Climate Policy Brief 18, November 2016

Gender and Finance: Coming Out of the Margins

The two-way inter-linkages between gender equality and women’s empowerment and climate change are now well established: climate change impacts and how they are managed, including financing and capacity building support, can help to foster or hinder gender equality and women’s empowerment goals (women’s and men’s lives, livelihoods and well-being) and enhancing gender equality and women’s empowerment goals and processes can help in the successful achievement of climate goals and policies, at national, regional and global levels.

Climate finance is important for tackling areas, including promoting food security, ensuring and enhancing protection from the adverse impacts of extreme weather events, covering losses and damages from storms, droughts and hurricanes, the provision of clean energy for cooking, lighting and agro processing, public transportation, the accessibility of individuals, households and businesses and their responsibilities for energy efficiency, waste handling etc.

The distribution and flows of billions of dollars of climate finance, as they exist now and in the foreseeable future ($100 billion, per year, up to 2020, including $10.2 billion pledged to the Green Climate Fund) should be amenable to gender equality and women’s empowerment, otherwise, they may impede or otherwise limit women’s abilities to adapt to and to create and maintain climate resilience of individual women, households and communities.

Ultimately, if designed, implemented and evaluated with gender sensitivity and gender responsiveness, climate finance may present new opportunities for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Gender machineries and gender advocates in developing countries must be empowered and resourced to become (more) proactively engaged with climate change policy, projects and programmes and their financing at local and national levels.

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