Background

The UN is formally committed to gender mainstreaming within all United Nations policies and programmes. In all societies, in all parts of the world, gender equality is not yet realised. Men and women have different roles, responsibilities and decision making powers. This has consequences for the Climate Change process which make it important to integrate gender sensitivity into all mechanisms, policies and measures, and tools and guidelines within the climate debate. This message has been communicated by different individuals and organisations during the past COPs and in several publications. This website aims to provide a platform for people interested in the issue of gender and climate change and to make the issue more accesible to everyone by providing a discussionlist, publications, links and other useful information regarding the topic. If you want to contribute to this website or if you want to subscribe to the discussionlist please contact the webmaster.

Gender and Adaptation

The issue of adaptation is recognized as highly important in climate change policy and projects. Since it is agreed that vulnerability and adaptation are largely social issues (as opposed to purely biophysical or technological), it is surprising that the issue of gender is not yet playing a more explicit role in adaptation studies, projects and policy. Because of the feminization of poverty, other existing gender inequalities, and men’s and women’s gendered roles in society and in the division of labour, there are gender differences in climate change impacts and in adaptive capacities. One example of the effects of such gender differences in the case of disasters is offered by the 1991 cyclone and flood in Bangladesh where the death rate was almost 5 times as high for women as for men. Warning information was transmitted by men to men in public spaces, but rarely communicated to the rest of the family. Also, women were not allowed to leave the houses without a male relative, and many perished waiting for their relatives to return home and take them to a safe place. Moreover, as in many other Asian countries, most Bengali women have never learned to swim which significantly reduces their survival chances in the case of flooding. Such differences, in vulnerability but also in adaptive opportunities, should be acknowledged in the adaptation process to avoid further increases in gender inequality and to ensure the successfulness of adaptation policies and measures.

Gender and Mitigation

The technological changes and instruments that are being proposed to mitigate carbon emissions, which are implicitly presented as gender-neutral, are in fact quite gender biased and may negatively affect women or bypass them. An example of this is the fact the Marrakech Accords on LULUCF exclude the questions of avoided deforestation and forest management and thus exclude all interventions designed to improve traditional biomass fuel supply and use, despite the fact that 2 billion women are dependent on this. But also in the context of developed countries important gender dimensions of mitigation policies and measures exist. Existing transport systems in the North have for instance been defined by a specific perspective on middle-aged full-jobbing men, neglecting women’s higher dependency of public transport means, and their specific needs due to gender-related division of labour. If these aspects would be fully taken into consideration, both more user-friendly and climate-friendly transport systems would be the possible. In general, the Climate Change policy process tends to be driven by a masculine view of the problem and its solutions. Participation of women in the whole process, at international, national and local levels is very low, both in the South and in the North; probably skills and resources need to be developed to overcome this.

Conclusions

For all activities relevant to climate change, either in industrialised or in developing countries, either in adaptation or mitigation, there is a gender dimension which should be taken into consideration.Taking the different daily realities of women and men into account can produce a qualitative improvement in climate change policy and measures. It is therefore important to integrate gender into all mechanisms, policies and measures, and tools and guidelines within the Climate Change debate. This leads to the following specific recommendations:

• Global and national studies on the gender-differentiated impacts of global climate change, including a focus on gender differences in capabilities to cope with climate change adaptation, and mitigation are urgently required.
• A gender analysis of all budget lines and financial instruments regarding climate change should be undertaken.
• Gender-sensitive criteria and indicators should be developed and applied in the UN FCCC and Kyoto Protocol mechanisms and instruments.
• In the course of the revision of the guidelines for the National Communications under the UN FCCC, the inclusion of the gender dimension should be ensured.