Recommendations

The following recommendations are based on the outcomes of the study on gender, climate change and human security and the three country specific case studies:

Climate change and human security

• Identify, research and integrate climate change as a human security issue into human rights frameworks, mechanisms and legislation, including the Hyogo Framework for Action.
• Apply a human security framework to climate change at all policy levels.
• Conduct a vulnerability analysis of climate change mitigation and adaptation and promote an integrated human and environmental security approach that is proactive and inclusive and combines top-down measures (e.g. institutional consolidation, laws, norms and policies) with bottom-up participation and resilience-building for exposed communities.

Gender aspects of climate change:
ensuring human security

• Include a gender perspective in global and national climate change policies, documents, programs and budgets.
• Guarantee women's participation in climate change decisions, and amplify women's voices in global, national and regional institutions, as well as in open dialogue at the community level.
• Acknowledge across sectors that women are among the most affected by climate change because of their social and economic situations and because of their role in the family.
• Enhance institutional capacity to mainstream gender in global and national climate change and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) policies and operations through the development of gender policies, gender awareness, internal and external gender capacity and expertise, and the development and application of relevant mechanisms and tools.
• Conduct gender-specific vulnerability assessments, and apply a gender analysis to global climate change policies and institutional mechanisms.
• Develop gender-sensitive indicators for use by governments in national reports to UNFCCC and related policies and mechanisms.
• Create gender-specific disaster reduction policies to address the effects of climate change in disaster-prone areas, as well as pragmatic national and international interventions to ensure food, energy and water security, economic resilience and security of place/habitat, particularly for poor and migrating women and their families.
• Promote women's empowerment through capacity-building before, during and after climate-related disasters, as well as their active involvement in disaster anticipation, early warning and prevention as part of their resilience building.
• Guarantee women's rights in climate change mitigation and adaptation, including their rights to knowledge, skills, land ownership, participation in decision-making and access to services.
• Construct a legal regime that safeguards the security of women affected by climate change, including mechanisms to review land-use planning and infrastructure work.
• Incorporate climate change in discussions on women's rights and related interventions, which often focus on political, social and economic empowerment and protection in a non-disaster context.
• Ensure that government policies and programs on human rights, women's rights and climate change are coherent and reinforce each other.
• Encourage the women's movement to take full responsibility and ownership of the gender and climate change discourse to ensure that implementation of UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol (and post-KP) measures take their specific concerns into account.

Adaptive capacity: strengthening human security

• Build on and strengthen women's experiences, knowledge and coping capacity adaptation policies and ensure that women's needs are considered in livelihood adaptation strategies.
• Integrate a gender approach and enhance women's human security in all National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs).
• Foster women's direct involvement in both policy and project planning in NAPA preparation.
• Create an environment in which women's engagement in adaptation discussions and governance structures is fully supported-in order to do so, existing coping strategies and constraints to adaptation should be studied.
• Empower women as agents of adaptation, and provide women with opportunities to control greater percentages of resources (including land) and services and to make independent decisions.
• Prevent cultural practices from hindering women's capacity to adapt.
• Support and promote practical solutions to enhance women's adaptive capacity and livelihoods including alternative agricultural practices, equitable employment opportunities, access to credit, labor-saving technologies and equipment, safe shelter and facilities, energy and water supply and services.
• Assist women and their coalitions and networks at community, national and international levels to ensure that recovery and adaptation measures respond to women's needs and concerns.
• Provide training to women's organizations, networks and support groups and opportunities to share experiences-women and their organizations should demonstrate exemplary leadership and serve as gender advocates and credible ambassadors on climate change.
• Acknowledge women's social, economic, physical and psychological vulnerabilities in community-based preparedness and response plans in order to reduce the impact of disasters on women.
• Recognize women's abilities and incorporate them into disaster relief efforts with the goal of changing gendered roles and perception of rights.
• Endeavor to ensure that activities are appropriate for women, and that they receive positive encouragement and support for participation.  

Financing mechanisms

• Integrate human security for women into climate change funding mechanisms, to ensure that poor women get a fair share of funds-practical tools such as accountability mechanisms would support gender equality's incorporation into climate change initiatives, including the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
• Consider developing a mechanism for the CDM to fund projects that make renewable energy technologies available to women. For example, NAPAs should target women as important actors in adaptation activities.
• Set up adaptation funds, according to principles of democratic governance and civil society participation to play a key role in promoting women's rights and to prioritize poor women's needs.
• Ensure women's engagement in adaptation financing mechanisms.
• Create adaptation finance mechanisms that support livelihood adaptation priorities of poor women, and include gender-disaggregated indicators in adaptation funds for targeting and monitoring the benefits to poor women.

Further research

• Conduct a gender-based approach to the study and analysis of climate change and natural disasters and collect more research, particularly supported by sex-disaggregated data.
• Apply lessons from the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GEHS) program (one of the science programs of the International Human Dimension Program) to climate change research, and use participatory research tools to study the impacts of climate change on women's livelihoods.
• Promote women's equal participation in climate change science and research.

Capacity building and networking

• Invest in strengthening the capacity of women and gender activists on climate change issues and apply affirmative action principles to draw women into climate change institutional structures and policy-making arenas.
• Enhance cooperation with women climate change organizations, including the Global Gender and Climate Alliance, WEDO, IUCN ENERGIA, genderCC Network - Women for Climate Justice, Gender and Disaster Network, and national partners.

This policy paper (by Rebecca Pearl and Irene Dankelman) is excerpted from the complete Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) study on gender, climate change, and human security, including case studies by ABANTU for Development (Ghana), ActionAid (Bangladesh) and ENDA (Senegal). Authors: Irene Dankelman, Wahida Bashar Ahmed, Khurshid Alam, Yacine Diagne Gueye, Naureen Fatema, and Rose Mensah-Kutin. Editors: Anna Grossman and Cate Owren.  www.wedo.org