of reluctance to consider and ignorance about the
relevance of gender in making climate financing mechanisms effective
contributors to long-term sustainable development, any gender-focused advocacy
strategy addressing the issue of financing for adaptation and mitigation will have
to be multipronged and look for a variety of access points and opportunities,
among them:
• First and foremost, raise the
gender-awareness and commitment to gender equity with all institutions and
donors (multilateral, bilateral, national and private) in the new climate
finance architecture.
• Shift the focus of the global discussion on
climate change away from a primarily technocratic exercise to one employing the
language of global justice and human rights, including the right to development
and gender equity.
• Develop a set of gender-sensitive criteria
for all new climate finance mechanisms supporting adaptation, mitigation,
capacity-building and technology transfer. This includes the funds administered
under the UNFCCC and the GEF as well as the CIFs and bilateral funds.
• Strive to incorporate gender-specific
language and gender considerations in the outcome document of the COP 15 in
• Require the UNFCCC Secretariat to develop a
Gender Plan of Action, following the example of other UN agencies. The recent
development of a CBD Gender Plan of Action could be helpful for the UNFCCC.
Such a Gender Plan of Action should cover all areas of work and programs by the
Secretariat, especially its assistance to the Parties and its work on financing
mechanisms.
• Demand the development of gender guidelines
or a Gender Plan of Action for the Global Environment Facility with the goal of
mainstreaming gender in all its six work areas, including on climate change, so
that UNFCCC climate funding administered by the GEF is distributed with
gender-equity as one of the funding criteria. Demand that the World Bank and
the MDBs allocate their funding under the CIFs and related MDB funds as grants,
not repayable loans. Women are often harmed the first and most severely when public
sector programs are cut in times of a developing country’s balance-of-payments
crisis.
• Ensure the generation and collection of
sex-disaggregated data in all sectors relevant to climate change by
governments, international organizations and financial institutions.
International institutions (f.ex. the World Bank as a “knowledge bank” or the
UNFCCC and the GEF) have an obligation to assist developing country governments
and civil society stakeholders in gaining access to such information. With respect
to gender, the old adage is true: what is not counted, does not count.
• Demand mandatory periodic gender-audits of
just-established and future new climate funding mechanisms, particularly those
operating with public funding. These include funds under the UNFCCC and the
GEF, but also the CIFs as well as bilateral funds. The results of these audits
should be publicly accessible. Develop transparent gender budgets for projects
and programs financed via recent and future publicly financed climate funding mechanisms.
• Improve the participation of women
(political and business leaders, gender experts, from disadvantaged groups such
as local communities, and indigenous peoples) in stakeholder and consultation
processes for climate finance instruments and ensure their inclusion in
decision-making bodies for these instruments, such as Trust Fund Committees.