Earth Today | Women and climate change get GCF attention
Published:Thursday | July 23, 2020 | 12:00 AM
WITH THE Green Climate Fund’s (GCF’s) commitment to supporting projects to enhance the power of women to adapt to climate change, the Caribbean has an opportunity to mobilise new and/or additional resources for resilience building.
“We would like to encourage countries that are eligible for GCF funding, particularly Caribbean countries, to really apply to ensure that the vulnerable in our populations get a fighting chance to build climate and disaster resilience,” said gender specialist and head of the development communications firm, Change Communications Limited, Indi Mclymont-Lafayette.
Small-island developing states of the Caribbean are counted among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, which includes extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and droughts that have hit sections of the region multiple times over recent years.
At the same time, there is growing acceptance and continued advocacy for the prioritisation of gender considerations in climate change planning, given the differential impacts faced by women and men in disasters and their unique roles in the effort to build resilience.
“We have been seeing calls for expressions of interests in the area of gender, disaster and climate change, and we have been exploring some of those as a company to see where we can add value because the need for that is very pressing, especially in COVID-19 times. The vulnerability is even greater now, with unemployment and all that is happening,” Mclymont Lafayette, who has also spent many years involved in climate change advocacy on the front line of global climate change negotiations.
The GCF has noted the vulnerability of women to climate change, in validating its focus on supporting projects that cater to their needs.
“When it comes to climate change, women bear a double burden. They are most vulnerable to the challenges caused by the climate crisis and are hardest hit by climate-induced disasters,” the GCF website notes, in a post done for International Women’s Day 2020.
“This exposure to high climate risks is compounded by factors such as chronic poverty, lack of access to social safety nets, and financial systems which make it more difficult for women to recover from the negative impacts of climate change,” it added.
PRIORITISING WOMEN
“In an effort to break this vicious cycle – whereby gender inequality and climate change both exacerbate and contribute to the other – the Green Climate Fund ensures that women’s needs, priorities and voices are mainstreamed into all the initiatives it supports,” the GCF said further.
It is against this background that the GCF has supported projects benefiting women, including investment in efficient, renewable energy in Mongolia; boosting resilience and incomes through climate-smart farming in Morocco; and protecting Uganda’s wetlands by funding livelihood alternatives, among others.
“They are empowering women to play a critical role in climate change mitigation by reducing their countries’ carbon footprints. Women are gaining better access to climate information, credit to forge sustainable businesses, and the knowhow to improve land practices that keep forests standing,” the GCF said of the projects.
Development professional and Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica representative Eleanor Jones has herself noted the need for gender considerations by Caribbean countries to access GCF money.
“Gender has been occupying the agenda of most of the development partners, and so a lot of the projects now that are internationally funded, they tell you that you need to account for gender,” she told The Gleaner.
“I think we want to ensure that when we speak of gender, we talk not only about women. We could really begin to pull together programmes that would help to improve the relative roles of men and women in energy security, in agriculture and food security, and in reducing the risk of disasters,” she added.
COMMUNITY PROJECTS
Mclymont-Lafayette suggested that an area of focus could be community-driven projects.
“From my years working on climate change communication, one of the areas of need for greater funding is on the ground for communities and vulnerable groups to put in place systems to help them become more resilient to climate change. Whether it is greenhouse farming for both men and women to have access to funding, or something else,” she noted.
“If we can put in some mechanisms to ensure that both men and women can access financing to invest in climate-smart agriculture, for example, to ensure food security for Jamaica, that would be great,” Mclymont-Lafayette added.