It’s Gender Equality Day at COP28. Reducing the justice gap for women and girls in all their diversity is fundamental to ensuring inclusive, equitable and effective responses to the climate crisis.
That’s why as a founding commitment maker to the Generation Equality Action Coalition on Feminist Action for Climate Justice (FACJ) in 2021 – and the only global intergovernmental organization exclusively devoted to promoting the rule of law as an enabler of peace and sustainable development – the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) made a landmark €500,000 commitment towards feminist climate action, by strengthening legal, regulatory and justice frameworks and supporting women leaders and women’s organizations in claiming their environmental rights.
And today, IDLO is advancing its commitment to gender-responsive environmental and climate justice by officially becoming a leader of the FACJ Action Coalition.
IDLO’s Director-General Jan Beagle said the organization, “Urges bold, tangible and concrete action in support of the Action Coalition… including increasing the proportion of women and girls in leadership positions throughout environmental governance, and enhancing the capacity of women and girls in all their diversity to build resilience to climate change.”
What does this look like in practice? IDLO works to strengthen the knowledge of state institutions and other stakeholders on how to develop gender-transformative climate laws and policies, including:
- Through an interagency partnership in the Philippines – conducting a legal assessment of climate and environment legislation, and identifying where discriminatory provisions against women and girls can result in differential and disproportionate impacts from climate change.
- With a multistakeholder group in Burkina Faso – developing a series of training workshops on gender and climate change, strengthening capacity in government policymakers and practitioners, and improving statistical tools and reporting for gender-sensitive data.
- In Kenya – working with County governments on gender-responsive County-level climate change and natural resource management actions for inclusive climate resilience development.
As an Action Coalition leader, IDLO will continue to champion rule of law pathways to scale up climate justice frameworks, with a particular focus on supporting young women, civil society organizations, and grassroots and feminist movements.
Ensuring women’s meaningful participation in climate-related decision-making processes – like those at COP28 – will help realize women’s environmental and economic rights, and empower the most climate-vulnerable people to actively participate in managing their natural environments. The climate crisis is not ‘gender neutral’ – nor are the solutions.
Photo: Ryan Brown / UN Women