It is hard to overstate the importance of forest ecosystems to human wellbeing and progress. Forests not only serve as an essential carbon reserve that must be maintained to limit global warming, they also provide livelihoods, subsistence and income for more than 1.6 billion of the global poor. Women comprise a vulnerable majority of the forest-dependent poor. As the pivotal functions of forests are gravely threatened by deforestation and forest degradation through activities which are estimated to cause about one-fourth of total global greenhouse gas emissions annually, women will disproportionately suffer the repercussions of both disappearing forests and climate change.

In response to the links between forest loss and global warming, Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have developed a climate change mitigation approach known as “REDD+”.  Officially defined as “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks”, REDD+ incentivizes developing countries to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. Key in promoting the sustainability of REDD+ is ensuring that gender-differentiated needs, uses and knowledge of the forest are integrated into policy and programmatic interventions.

Existing gender inequalities on the ground – if left unaddressed – can pose serious challenges to the sustainability of REDD+ in the long term. For example, those who rely most on forests for their livelihoods are among the poorest people on the planet and they are disproportionately indigenous peoples and women. Although these groups hold a wealth of knowledge of and have deep relationships with forest systems, making them perfectly placed to be powerful actors for positive action, they often remain under-valued agents in addressing forest loss.

In an isolated village in Sri Lanka, Sampathhamy, a female community elder discusses the active role of women in forests. “Women in this community are engaged in organic farming, growing local tree species in our own lands and also engaged in processing tree products.” In this corner of the hamlet of Kivulewatta in Ampara District, women’s understanding of forest management is a rich, but an often untapped, resource. “We have the experience and human capacity to lead restoration,” Sampathhamy notes emphatically, “our social network brings local practices and traditional resource management knowledge.”

Women and men’s specific roles, rights and responsibilities, as well as their knowledge of forests, shape their experiences differently. These gender-differentiated aspects are critical inputs to planned interventions that will enable the long-term success of REDD+ on the ground. However, given social, economic, and cultural inequalities, and legal impediments, women, particularly those from marginalized groups, such as indigenous people, continue to experience exclusion. This severely limits their ability to fully participate in, contribute to, and benefit from REDD+. It is therefore imperative that deliberate and meaningful efforts are taken to ensure REDD+ action is inclusive, fair, and gender-responsive, both in policy and in practice.

Several hundred kilometers from the village in Kivulewatta, Nong Thi Nguyet, a 50-year old woman and village head from the Na Ray village in Bac Kan province, Viet Nam, plays a key role in local REDD+ activities. “I’m the first person they turn to when they can’t resolve disputes amicably,” she says. Nguyet is the sole village headwoman and speaks with the confidence of a born mediator who has won the trust and respect of her fellow villagers – most of whom are from indigenous groups. As the headwoman, she leads the Grassroots Mediation Group, which has an important function in province-level pilots to trial REDD+ grievance redress mechanisms. 

These experiences from Sri Lanka and Viet Nam illustrate why the equitable and meaningful inclusion of women is a core concern for REDD+. Witnessing this reality and acknowledging the crucial role of gender, the UNDP Climate and Forests Team places a strong emphasis on fully integrating gender equality and women’s empowerment principles in the support provided on REDD+ across Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. This support is concentrated on taking a more proactive and integrated approach in which gender is integrated both as a stand-alone and cross-cutting issue across the following five workstreams:

•      Gender-responsive assessments and analyses to identify entry points and strategies.

•      Gender awareness raising and capacity building to lay the foundations in-country to carry out work in a gender-responsive manner.

•      Gender-responsive participation to ensure women’s equitable and meaningful inclusion in stakeholder engagement, critical institutions and decision-making processes.

•      Gender-responsive planning and monitoring to ensure processes are designed and implemented using approaches that account for gender differences (e.g., through improving women’s forest user and land rights, accounting for their differentiated traditional knowledge and patterns of forest use in forest management regimes, enhancing their ability to engage in decision-making over their forests, etc.)  and then monitored to verify that intended gender outcomes are achieved.

•      Capturing gender-related learning and results from REDD+ activities support a culture of continuous learning and improvement as well as guidance for scaling up and replicating successes.

Gender and women’s empowerment form an integral part of UNDP’s technical support to countries developing REDD+. This holistic gender approach ultimately seeks to go beyond ‘doing no harm’, and instead achieve a gender-responsive approach of ‘doing better’. The goal is to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment, which will ultimately lead to more sustainable REDD+ processes and outcomes. UNDP has carried out this work both directly with countries and in collaboration with other UN agencies through the UN-REDD Programme.

In order to move from commitments to credible action on the ground, UNDP has worked hand-in-hand with women’s groups, indigenous peoples, communities and other governmental and civil society stakeholders to develop real solutions that enable women in their role as guardians of the forest. From the policy to the grassroots level, the stories of women like Nguyet and Sampathhamy, and many more like them, show us how “successful” sustainable development and REDD+ can look like when women are given an equal place at the table.

Acknowledgements: This knowledge product was coordinated, written and edited from UNDP Climate and Forests Team: Celina (Kin Yii) Yong, Elizabeth Eggerts and Ela Ionescu

Originally published in the Gender Equality Newsletter Vol. 4

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