The current global pandemic has highlighted the fact that disasters and crises are not gender-neutral. The National Women’s Law Center in the USA reported that as a result of the pandemic economic downturn, women lost 156,000 jobs while men gained 16,000 jobs. Across every sector, from health to the economy, security to social protection, the impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbated for women and girls simply by virtue of their sex. This crisis provides us with evidence of the critical need to address gender inequities in relation to climate change – the next impending global crisis. We argue here that post-COVID recovery has to be a Feminist Climate-Resilient Recovery.
We advocate for viewing women not as vulnerable victims, but as agents of change who bring solutions to these global challenges. Over two decades, we have become convinced that women’s groups have an immense potential to bring about these changes when given the opportunity to overcome the resource, capacity and time limitations that they often face. Our podcast series – “10 Solutions for a Feminist Climate-resilient Recovery” – features ten international thought-leaders who share their views on how to reimagine and reshape our future from a feminist approach. These ten podcasts present concrete and bold solutions and call for urgent actions. [Listen to the Podcasts]
Two solutions discussed in the podcasts are impact measurement and compensation for women’s social and environmental contributions. WOCAN’s W+ Standard provides a way to enable women to be compensated financially for their contributions to climate adaptation and mitigation. The W+ Standard’s benefit-sharing mechanism directs money to women to be used as they see best fit for the good of their local community.
The White Paper, “How the scaling of voluntary carbon markets can amplify gender equality impacts” [Read the full white paper], provides a solution that addresses both simultaneously the need to scale up the private sector voluntary carbon market and generate gender co-benefits by applying a transparent and rigorous methodology. The W+ Standard is a unique mechanism that can be used by companies, projects and investors to measure, quantify, verify and report on women’s empowerment impacts. It can be used in combination with carbon standards to scale up the private voluntary carbon market in a way that addresses SDG5 through the purchase of credits that support both emissions-reductions and women’s empowerment.
In 2016 the ‘W+ Standard’ was awarded under the UNFCCC Momentum for Change Women for Results focus area. The Momentum for Change initiative is spearheaded by the UN Climate Change secretariat to shine a light on some of the most innovative, scalable and replicable examples of what people are doing to address climate change. Watch the video narrated by Mary Robinson, which highlights its application to a biogas project in Nepal [Watch the video]