Women-Focused Investments are Crucial for Community Adaptation

Dec 20, 2022 | Asian Development Bank
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At an event during Cop27, speakers highlighted the important role women and girls play as agents of change in community adaptation.

Specifically, emphasis was placed on recognising, promoting, and investing in women from lower-income communities as leaders of climate resilience, instead of vulnerable or passive beneficiaries of development projects.

“Investments should not only be about improving materials but also to empowering women,” said Ibu Deborah Utami, programme manager at Yakkum Emergency Unit in Indonesia.

“The fact that climate change has brought disproportionate impacts for women and girls in poor communities is already widely known, and it is because women have less access, power, and control over resources and to decide on the issues that really affect their life,” she added.

Conversations at this year’s Cop27 identified that women-focused investments can shift that narrative and allow the skills, traditional knowledge, and actions that already exist in low-income communities to be catalysed.

There is a clear need to scale up adaptation investments in sectors where women play an important role as economic agents, such as in forestry and agriculture, the latter coined by a World Bank project as gender-smart agriculture.

This can be extended to include sectors which have direct and indirect impacts on the wellbeing of women, such as in education and health.