A New flagship publication ‘The Art of Implementation: Gender Strategies Transforming National and Regional Climate Change Decision Making’ launched at the 18th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Doha, Qatar. The publication focuses on facilitating transformational change through the development of Climate Change and Gender Action Plans (or ccGAPs as they have come to be known) in eleven developing countries and regions throughout the world. The publication includes a synthesis of the strategies and action plans developed by the IUCN Global Gender Office on behalf of the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA) in Mozambique, Jordan, Egypt, Tanzania, Nepal, Haiti, Panama, Costa Rica, Liberia, the Arab League of States and the Central American Region, as well as an outline of the methodology employed by IUCN to do so.
A water taxi network owned and -operated by women on the Nile that both reduces emissions and provides fast, reliable public transport in a gridlocked Cairo transport system, a waste-to-wealth recycling project that empowers women as green entrepreneurs in Kathmandu, women environmental whistleblowers on the coast of Liberia that assist government in the collection of meteorological data to forecast the weather, acts as an early-warning system for storms and identify and report environmental offences, a carbon-footprint program run by women that at scale could also link to the carbon market, and using mosques and poetry singers in temples in Jordan and Nepal to communicate climate change messages.These are only a few innovative examples proposed by multi-stakeholder groups convened by IUCN and contained the publication.
After several years of advocacy, capacity building, and awareness raising, governments have agreed multilaterally that gender equality is a key component in achieving climate change goals. Since 2008 and to date, more than 60 official gender references have entered the UNFCCC negotiation text, and the final outcomes of the Cancun (2010) and Durban (2011) conferences included eight and seventeen references to gender, respectively.
With these global mandates in place, the urgent next step is implementing them and determining how to design climate change policies and programming in a way that addresses gendered realities. The publication provides evidences that can guide the way forward.