Gender into Urban Climate Change Initiative concluded

Gender-just climate policy in practice

The experience gained in the project demonstrated that working towards low-carbon and resilient cities goes very well together with working towards gender equality. Moreover, it shows that the deep transformation we need requires the full integration of gender justice. At the end of the project, the partners are able to present a number of recommendations on what is needed at urban and national level to work towards this transformation.

Partner organisations have for example identified huge policy gaps at institutional level. They found out that the understanding of gender and climate change among national and local governments is still very poor. Women are perceived only as a vulnerable group, who are the target of climate adaptation. Meanwhile, climate mitigation policies and actions do not yet integrate a gender perspective. 

Three key areas for the integration of gender perspectives

A solution can be found in the GUCCI partners’ overall recommendations: three key areas have been identified such as ‘Institutional development’ of gender expertise, ‘capacity building’, as well as ‘community involvement’. Regarding the first of those areas, governments should establish a particular unit to handle gender-responsive climate actions, develop a Gender Action Plan and gender indicators for all climate change policies and actions at the national and city level.

In order to enhance the gender expertise at institutional level, local councillors should be trained to deal with gender differentiated impacts of climate policies and and there should also be a mandatory gender sensitization training for knowledge enhancement of officials/stakeholders at all levels. Concerning the community involvement, it is important to involve women's, environmental, community-led organisations and possibly other civil society groups throughout the process, including policy planning and implementation, as well as evaluation of climate change actions. 

Gender-specific data are missing

Another gap that the project partners identified is that the national governments do not yet have gender-disaggregated data, for example on energy access, transportation, and sanitation. That kind of data would help in developing national and regional plans responding to the needs of all genders. GUCCI partners are encouraging the national government to support more in-depth research on the gender issues in climate change and take on board the outcomes of its results. 

E-learning course available

Even under the challenges of the Covid-19-Pandemic in the last 2 years, all partners have successfully completed the project. Among the achievements is now a well-tested method and procedure in place, enhanced by the rich experience of the partners, to address climate and gender justice at urban levels that works for other levels as well. The approach can be applied by women’s and other civil society organisations, as well as city officials and urban policy-makers who can use GAMMA for a self-assessment. The approaches developed and experiences obtained during the project are summarised in a booklet, and an E-Learning course at GenderCC’s Global Learning Platform offers basic knowledge on urban climate policy and gender.

All project partners would be delighted if more civil society groups and cities would take up their approach and make use of the GAMMA booklet and the E-learning course. They see a crucial role of civil society to raise awareness, provide capacity building, push for climate and gender justice, and monitor urban climate change policies.

In the future, all project partners would like to roll out this programme to other countries and cities.