Excerpt from the article:”Are Women The Key To Solving Climate Change?” written by Lauren Zanolli forFastCompany.
“‘Adaptation’ is where everyone wants to put women,” says Jeanette Gurung, Executive Director of Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (WOCAN). “At best women are associated with small-scale projects like solar lamps or cookstoves. Meanwhile the big boys get on with the ‘mitigation’ work and making money.” Gurung says that female leaders should be more aggressive about pursuing large slices of the huge climate finance pie, rather than play it safe with small-scale projects. But she also highlighted the challenges women at all levels face—from farmers in the developing world to government ministers—in getting access to the financial and political resources they need to move the needle on climate change. “There’s an immense need for intermediaries between women farmers and these higher levels of sources of funding and decision making. That’s the level that no one wants to think about,” she said. “If women are involved we are almost expected to be volunteers, rather than valuing our work.”At the national and international governance levels, there is a striking gender gap. Women headjust 12%of the nearly 900 environmental sector ministries in UN member countries, and on average only one-third of delegates to global negotiations like the Paris meeting are female.
New financial vehicles, like theGreen Climate Fund, could breathe new life into women-focused climate work. The GCF, established in 2010, currently holds some $10 billion in government and private donations, and is aiming to reach $100 billion. It’s the first climate fund to include a mandate for gender policies and requires that any organization that receives money for climate work get accredited for its policies and track record on gender equality.
“This is game-changing,” says Gurung. “Advocates no longer have to convince somebody to link gender and climate change. These are the big boys, and they got it.”
Gurung’s organization, WOCAN, is also working on tapping into climate investments to support gender equality in the same way carbon offset credits have funded big reforestation and renewable energy projects. They are rolling outW+, the world’s first “women’s empowerment standard” that measures things like time saved, income generated and educational training to help quantify the benefits to women from development projects and then market the “credits” for sale to government or private investors. The goal, says Gurung, is to help fill the financing gaps that exist for on-the-ground organizations and advocates doing women-focused climate work.
WOCAN has already applied the W+ standard to two projects in Indonesia and Nepal and is working on setting a steady credit price. They are hoping to bundle the standard for sale with carbon offset projects and Gurung says she’s received a lot of interest so far from private companies doing sustainability work.
“It was developed as a system to incentivize those projects that are already working on climate change to do good things for women, and make a profit in doing so,” said Gurung.
Read the full article here:http://www.fastcoexist.com/3054564/are-women-the-key-to-solving-climate-change