Making Climate Finance Work for Women

The paper highlights the need and demand for mitigation measures that tap women’s potential to contribute to emissions reductions and sustainable development.

Key messages

• Women possess an extraordinary—and often underappreciated—potential to contribute to climate change mitigation and resource management.
• Until recently, initiatives to empower women as agents of change have remained woefully neglected in climate policy and finance circles.
• High transaction costs and gender biases hinder small-scale, bottom-up project development and access to finance, despite the significant social development and mitigation impacts of these projects.
• Links between gender and climate change are nonetheless gaining greater recognition. As a result, international policy makers are demanding inclusive and gender-sensitive approaches that demonstrate how climate finance can be channeled to achieve a greater impact.
• An enabling environment that can support a policy dialogue, capacity development, and pilot projects will be critical to this inclusive approach and making climate finance work for women.
• Climate finance accountability is needed through development of a systematic and ambitious approach to auditing the gender responsiveness of climate projects and financial flows.
• Now is the time to seize the momentum to make truly inclusive mitigation action a reality.