Global frameworks for climate action, including but not limited to the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, have recognized that they must respect and promote gender equality and women’s rights to be effective and truly transformative. This requires climate finance architecture to be gender-responsive and inclusive to take into account solutions that are working toward gender equality.

Frameworks and policies now exist that articulate gender considerations and uphold women’s engagement as  stakeholders in all four of the main public climate finance mechanisms—the Adaptation Fund, Climate Investment Funds (CIF), Green Climate Fund (GCF), and Global Environment Facility (GEF). This notable achievement is due in part to the sustained and committed advocacy of women’s groups and organizations over the last decade, that have provided advice and guidance to these public funds. In addition, philanthropic funders and individual, institutional and gender lens investors are now identifying climate change as a critical area of their investments as well.

Despite the strong arguments made by gender advocates, however, the amount of funding for women’s empowerment and gender inclusion within these mechanisms remains scant. Funding streams for work being done at the intersection of climate change and women’s rights have been virtually non-existent, with less than 0.01% of global philanthropic grant money (2014) supporting projects that addressed both climate change and women’s rights. [2]

Funders and international climate policies are missing key opportunities to help address climate change and gender equality issues because they are not acknowledging or accessing the knowledge and expertise of women at local, national and international levels or supporting agendas led by women’s organizations.

Some of the most critical stakeholders in addressing climate change are grassroots women, women’s organizations, gender and climate experts and advocates – whose engagement in climate finance processes, from design to decision-making, implementation to monitoring remains limited. As stated by WEDO (2019), “gender-just climate finance will require mechanisms that include and engage these organizations and groups as integral partners at all stages of project design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation, and at all levels and types of financing.”

Read the full article about climate and gender funding by Jeannette Gurung at avpn.