Cathy Lee,memberof W+ Advisory Council, has been involved in global carbon trading for almost 20 years. She shared her analysis of the situation at the CSW 63 Side Event ‘Towards gender-responsive climate action’ in New York on 25thMarch.For her, global carbon markets continue to activate millions of dollars, through the buying and selling of GHG emission reductions (carbon credits), but consistently fail to mobilize capital and introduce positive structural changes that benefit and empower women in the developing world. When climate projects are women-friendly, they don’t go far enough, she says, by not recognizing nor compensating women’s inputs of labor and knowledge, which contribute to the projects’ outcomes.
For Cathy, the W+ Standard creates an intersection between the worlds of carbon markets and the world of feminism and commitment to women’s empowerment, SDG 13 and SDG 5. The W+ Standard measures impacts on women’s lives at the project level in 6 domains: Time; Income and assets; Health; Leadership; Education and knowledge and Food security, and creates a results-based financing mechanism. Positive outcomes generate W+ units, a quantified and realized improvement in a woman’s life, that impactandsocial investors, governments, corporations; all of us as individuals can purchase W+ units with 100% confidence that this contributes to women’s empowerment.
W+ offers an effective means to ensure that inequality and women’s empowerment are addressed in carbon and developmentprojects,andthat women are compensated for their contributions. At least 20% of the value of the W+ units sold must be provided to women involved in the project or the project community, to be used as they see fit. The more projects that apply W+, the more women will benefit in real terms ($).
| ‘…the underlying methodology to quantify co-benefits offers significant opportunities to provide the transparency and accountability needed for the kind of transformational impacts the Green Climate Fund aims to achieve.’ Yannick Glemaric, formerly of UN Women and now Executive Director of the Green Climate Fund, about W+ |
Cathy ended her talk with a call to organizations and individuals to purchase W+ units; she suggested that UN agencies, inparticularUN Women, add W+ units onto carbon credits purchased internally to offset travel for events that aim to contribute to women’s empowerment.
More information on the W+ Standard:www.wplus.org
Buying W+ units:http://www.wplus.org/how-buy-units
Recording:https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6510470538714972160