Description
Climate finance instruments, such as national climate funds financed through the United Nations Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) financing mechanisms, have been gaining traction in recent years. While REDD+ mechanisms have demonstrated the ability to overcome some major political obstacles to earlier efforts to promote sustainable forest management, key questions regarding their effectiveness and social impacts on the ground remain, including concerns regarding gender equality across intersectional axes: diverse gender impacts of afforestation and reforestation projects need to be considered at every level and stage of implementation to avoid unequal distribution of costs and burdens.
This paper analyses existing best practices and elaborates lessons learnt on gender considerations in climate finance through an intersectional ecofeminist lens. Based on projects and programmes funded by the Brazilian Amazon Fund/BNDES and building on recent fieldwork in the State of Pará in the Legal Amazon, as well as desk-based primary and secondary research, the paper draws out the connections between gender considerations at three levels of climate finance: the level of the national fund, the project carrier organisations, and, most importantly, the project participants on the ground. To work towards socially just climate finance, a gender transformative approach that is participatory, grounded in social justice, and explicitly seeks to redress gender inequalities needs to be adopted at all levels of climate finance.
