Gender and the environment.Reporting
Gender and the environment.Reporting
Gender equality and women’s empowerment are matters of fundamental human rights and
prerequisites to meeting sustainable development goals around the world.
This 4-part blog series sets out the benefits of (part 1) and barriers to (part 2 – upcoming)
gender equality within sustainable ecosystem management. Part 3 (upcoming) zooms in on
solutions, outlining key tools and strategies. Part 4 (upcoming) highlights examples of
gender-responsive interventions. This blog sets out four benefits of ensuring women and men
are effectively and equally included in sustainable ecosystem management.
Land is essential in securing livelihood resources, including shelter, food and income;
facilitating access to decision-making power and maintaining cultural identity. Access to and
secure tenure over land is also closely linked to natural resource access and management,
such as water and forest resources, with benefits for sustainable ecosystems. One study from
the Amazon region shows that securing land rights for Indigenous women and men
contributes to reduced deforestation rates and is a cost-effective measure for climate change
mitigation.
Even though women have major roles using land for food security, income and household
resources, women make up only 13.8% of landholders globally, often facing numerous legal
and social barriers in all aspects of land rights – including rights to sell, manage or control the
economic output from their land. Insecure land rights are a huge barrier for women in
participating in or leading sustainable management efforts, as they may not have decision-
making power over how land is used and managed if they do not own it. Furthermore, while
women that manage land may want to adopt sustainable management approaches, if they do
not have their name on the land title, they may not be able to access loans to invest in
technology and inputs.
Traditional and cultural norms can play a role in dictating who is capable of managing land,
which can restrict women’s access to land even in countries where they have legal rights over
it. In the Rukwa and Katavi regions of Tanzania, ActionAid Tanzania, in collaboration with
LEAT, Haki Ardhi and other community-based groups, set out to shift perceptions on
women’s ability to manage and own land by organizing village dialogues to raise awareness
and sensitize communities on equal land rights. While cultural and societal shifts do not
occur overnight, these dialogues were a necessary starting point to empower women and
build acceptance within the communities, with women now actually owning their properties
of land.
The importance of secure and equal land rights in sustainable ecosystem management cannot
be understated. A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), reaffirmed that strengthening women’s access to and control over land improves
sustainable management efforts, such as by increasing investments and willingness to engage
in conservation activities, including tree planning and sustainable soil management.
From national governments to local community groups, women are vastly underrepresented
in decision making. For instance, women make up less than 25% of all national
parliamentarians around the world. This underrepresentation also extends to national
environmental decision making, where women hold only 12% of top ministerial positions in
environment-related sectors worldwide, as well as in district or community level committees,
where women are generally underrepresented.
In many communities, cultural norms and time-intensive household care duties often impede
women’s abilities to participate in community consultations and decision-making processes
about sustainable management initiatives. This means that when it comes to natural resources
and ecosystem management, women’s needs, priorities and knowledge are often ignored or
overlooked, impacting their empowerment and agency and undermining the effectiveness of
sustainable management solutions.
Transformative power
Research and experiences increasingly show the transformative power of inclusive decision
making and both women’s and men’s unique differentiated knowledge in successful
environmental programming and sustainable development. For example, at the national and
international level, countries with more women parliamentarians are more likely to ratify
environment treaties. At the community level, in India and Nepal, forest management groups
that included women showed better resource governance and conservation outcomes.
Additionally, government bodies, private sector companies and organisations need to look
internally and evaluate the barriers to and opportunities for inclusive decision making. A
Rocha Ghana recognised the importance of gender mainstreaming in both their projects and
within the institution and made the decision to develop an institutional gender policy. The
first step in this process required them to conduct a gender audit to assess the barriers for staff
in mainstreaming gender in projects and accessing decision making opportunities within the
organisation. The results of this audit will inform a gender policy to improve conditions for
inclusive organisational decision making and reaffirm institutional commitments to gender
equality and women’s empowerment.
3. Gender-based violence
Complex links
The links between gender-based violence and the environment are complex, but recent
research from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) establishes a
knowledge base demonstrating that gender-based violence can both be driven by and impact
power imbalances in control over land and natural resources, especially when those resources
are scarce or under stress.
Gender-based violence has long been a tactic to silence dissent from women defending
human and environmental rights and deter others from speaking out, with Indigenous
women facing increased violence due to intersecting forms of discrimination. As shown by
the women community leaders and activists that took part in the latest ReSisters Dialogue,
these trends of violence, threats and intimidations occur across countries and contexts.
However, this gathering of women defenders also shows a growing support system and
resistance to these trends and a strengthened network of strong and inspiring women.
If sustainable development programmes do not consider local gender dynamics and drivers of
gender-based violence, interventions can inadvertently exacerbate conditions that contribute
to an increase in violence. Addressing gender-based violence across environment-related
contexts and sectors is important for realizing conservation and resilience-focused
interventions and advocacy, as well as for realizing human rights and peace and security.
Fostering safe civic spaces, building awareness on rights and improving structural protections
for women to engage in and defend their rights to environmental resources and land is
essential.
Addressing barriers: consider the context
While gender gaps are a risk to effective sustainable ecosystem management, these gaps can
also be addressed in sustainable management approaches through promotion of gender
equality and women’s empowerment. It is important to note that gender inequality and the
resulting gaps and barriers are different in every context. Therefore, any projects,
programmes and strategies for sustainable ecosystem management need to be grounded in a
gender and social context analysis that considers gaps, as well as opportunities to address
them, specific to the context.
More information
For more information and support on gender analyses and gender mainstreaming, view
the SRJS and gender tool developed by the IUCN Gender team. The tool is meant to help
establish a common understanding of gender equality and social inclusion terms and issues;
to help ensure that gender equality and social inclusion principles trigger concrete actions and
results; and to help recognize the value of a gender-responsive, socially inclusive approach to
safeguarding international public goods.
ntroduction
This article analyses relationships between gender and key natural resources —such as
biodiversity, water, energy, food and mining— in Latin America and the Caribbean. It
provides a comprehensive overview that identifies the main economic, social and
environmental impacts, as well as the opportunities for incorporating gender perspectives into
public policies for natural resources in the region. One of the main factors that has created a
differentiated impact between men and women is the unequal access to ownership and
control of natural resources, which creates a gender gap in natural resource governance
(understood as governance of the ownership, modes of appropriation and distribution of the
costs and benefits of renewable and non-renewable natural resources, so that society as a
whole can benefit from their exploitation and/or conservation). Furthermore, this has a major
impact on the unfair division of labour, wherein women are overburdened with care duties
(see diagram 1), a situation that has been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Diagram 1
Consequences of inequality between men and women in access to natural resource ownership
Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), on the basis
of official figures.
Despite this panorama, there are still gaps in the policies for addressing the relationships
between gender and natural resources. The 2030 Agenda emphasizes the need for gender
mainstreaming, with nine Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a total of 29 indicators
that can be broken down by sex; many of them, however, are not yet measurable (United
Nations, 2015). Significantly, none of these gender-sensitive indicators are related to the
environment or natural resources. Progress must therefore be made in analysing the
interdependence between natural resources (environmental dimension), gender issues (social
dimension) and productive activities (economic dimension) to encourage the design of more
comprehensive policies within the framework of the 2030 Agenda.
The Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, a subsidiary body
of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), has been
working on gender issues in the region for over 40 years (ECLAC, 2017a). At the first
Regional Conference on Women, held in Havana in 1977, attention was drawn to the need to
include a gender perspective in ensuring access to and improving domestic water supplies,
and to implement public policies in order to increase women’s access to land ownership, and
through that, access to natural resources and their governance. Forty-three years later, the
fourteenth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the
Caribbean, held in Santiago in January 2020, examined gender challenges in the context of
climate change and its close relationship to natural resources, highlighting the greater
vulnerability that women face through unequal access and governance at a time of
increasingly frequent disasters and their negative effects. Thus, the Santiago Commitment,
adopted by the region’s countries on that occasion, contributes to the mainstreaming of
gender considerations in policies related to the governance of natural resources.
The Regional Gender Agenda seeks to close the gaps in this area by supporting public
policies that guarantee women’s autonomy and rights, and by presenting recommendations to
address the causes of inequality, policy proposals and perspectives in favour of gender
equality, women’s human rights, intersectionality and interculturality, parity-based
democracy and inclusive sustainable development (ECLAC, 2017a). On this last point, in
2016, the thirteenth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the
Caribbean adopted the Montevideo Strategy as a tool to address the challenges facing the
region in the comprehensive implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda and the
mainstreaming of the 2030 Agenda (ECLAC, 2017b).
This tool identifies four structural challenges that must be resolved to attain the SDGs in
consideration of the region’s context and its gender priorities and challenges. As regards
natural resources, each of those challenges presents major problems on account of the
dependence of the region’s productive structure on natural resources and its vulnerability to
climate change. It also identifies patriarchal cultural patterns that need to be eradicated before
women can effectively enjoy their rights in various areas, including the environmental sphere
(see diagram 2).
Diagram 2
Regional Gender Agenda, structural challenges and their links to natural resources
Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Montevideo
Strategy for Implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda within the Sustainable
Development Framework by 2030 (LC/CRM.13/5), Santiago, 2017.
Therefore, in order to comply with the 2030 Agenda, Latin America and the Caribbean must
address the structural challenges that perpetuate gender gaps and ensure the full exercise of
women’s human rights to ensure them a life of dignity. Achieving this demands an
understanding of the relationship between gender dynamics and natural resources, of the
particular vulnerability of women to climate change and their economic dependence on
natural resources, and of the sexual division of labour, where natural resources are
fundamental for the provision of food and care and in which activities women play a leading
role, because of cultural and patriarchal structures. At the same time, gender inequalities are
also present in the governance of natural resources. Because of this, a clear gender focus at a
comprehensive, multisectoral level must be incorporated into access to natural resources and
the environment and the management thereof.
The following sections explore the dynamics of how gender differences relate with natural
resources and then examine the consequences of gender inequity in the economic, social and
environmental spheres as regards the management and governance of water, energy,
agriculture, biodiversity and mining. An overview of the core messages is provided in the
conclusion.
Women and men interact in different ways with natural resources and the care economy, both
in unpaid activities in the household (e.g. managing water, energy and food) and in income-
generating activities inside or outside the household (e.g. land tenure and agricultural work).
This is a result of culture, but it also has to do with their relationships with the territory, the
environment and biodiversity.
Inequalities related to traditional gender roles lead to pronounced inequalities in time use.
Globally, women spend 2.6 times more time on unpaid domestic and care work than men
(UN-Women, 2018); moreover, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the average is slightly
higher, with women working 2.8 hours for every hour of unpaid work that men perform
(ECLAC, 2020). Global data indicate that “women perform most of the domestic work, such
as cooking and cleaning” and, at the same time, they “are the main caregivers of children and
adults needing care” (UN-Women, 2018).
This overload of care work leads in turn to a greater dependence on natural resources, as well
as to greater vulnerability and impacts on account of difficulties in accessing and controlling
them, especially in rural areas. For example, difficulties in accessing nearby water sources
mean a greater workload for women and girls, who are generally responsible for fetching
water. The lack of access to sources of clean energy for cooking implies, in many places,
responsibility for collecting firewood, which at the same time exposes women to the negative
impacts of smoke on their health. In addition, since women are generally responsible for
taking care of sick people, older adults and pre-school children in the home, health problems
resulting from a shortage of clean water or energy also mean a greater workload.
At the same time, although women play a fundamental role in productive activities —
agricultural work in particular— there are still marked gaps in access to the control and
management of natural resources, as well as in the associated forums for participation. For
example, only 20% of the region’s agricultural farms are led by women (FAO, 2017). This
lack of control over the land also translates into a lack of participation in water management,
with little representation on basin councils or irrigation user boards.
All these gaps also imply gender-differentiated impacts related to environmental degradation
and climate change. For example, the pollution of water sources by extractive activities, the
reduction of agricultural productivity or the appearance of new disease vectors as a
consequence of climate change, have a greater impact on the care activities that women
mainly perform.
This highlights the complex and multidimensional relationship between women and natural
resources and underscores the need to mainstream a gender approach in policies related to the
governance of natural resources and the environment, as proposed by the 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development and the Regional Gender Agenda.
Women and men have traditionally used natural resources in different ways and their gender
roles are associated with different sets of knowledge and different responsibilities, although
there is an increasing participation of women in all processes. In forests, for example, women
harvest non-timber products; in fisheries, they are often involved in collecting algae and
molluscs from beaches and in processing catches landed by men; in family gardens they are
the guardians of the seeds and maintain exchanges by enriching genetic variability and
product diversity, thereby increasing resilience to factors such as climate change. Since they
are traditionally in charge of family nutrition and health, it is also women who supplement it
with wild products from their surroundings.
Despite all this, there is a huge disparity in decision-making about natural resources, with
fewer women in decision-making positions in both the public and private spheres: land
ownership and water rights, positions of legal representation and oversight over forests,
fisheries, protected areas and other resources. This undermines their autonomy and further
marginalizes them.
Of total rural employment in Latin America and the Caribbean, just over a third is female
(35%). That reflects an increase from 33.9% in 2005 (ILO, 2019) and, in fact, Latin America
and the Caribbean is the region of the world where the participation of women in rural
employment rose the most between 2005 and 2020. The Andean region and some Caribbean
countries are particularly notable for their high levels of female rural employment: in Peru
and the Plurinational State of Bolivia, women accounted for between 45% and 47% of rural
employment in 2020. In contrast, female rural employment rates in Central America are not
as high: in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala, for example, women occupy
between 25% and 30% of rural jobs.
In the region’s rural areas, informal employment is a major source of vulnerability. Most jobs
are not covered by contracts and earn low wages or are paid in kind. Women employers make
up only 17% of the total, yet women account for 60% of family workers in the region’s rural
areas (ILO, 2019). Likewise, women engaged in the agricultural sector work, on average,
more unpaid hours than employed women as a whole, while the number of hours men spend
on unpaid work remains virtually the same regardless of the economic sector in which they
are active (ECLAC, 2016). The long hours that rural women spend on unpaid work limit their
participation in the market and, consequently, their ability to earn incomes; this ultimately
affects their quality of life (ibid.).
Land is the key input for agricultural production in the region; for historical and current
reasons, however, the gender distribution of land has always been very unequal and remains
so today. According to studies into land concentration, Latin America and the Caribbean is
the region of the world with the greatest inequality in its distribution: 1% of properties
occupy more land than the remaining 99% (Gómez and Soto Barquero, 2013). Moreover,
within that tremendous inequality, women suffer even greater gaps in access to land, ranging
from less than 8% in Guatemala and 12% in El Salvador to almost 31% in Peru and 30% in
Chile. Only 20% of the region’s agricultural farms are led by women; however, women
perform a large proportion of work on the land (see figure 1). In Central America, this figure
drops to 15%, and in the Caribbean and South America it rises to 23%, according to the latest
available census data (FAO, 2017). The figure is trending upward in some of the region’s
countries: between 2006 and 2017, the number of agricultural farms in Brazil headed by
women jumped from 660,000 (13%) to 950,000 (19%).
Figure 1
Women who work the land as a proportion of the total in Latin America and the Caribbean
Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), on the basis
of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “Sustainable
Development Goals” [online]
http://www.fao.org/sustainable-development-goals/indicators/es/
In addition, the plots of land that women own are generally smaller, of poorer quality and
under more insecure tenure (Guereña, 2016). In terms of agricultural land area, women’s
participation is even lower. In Brazil, for example, the area of their units amounts to only 9%
of the country’s total agricultural land (Brazil, 2017 Agricultural Census).
It should be noted that while in many cases there is legal equality in land tenure, it is not
observed on account of traditional and religious practices (UNEP/IUCN, 2018). Inequalities
are multifaceted, intersectional and combine in a perverse circle comprising such dimensions
as being female, indigenous and poor.
This unequal participation in ownership leads to unequal representation on the boards and
representative bodies of campesino organizations, and on irrigation water users’
organizations and committees. In Peru, for example, in 2013 only 4.23% of all irrigation user
board managers were women (CNDDHH–Pacto de Unidad 2015, cited in Silva, 2018). Costa
Rica, despite being one of the region’s most advanced countries in integrating gender issues
into its public biodiversity policies, still reports a high shortfall in women’s representation in
local governance structures. Women make up about 30% of the membership of local water
councils and, in local forestry councils, they have no representation at all (Muñoz, 2019).
Another UNESCO/IHP study (2016) in Central America indicated that the management of
both surface water and groundwater was the responsibility of users’ associations, water
boards or water committees in all the municipalities analysed. It found that around 1,120
people were in charge of local water governance, of whom only 27% were women.
Access to other key inputs, such as technology and financing, has proven to be unevenly
distributed in other sectors, and agriculture is no exception. Rural women heads of household
report no negative gaps in either age or education compared to their male counterparts who
do have access (ECLAC/, 2020; Srinivasan and Rodríguez, 2016). Levelling out access to
both technology and financing would conceivably bring about an improvement in total
productivity in rural areas and ensure progress towards meeting the 2030 Agenda.
According to the UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme, “if women had the same
access as men to productive resources – including land and water, they could increase yields
on their farms by 20 to 30%, raising total agricultural output in these countries by 2.5 to 4%.
This could reduce the number of hungry people in the world by around 12 to 17%” (WWAP,
2019).
Mention should also be made of women’s participation in another sector that is closely linked
to natural resources and the economic dimension: the extractive sector. Mining is one of the
pillars of the economy and the generation of income and foreign exchange in the Andean
region. However, the direct jobs it generates are heavily dominated by men. Female labour
participation in mining in Andean countries is far below that in other mining areas. It should
be noted that in several countries of the subregion, this trend is reversed in artisanal and small
and medium-scale mining: one example of this is Colombia, where female participation
stands at 70% (Benavides, Vinasco and Albornoz, 2020).
Figure 2
Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), on the basis
of official data: Bolivia: CEPALSTAT, 2011; Chile: National Geology and Mining Service
(SERNAGEOMIN), 2019; Colombia: data from the sustainability survey of the Colombian
Mining Association (ACM), 2019; Ecuador: data from the National Institute of Statistics and
Censuses (INEC), Manufacturing and Mining, 2015; Peru: data from the National Mining,
Petroleum and Energy Society (SNMPE), 2018; Canada: data from Statistics Canada, Table
282-0008 11; Australia: Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The incorporation of new technologies such as digitization and automation is changing the
needs and skills of the mining workforce; this is helping overcome many of the sector’s
gender barriers, which are linked to physical strength. These new jobs, however, are strongly
dependent on the disciplines of basic science, technology, engineering and mathematics,
where women are underrepresented.
According to the report by RMF (2020), there are few initiatives to address gender issues in
the communities where mining companies are present or within their governance and
management bodies and workforces. The report reveals that companies are still falling short
in protecting against harassment and gender-based violence and that the sector is not yet
systematically addressing the issue.
As regards the institutional framework for gender, all the Andean countries have signed up to
international and national regulatory instruments for gender equality and have developed
numerous national plans with a gender perspective or created gender offices, committees or
units within their ministries of energy and mines. Particularly noteworthy in this sense is
Colombia, which launched its “Gender Guidelines for the Mining and Energy Sector”
(Benavides, Vinasco and Albornoz, 2020), which focuses on linking women to direct jobs,
management and leadership positions, community participation and the value chain,
promoting a culture of gender equity, building inter-institutional interconnections and
preventing violence against women. The challenge is to broaden mining policies to instil a
gender-equality perspective in the region’s mining sector, and to operationalize and
implement those policies. Despite the progress made, there is still a long way to go.
Another area to be considered is the energy transition, a key trend for the economies of the
twenty-first century and which ECLAC has identified as the first of seven sectoral systems
that can dynamize and serve as driving forces in the reconstruction of the regional economy
with equality and sustainability in the post-pandemic period (Bárcena, 2020). This is a
splendid opportunity to move towards a renewable, distributed, low-carbon energy system
with enormous environmental and social benefits, including job creation (Pistonesi, Bravo
and Contreras, 2019), although many challenges remain regarding the gender perspective and
the active inclusion of women. According to ILO/IDB (2020), over 80% of the jobs created
in decarbonization programmes will be in male-dominated sectors, and so women will not
benefit from this job creation unless the current occupational segregation is addressed.
A study by IRENA (2019) consulted women, men and organizations in the renewable energy
sector in 140 countries (for a total of almost 1500 surveys) and concluded that women’s
participation in sector’s workforce was 45% in management, 35% in technical areas and only
28% in professional positions involving science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The average across the board was 32%: above the 22% reported in the oil and gas industry,
but still low.
The energy sector faces great challenges, and it should take advantage of the dynamics and
strength of the energy transition process to solve its structural challenges: a social pact for the
sector that takes on the fight against energy poverty, and that also provides opportunities for
study (vocational training) and greater participation and incorporation of women in these
sectors.
As already noted above, women have culturally and traditionally been assigned a caretaking
role, closely related to the management of water, food and energy in households.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, 65% of the population has access to safe water
(delivered to the home, available when needed and free from contamination), 31% have
access to at least a basic service (an improved source accessible within a 30-minute walk) and
4% have access to limited (distant, more than 30 minutes away), unimproved (not free from
contamination) or surface water (WHO/UNICEF, 2017). However, the closing of gaps in
access has mainly occurred in urban settings, while clean water sources and improved
sanitation are difficult to access in rural and peri-urban areas. In rural areas of Latin America
and the Caribbean, access to piped water in the home increased from 37% to 68% between
1990 and 2015, while in urban areas it rose from 88% to 94% (WHO/UNICEF, 2017).
Water is indispensable for sustaining life and a key element in housework, including cooking,
cleaning and laundry, tasks that are undervalued (unpaid) and that, in contexts of poverty and
social vulnerability, affect the lives and time-use decisions of women and children, who bear
the chief responsibility for obtaining this resource for care work (Ayala, Bogado and Cañiza,
2020). If there is no water in the house, the burden of fetching it is unevenly distributed: 72%
women (64% adults and 8% girls) and 28% men (24% adults and 4% children) (IDB, 2016).
Thus, water collection responsibilities in Latin America and the Caribbean have different
gender patterns. In Paraguay, for example, 68.7% of women in urban areas are responsible
for fetching water, together with 54.2% in El Salvador and 53.7% in Panama (Borja-Vega
and Grabinsky, 2009).
In the field of energy, in contrast, these inequalities relate to responsibilities in securing and
managing household energy (wood, biomass), a task that can be very time-consuming and
risky for physical security, especially in households not connected to the electricity grid. At
the same time, the use of such energy sources as wood and biomass are linked to health
problems caused by pollution inside the home. All of this underscores the situation of
“energy poverty” (UNDP, 2018) (energy access level: minimum and maximum temperature,
lighting, etc.) faced by many of the region’s women heads of household.
With regard to food, in most the region’s households it is women who are responsible for
both securing ingredients and preparing them, a burden that imposes clearly differentiated
time use patterns.
In addition, as regards food consumption, there are also gaps in the performance of the food
system. In Latin America and the Caribbean, women suffer from the consequences of a food
supply where nutritional quality depends largely on price. No country in the region currently
has an obesity rate for women equal to or less than that of their male counterparts. In fact, the
region’s obesity gap is close to nine percentage points. In Central America, the obesity rate
for women is 31%, compared to 22% among men and, in the Caribbean, the gap is even more
pronounced (31% versus 19%) (WHO, 2020).
The degradation and environmental crisis caused mainly by the loss of biodiversity,
deforestation and resource over-exploitation, added to climate change and pollution, are the
main factors threatening human development and attainment of the SDGs, both globally and
in the region. Moreover, those threats are also interconnected with gender inequalities.
As already stated, women are in a structurally different situation from men as regards various
issues related to natural resources. Thus, factors such as gender, ethnicity, poverty,
marginalization and rural locations are intertwined with closely interconnected environmental
and climatic vulnerabilities. There is empirical evidence to reinforce the conclusions of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which since 2001 has recognized the
differentiated impact of climate change on women (Casas, 2017), reinforced at COP20 in
Lima in 2014 and reaffirmed in 2015 through the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda and
at the 2019 New York Summit.
The foreseeable consequences of climate change in the region include reduced water
availability, reduced agricultural productivity, heightened pest and disease vectors, reduced
marine productivity and increased desertification and savannization. All these elements have
and will have gender-differentiated impacts, in a regional context where —as described
above— access to water, land and other factors of production is unequal, as are the
responsibilities for the provision of vital resources for care activities.
Likewise, the impacts of pollution caused by anthropogenic activities are also uneven. For
example, the impacts of mining are gender-differentiated mainly on account of the different
roles played by women and men, which leads to inequalities in access to and control of
resources and in the exercise of rights and responsibilities. As a result, women’s abilities to
take advantage of the opportunities offered by mining projects vary, and do their capacities
for coping with the risks they pose. The negative impacts of mining on the environment also
undermine women’s abilities to provide food and clean water for their families and, at the
same time, can increase their workloads. In spite of that, current policies and practices in the
mining sector do not address these gender differences adequately (IFC, 2018; Hill, Madden
and Ezpeleta, 2016; Oxfam Internacional, 2017).
In addition, inequalities in access to and control of resources also have important —but often
invisible— implications for programmes and projects associated with the conservation of
biodiversity. Thus, for example, even conservation initiatives that seek to benefit local or
indigenous communities, such as restoration efforts or payments for environmental services
to maintain forests that ensure water capture, do not directly benefit women, but rather the
men who are predominantly the legal owners of the land, increasing the gender inequality
gap.
Although this has primarily been a problem almost not addressed in the implementation of
some projects for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and for climate change
mitigation and adaptation, a gender approach from the outset —to balance out the existing
gaps— is gradually being mainstreamed into environmental policies and programmes.
Urgent, concrete progress with adequate budgets is required to avoid trivializing the problem
within the various policies and sectors and to address this inequality.
In 2008, the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted a Gender Plan
of Action, the first such effort under a multilateral environmental treaty (UNEP/IUCN, 2018).
A review of National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) by the International
Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and the CBD Secretariat found that
27% consider women as relevant actors, yet they are often treated as a vulnerable group
(17%) rather than being recognized as agents of change in the conservation and sustainable
use of biodiversity. Paraguay is the country that most mentions the word “women” in its
NBSAP; the Dominican Republic, in its first National Biodiversity Strategy (NBS) in 2011,
highlighted that women are leaders of reforestation brigades; and El Salvador, also in its first
NBS (2003), noted that urban women’s work on sanitation, recycling and water management
is often unpaid (IUCN, 2017). National Biodiversity Strategies generally fail to address the
issue of equitable access to natural resources in order to curb current inequalities;
accordingly, although it plays a structural role in maintaining inequalities, this topic will not
be followed up on. However, it is addressed in the goals of the 2030 Agenda.
The international treaties and their synergies are an opportunity that the region could take
advantage of to bolster progress in reducing gaps, since different strategies must be applied in
the same territory and several of the gender inequality gaps are transversal to the different
issues. In 2019, ECLAC supported the innovative Biodiversity, gender and climate change
initiative for Latin America and the Caribbean, which involves people from nine countries
with an emphasis on academia, civil society organizations and government institutions. The
work included exchanging experiences, seeking overarching information and beginning the
development of a comprehensive conceptual framework. While the environment and gender
sectors are relatively new and their interrelationship is more of an emerging issue, and the
same is also true of climate change, it will progress in importance and deepen the different
dimensions and structural challenges of inequality gaps, and embracing it also offers an
opportunity to advance toward several SDGs simultaneously and synergistically.
Conclusions
There is a complex and multidimensional relationship between gender equity and natural
resource policies. That relationship involves care work, which falls disproportionately on
women; the productive sphere, where there are significant inequalities in access to and
control and management of natural resources; and the existence of differentiated
vulnerabilities to the effects of climate change and the environmental impacts of human
activity.
There are structural inequalities that place women at clear economic and social
disadvantage: pronounced inequalities in ownership of and access to key resources such as
land and water, inequalities in the quality of employment and in decision-making venues,
and inequalities in the economy of time. The latter has been particularly aggravated in the
current context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Inequalities translate into a pattern of economic growth characterized by exclusion, since
women are not as well positioned as men to take advantage of the opportunities generated
by economic growth. This is evident in industries such as the extractive sector, where the
benefits are mainly reaped by men, due to the predominance of male employees.
Accordingly, the gender perspective must be included in job creation policies to reduce the
gap and to avoid its reproduction in the new schemes for changing the energy matrix from
fossil fuels to renewables, where the gender aspect can made invisible through the better
environmental conditions achieved. At the same time, the impact of these activities —
linked, for example, to the contamination of water sources— affects women in a
differentiated way given that they are mostly in charge of care work.
Special attention should be paid to land control and ownership, as a result of which the
economic benefits of land sales are unequally distributed, women can be insecure in their
land ownership and they generally have access to smaller plots of lower quality land. This
goal is covered by two different SDGs of the 2030 Agenda.
The impacts of climate change are expected to exacerbate the serious consequences of the
environmental crisis and affect men and women differently, inasmuch as such issues as
reduced water availability, loss of agricultural productivity or the emergence of new vectors
of disease are especially linked to the care work carried out by women.
This is linked to and exacerbated by highly inequitable cultural patterns and traditional
gender roles, and by a sexual division of labour that assigns greater use of women’s time to
unpaid domestic work, which is largely dependent on access to and the provision of natural
resources such as water and energy. Lack of access to resources such as water and electricity
increases the time used for housework, especially for women and girls, and exposes them to
greater vulnerability.
The exclusion of women from governance is also notorious, at the local, regional and
national levels, in participation venues dealing with resources such as water, seas, land and
forests. This leads to their exclusion from decision-making, which is something that those
sectors’ development policies must address. To that end, a gender perspective must be
integrated into the design and monitoring of measures for improving the governance of
natural resources, especially during the pandemic; investments must be made in women’s
leadership and support to their formal and informal networks.
Those efforts must be based on the interrelations that exist among the various SDGs, where
there is an urgent need for an integral and multidimensional approach, which implies the
mainstreaming of the gender perspective in all public policies related to natural resource
management.
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October 2, 2017
A lack of access to natural resources, including minerals, water and land, is often the
underlying cause of many conflicts around the world. When managed properly however, as
part of a peacebuilding strategy, these same resources can also be utilized, and their benefits
shared to generate sustainable livelihoods that help guarantee peace and achieve sustainable
human development.
Women have the potential to play a critical role in this process, as they use and manage land
and other natural resources, while meeting water, food and energy needs in households and
communities.
However, this use rarely translates into women being allowed to influence the distribution of
natural resources or being given a decision making role when the management of resources is
discussed and peace is negotiated.
This report analyzes the reasons behind this discrepancy, its implications for long-term peace
and development and suggests some solutions.
Part one of the report examines the relationship between women and natural resources in
peacebuilding contexts, reviewing key issues across three main categories of resources,
including land, renewable and extractive resources.
Part two of the report discusses entry points for peacebuilding practitioners to address risks
and opportunities related to women and natural resource management, focusing on political
participation, protection and economic empowerment.
The report was published jointly by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
[DK1] , the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Entity for
Gender Equity and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), and the United Nations
Peacebuilding Support Office (PBSO). It is the product of a two-year collaboration among
the four partners.
Key findings
__________________________
http://www.fao.org/3/x0178e/x0178e03.htm
Dr. Huguette Labelle, President, The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
The development paths followed by Southeast Asian countries are based increasingly on
monocentric industrialisation in urban centres where resources and services are increasingly
concentrated. This has led to a relative shrinkage of the rural sector, increasing food prices
and creating an unhealthy reliance on supplementary food imports. Rural communities in
general and rural women in particular are especially vulnerable to the processes of
impoverishment. These include: the degradation, depletion or loss of the natural resource
base
Notes:
a
includes Cambodia, Lao, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam
b
includes Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines
Thus the rural poor face an increasing challenge to meet their basic needs, the most basic of
which is food security. This situation is exacerbated by ongoing environmental
impoverishment, which may in turn lead to a loss of forest products, the depletion of soil
nutrients, the pollution of soils and the contamination of water. The impact of these problems
is especially felt by rural women, whose livelihood depends on access to natural resources,
which are the factors of production.
Inequalities between the sexes in access to resources, entitlements and in the division of
labour in the household, have made women the poorest of the poor. Poor women have:
· fewer legal and customary rights over land, property, water, credit and other
productive resources, such as energy, technology and information
This already unfair situation is worsened when increasing impoverishment leads to male
migration or even abandonment, leaving women to manage the livelihood of their families
entirely on their own. If the expected remittances from the migrating male family members
do not come, the family suffers increased chances of falling into debt. These women and their
families are among the most likely to become destitute, and it is no coincidence that women
number over 60 percent of the absolutely poor and destitute in rural areas.
Poverty is a state of resource deprivation relative to basic needs. In rural areas, if one has
little access to land or other capital resources, labour becomes the only asset that can be sold
or mobilised through work, and by the reproduction of children. Research indicates that the
relatively higher fertility rate found in the rural sector is often a response on the part of the
rural population to impoverishment on the one hand, and high infant and child mortality on
the other. In shoe, the poor tend to have more children because they are poor and because
more of their children die before reaching maturity (see, for example, Caldwell 1982,
Ruzicka 1984, and Handwerker 1986).
For the poor, the family is the significant unit of economic production. The labour of its
members is maximised and pooled through the family. This mode of organising labour at the
micro level shapes gender relations and the role of women as the biological reproducers of
labour High infant and child mortality thus constitutes a compounding factor that further
spurs fertility towards the goal of labour maximisation. This is especially so for smallholder
agricultural producers and landless rural workers. In their labour-intensive mode of
production, children are producers, labour recruits, workers, parental investments for upward
social mobility, and pension providers for the elderly family members.
Such coping strategies at the micro level, however, inevitably have consequences at the
macro level because the maintenance, or increase, of high fertility further degrades limited
environmental resources. It is clear that macro-level planning for sustainable development
must thus necessarily address the micro-level needs of poor households, especially those of
poor women. If sustainable development is to be achieved, such planning must also address
the serious imbalances between urban and rural areas.
The unequal distribution of development resources between the rural and urban sectors
deprives the rural population of the determinants of general well-being, including:
· adequate nutrition
· potable water
· decent sanitation
· adequate rest and relief from hard physical labour and drudgery
_______________
http://www.fao.org/3/x2919e/x2919e04.htm
For several years now, governments and development agencies have given top priority to
gender issues in development planning and policies. Gender equity, concerning resource
access and allocation as well as opportunities for social and economic advancement, has been
a prominent item on the agendas of all recent international meetings, which have also
investigated the basic link between gender equity and sustainable development, defining
specific mechanisms and objectives for international cooperation.
· Inequalities and inadequacies in, and unequal access to, education and training;
· Inequalities and inadequacies in, and unequal access to, health care and related services;
· The effects of armed or other kinds of conflict on women, including those living under
foreign occupation;
· Inequality in economic structures and policies, in all forms of productive activities and in
access to resources;
· Inequality between men and women in the sharing of power and decision-making, at all
levels;
· Lack of respect for, and inadequate promotion and protection of, the human rights of
women;
· Stereotyping of women and inequality in women's access to, and participation in, all
communication systems, especially the media;
· Gender inequalities in the management of natural resources and the safeguarding of the
environment;
· Persistent discrimination against, and violation of the rights of, the girl-child.
3
UN. 1995. Critical areas of concern. In Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing,
4-15 September 1995, Chapter III, Item 44, p. 23, United Nations A7CONF.177/20.
Governments and international organizations were urged to promote the search for, and the
dissemination of, information on the main aspects of gender issues, and to encourage the
production and dissemination of gender-specific statistics for programme planning and evaluation.
2.3.1 Work
Gender disparities in access to economic resources, including credit, land and economic
power-sharing, directly affect women's potential for achieving the kind of economic
autonomy they need to provide a better quality of life for themselves and their dependants.5
Limited access to agricultural inputs, especially for food crops, severely curtails women's
potential productivity.
5
Sections A and B of the Beijing Platform for Action recognize women's lack of access to productive
resources and limited access to economic power-sharing as being major causes of poverty. The 1995
FAO Plan of Action for Women in Development identifies women's lack of access to land and other
agricultural inputs as one of the major obstacles to productivity.
Discrimination against women in employment is also frequent outside the agricultural sector, and
has an impact on the kinds of work, careers and career advancement that women can expect. Over
the past 20 years or so, women all over the world have increased their participation in the labour
market, but they continue to work in less prestigious jobs, are paid less and have fewer
opportunities for advancement.6
6
UN. 1995. The world's women 1995: trends and statistics. Sales No. E.95.XVII.2. New York.
Women face a number of disadvantages in the labour market. As well as coping with sexist
prejudices, they must reconcile the twin roles of homemaker and money-maker. This often affects
their work status, the length and structure of their workday and their salary level. In addition, the
employment sector offers less scope and potential for women than for men, as well as lower pay for
the same work.
****Planners and policy-makers must be mindful of the major aspects of socially ascribed gender
functions and the specific needs of men and women. If development policies are to be sustainable,
they must consider existing gender disparities in employment, poverty, family life, health, education,
the environment, public life and decision-making bodies.