Recommendations

Governments:

• Provide quality and affordable social care and infrastructure and gender- and shock-responsive social protection to mitigate negative impacts from climate shocks.
• Incentivise the private sector to increase the ambition related to women’s economic empowerment within their operations, using a combination of incentives and punitive measures. This might include setting and holding companies to targets and incentives, and creating incentives for those targets to be met; supporting supply chains to comply with new green standards; providing taxes benefits and incentives for female-dominated green sectors to grow and safeguard women’s space within them.
• Legislate on enhanced climate and gender transparency within supply chains.
• Increase women’s land titling.

Private sector:

• Integrate a gender lens into decarbonisation efforts to ensure women in supply chains are not disproportionately affected.
• Collect more gender data as part of net zero journey, including mapping supply chains downstream to informal workers.
• Create a business coalition on gender and climate to share what’s working in supply chains and green jobs.
• Increase access to finance and climate insurance for formal and informal women workers.

DFIs and MDBs:

• Increase the proportion of climate finance that has a gender lens and that reaches women.
• Reconsider tax and debt-rescheduling mechanisms to allow fiscal space for women’s economic empowerment and green growth.
• Incentivise the private sector, for example on data gathering in supply chains and employing women across different levels of seniority.
• Set and implement Gender Action Plans (GAPs) to be reported against by all projects.

Climate investors / funders:

• Increase the proportion of climate finance that has a gender lens, whilst also increasing the overall amount of climate finance.
• Drive climate finance towards women’s green entrepreneurship and women engaged in climate adaptation and mitigation.
• Expand meaningful criteria for gender-responsive climate finance with guidance on how to implement these in practice.
• Set and implement GAPs to be reported against by all projects.
• Build gender into the verification and certification of climate projects.

Civil society:

• Represent women who are undertaking climate adaptation and mitigation activities, and bring their voices to climate policy making circles. This could be done within consultative processes for international climate agreements and global climate fora.
• Champion the rights of marginalised groups, such as young people, women with disabilities, rural communities, women from ethnic and religious minority backgrounds and informal workers who face further barriers to representation.
• Support, mobilise and organise women who are undertaking climate adaptation and mitigation activities, for example by providing climate-smart agriculture training, facilitating market linkages, building financial inclusion and facilitating access to information.
• Work alongside the private sector and global business coalitions to influence and increase impact for women and marginalised groups.

Academia and researchers:

Generate research and data on what works, and for whom and in what circumstances, to provide evidence on what needs to be scaled up and how.

Olivia Jenkins

Wilton Park | April 2024

In partnership with

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