Climate Finance: Catalyst for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the forest sector

WATCH THE RECORDING OF THIS EVENT HERE.

This event focused on how climate finance can be a catalyst for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the forest sector. The event fostered an opportunity to reflect on the barriers and challenges that prevent women for benefiting from climate-forest finance and open a discussion on how REDD+ initiatives are addressing these prevalent gender inequalities and increasing the recognition of women’s environmental stewardship and an increase in their leadership and empowerment.  

As the world faces unprecedented planetary and social crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, nature loss and climate change, climate finance can contribute to green recovery efforts that catalyze social and environmental transformations. While the current climate finance architecture for the forest sector can be complex, it can – and should – advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. 

Climate-forest finance, such as those provided through the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and Governor’s Climate and Forest Task Force (GCFTF) represent an opportunity to develop a new generation of gender responsive climate-forest finance, which supports innovative actions that: 

• Address ongoing deep-rooted gender barriers and inequalities  

• Equitably increase women’s and men’s access and control over resources 

• Recognize and engage all relevant actors fully and equitably across all genders in all actions 

• Value unique and complementary knowledge and skills of women and men 

• Improve women’s livelihood and their economic empowerment 

• Generate new sustainable livelihood, productive and economic opportunities for women in the forest and AFOLU sector 

With the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ghana and Indonesia, are charting this new path forward through their climate-forest finance via their REDD+ initiatives. Not only are they promoting gender-responsive approaches in project design, implementation, and decision-making processes, but also in tackling larger systematic gender inequalities within complex sectors, such as land tenure, fire management and control and sustainable forest and agriculture value chains, in order to promote more transformational change and sustainable and gender-equitable results that benefit women.  

Complimenting recent knowledge exchanges on gender and REDD+, such as that held by the UN-REDD Programme in October 2021 on “Gender: The key to unlocking transformational change in climate-forest finance”, this event will showcase the process of how these projects are effectively integrating established good practices on gender to achieve catalytic gender-responsive climate-forest actions.

 EVENT SPEAKERS:

• Welcome: Raquel Lagunas  Director, UNDP Global Gender Team 
   
• Keynote address: Andrea Meza Murillo, Minister of the Environment of Costa Rica 
   
• Panel Discussion: 
  • Indonesia: Yenny Almuthahar, Head of Division of Environmental Management and Monitoring of Environment, Forestry Office of West Kalimantan, Indonesia (GCFTF Project) 
  • Brazil: Monique Sacardo Ferreira, Deputy Project Coordinator in Department of Forest Conservation and Environmental Services / Ministry of the Environment of Brazil (GCF Floresta+ Project) 
  • Costa Rica: Maria Elena Herrera, REDD+ Secretariat FONAFIFO (GCF REDD+ RBPs Project)  

  • Ecuador: Karina Barrera, Undersecretary of Climate Change of the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition (GCF ProAmazonia Project)

  • Ghana: Marie Veyrier, Development Director, Global Shea Alliance (GCF Ghana Shea Landscape Emissions Reduction Project) 

  • Moderator: José Vicente Troya Rodríguez, UNDP Resident Representative in Costa Rica and Gender and NCE Champion LAC 

• Organisational perspectives: Mario Boccucci, Head, UN-REDD Programme

• Closing: Josep Garí, Senior Policy Advisor (Climate & Forests) and Employee Ambassador, UNDP