The Measuring and Reporting on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment for Climate and Sustainable Development Goals, on 6 Dec. 2018, was the first of a W+ webinar series that will continue in 2019.
Jeannette Gurung, Executive Director of WOCAN, provided an overview of the recent trends and drivers for gender equality and introduced the W+ Standard, developed in 2015 to increase rigor and accountability of gender initiatives, incentivize new investments in women’s empowerment, and create a market-based results-based financing mechanism. Projects that meet the Standard requirements generate tradable W+ units, now listed on Markit, a global environmental registry.
Tanushree Bagh Mukherjee, Senior Manager of Business Development and Sustainable Standards at South Pole, spoke of how addressing SDG5 can address other SDGs as well, and the value of the W+ in providing both financial and social returns from those investments. She shared SP’s involvement with the award-winning Nepal biogas project, that generated W+ Time units that are listed on Markit and available for sale.
Maria Lee, W+ Coordinator, presented the results of a W+ application to a CSR project in Morocco implemented by ACWA POWER, an international power company. The project measured benefits of livestock and handicraft activities using two W+ domains: Income & Assets, and Education & Knowledge. Benefits measured and verified generated a 67 % increase in income and assets and 183 % increase in knowledge per woman for the livestock component, and 228% per woman for the handicraft component. W+ units generated are soon to be listed on Markit and available for sale by the company.
John Holler, Senior Program Officer at Verra, spoke of how Verra values the W+ as a additional certification on top of a Verified Carbon Unit for the certification of GHG emission reduction projects. W+ labelled VCUs allow carbon projects to demonstrate their contributions to women’s empowerment in the six domains.
Sandeep Roy Choudhury, Project Developer of Community-based Climate projects at VNV Advisory Services highlighted the central role of women in climate-related projects and the importance to create incentives for project developers to design gender-centric projects. He presented several examples of projects that can use the W+, and specified which domains are most applicable.
Recording of the webinar:
The NEXT webinar will happen early 2019 and provide examples of investments at the nexus of climate and gender; stay tuned!.
Please send an email to coordinator@wplus.org if you’d like to have more information about the W+ Standard.