Gender inequality exacerbates the disproportionate impact of climate change on women and girls, and it is a barrier to achieving climate change goals. However, we also know that women and girls are powerful change agents in designing and implementing climate solutions that benefit all people.
USAID is advancing gender-responsive climate action by implementing evidence-based, high-impact programs in a range of sectors, including gender-equitable access to green jobs, land rights, natural resource management, and climate finance. The Agency also is doing this by addressing gender-based violence and harmful gender norms connected to climate change. Additionally, USAID adopted an Agency-wide goal to scale its gender-responsive climate programs across all climate-related sectors. This includes improving the climate resilience of women and girls, as well as implementing systemic changes that increase meaningful participation and active leadership in climate action.
But what does a gender-responsive climate approach entail? Below are a few best practices for advancing gender-responsive climate work.
Empower Women and Girls as Climate Leaders
Women and girls bring unique skills and knowledge that are critical to addressing the challenges that climate change creates. Local women leaders know what their communities need, and this knowledge makes them powerful change agents in designing and implementing climate solutions that benefit all people. Indigenous women and girls, in particular, have a critical role to play as knowledge keepers attuned to the needs of their communities. Supporting and elevating women and girls as climate leaders requires empowering them to acquire the tools they need to act freely, exercise their rights, and fulfill their potential as full and equal members of society.
USAID is empowering women as climate leaders through a range of programs, such as the climate change Gender Action Plans (ccGAP), which are produced by Advancing Gender in the Environment (AGENT) through a partnership with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Through a participatory, multi-stakeholder methodology, climate change ccGAPs build on a country’s national development and climate change policy or strategy and identify gender-specific issues in each priority sector to enhance mitigation and resilience for people throughout the country.
Address Gender-Based Violence
Gender-based violence (GBV) is a violation of human rights and can be more prevalent in resource-scarce situations, as plentiful evidence shows. The impacts of climate change and the escalating biodiversity-loss crisis threaten to exacerbate these conditions; examples include spiking reports of domestic violence in post-disaster contexts and increasing child marriage as a survival strategy in climate-vulnerable regions.
Gender-neutral climate and environment-focused policies and implementation frameworks can also inadvertently create conditions for heightened risk, with differentiated impacts on those most commonly marginalized and underrepresented.
Increasing equal access to, control over, and management of natural resources, however, contributes to GBV prevention and response efforts. Through the Resilient, Inclusive & Sustainable Environments (RISE) Challenge, USAID is working with organizations to mitigate issues related to the management, access, and use of natural resources and compatible land use, and to better prevent and respond to gender-based violence.
Engage Men and Boys
USAID knows how critical it is to engage men and boys as gender equality champions, which is why the Agency is helping implement programs geared toward them. These programs address the necessary social and cultural changes needed to advance positive gender equality outcomes in regions affected by climate change.
For example, preventing GBV and stopping the cycle of violence, an issue that can affect communities for generations, requires the participation of all genders. Recognizing the pivotal role that men and boys play, USAID has led efforts and collaborated with partners to integrate male engagement as a critical strategy to end GBV and to address the impacts of climate change. Evidence is clear that GBV is occurring across climate sectors, so USAID is partnering with organizations working on GBV prevention and response to help address it.
The Regional Coastal Biodiversity Project (RCBP), for instance, is a USAID-funded project that IUCN implements in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala to protect nature and livelihoods for current and future generations. By reducing climate threats to biodiversity in bordering coastal-marine ecosystems, USAID and IUCN are building resilient communities for people at risk of the effects of climate change, including GBV.
As highlighted in a recent report, RCBP built a transformative gender strategy to integrate gender in implementation and monitoring, evaluation, and learning processes. A “new masculinities” training that addresses GBV, expands male engagement, and addresses how positive masculinities can help gender equality was among the gender strategies implemented.
In Northern Triangle communities that RCBP serves, there is now a growing understanding among the men that they are an integral part of the solution to gender-based injustices that people in their communities face. This growing understanding is important since new masculinities are foundational to building resilient communities and coastal-marine ecosystems.
Increase Women’s Access to Green Jobs
By 2050, the global commitment to mitigate climate change will increase the number of jobs in the renewables sector to 29 million. As the green economy grows, it is imperative that women are empowered as leaders, that their skills are leveraged in defining the new economy, and that they have access to green jobs.
In its 2022-2030 Climate Strategy, USAID committed to creating economic opportunities for women in climate-friendly industries by supporting the training, education, and opportunities necessary to ensure equitable access to jobs.
USAID’s Engendering Industries program supports organizations to increase economic opportunities for women and improve gender equality in the workplace. Currently, Engendering Industries collaborates with 31 partners working in renewable energy to advance gender equality across their workforce. These companies employ more than 34,000 women, and they have hired or promoted more than 4,500 women since 2020. Since joining the program, these partners have drafted, implemented, or enhanced 46 policies to advance gender equality in the workplace.
USAID recognizes that expanding women’s participation in male-dominated sectors leads to economic empowerment outcomes for women, such as formal employment opportunities and higher income. For organizations and companies, increased gender equality also improves business performance, helping companies meet their bottom-line by enhancing employee satisfaction, reducing turnover, and driving productivity.
Increase Women’s Access to Climate Finance
Climate finance refers to resources that support activities that limit global temperature increases in line with international targets and/or support adaptation to climate impacts. If designed without gender considerations in mind, financing mechanisms will be less effective for women and girls and can, in fact, exacerbate inequality and marginalization.
A key element of gender-responsive climate finance is providing direct funding to women and women-led organizations and businesses. At COP27, USAID announced the launch of its new Climate Gender Equity Fund. This new initiative will increase access to climate finance for women-led climate organizations, as well as businesses that advance gender-equitable climate solutions around the world. This includes a new five-year partnership with Amazon to advance this critical issue.
Strengthen Women’s Land Rights and Natural Resources Management
As Administrator Samantha Power noted in her “Feed the World We Now Face” speech at the 2022 World Food Prize, “perhaps the most important barrier to the success of women farmers is land ownership.” Although women play a critical role in farming and food production, around the globe, they are less likely than men to own, inherit, and control land and natural resources.
The World Bank estimates that more than a third of countries limit women’s land and property rights, which means they have fewer opportunities to conserve and protect land and resources, and to fight against deforestation, overgrazing, and land degradation. They also have fewer opportunities to invest in climate-smart agricultural products and practices. We know that when women have secure land rights, their resilience to climate change increases, as does their communities’ resilience overall.
USAID works with partners in Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and India to implement practices, such as joint titling, inclusive land registration, and social behavior change, to ensure that women have secure land rights, that communities respect these rights, and to support legal and land-resource governance reforms around women’s land rights.
A Path Forward
Intersectional approaches are an essential part of any development and climate strategy, and they will continue to help all development practitioners think expansively about how to approach gender-responsive climate work. To understand the complexities of the inequalities people face and how they might be exacerbated or alleviated through climate programming, evidence shows that climate interventions need to consider people’s intersecting identities and experiences. Intersectional approaches engage women and girls who have been at the margins of power in climate decision making and also experience disproportionate climate impacts.
A gender-transformative climate approach examines ways to address harmful gender norms, prevent and respond to GBV, and prioritize climate equity and social inclusion, leading toward a more resilient climate future for all.
M. Mena
M. Mena is a Gender & Environment Technical Advisor and AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow with USAID's Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment Hub, where she provides gender-technical support for climate and environment programming across the Agency. Prior to joining USAID, she worked as an educator and researcher investigating issues of race, class, and gender in São Paulo, Brazil. She holds a Women & Gender Studies Graduate Certificate and a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder.
