When the Data Doesn’t Tell the Full Story: Improving Gender-Responsive Climate Finance
Nov 29, 2023
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Mariam Ibrahim, Fionna Smyth, Claudia Wells, and Euan Ritchie
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Women and girls are often on the front line of the climate crisis, including as environmental defenders, food producers and care givers. It has already been established that women, girls and indigenous communities are structurally vulnerable to climate change, and that the environmental crisis will worsen the gender-based inequalities that keep them impoverished and marginalised. That needs to change. But how?
To ensure that the specific needs of these groups are met, it is critical that gender-responsive climate finance reaches them where they are. Yet several critical barriers are stopping this:
- There’s no consistent reporting or single framework that allows all climate finance, including ODA, to be counted. This makes it hard to find out who is funding climate projects, let alone gender-responsive climate projects.
- The existing gender and climate markers used to tag official development assistance (ODA) are blunt instruments. They can’t adequately assess how much funding is being directed to deliver gender-responsive climate projects.
- There’s currently no way of accurately collecting data and building a data eco-system that captures both women’s experience of climate change and their contributions to climate action. This means resources aren’t well targeted.