Climate change is real, it is happening already and its impact 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 adaptation 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 (LDC) 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 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 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-aside 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.
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Engendering Climate Change 