Research Articles Women are Key Custodians of Biodiversity, and COP16 Could Strengthen their Conservation Efforts
The participation, voice and influence of women in conserving biodiversity is critical to facing the biodiversity crisis. However, women are often excluded from governance, capacity building, and finance, putting them at a disadvantage and reducing the global impact of conservation efforts. The COP16 biodiversity summit this year offers an opportunity to change the status quo.
Women in rural and agricultural communities worldwide are custodians of biodiversity, whilst also actively organizing and taking action for the sustainable use, management, conservation, and restoration of biodiversity. Governments, stakeholders, and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), demonstrate growing support for these efforts; however, power inequalities still reduce women’s presence amongst decision-makers.
Gender and inclusion in biodiversity protection should remain a top priority for countries at the 16th session of CBD’s Conference of the Parties (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, to be held from October 21-November 1, 2024. Ahead of the event, experts from the Alliance and other international organizations outline the challenges of gender-responsive implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in 2022, proposing concrete solutions, with clear examples of success stories that Parties to the Convention (almost 200 countries and territories) can use to ensure that their efforts to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity are gender-responsive.
Supporting gender equality helps all people, and the planet
Decisive action is required to halt and reverse biodiversity’s global decline, which converges with the crises of climate change, nutrition and food insecurity. World leaders face difficult decisions to address these existential threats. The inclusion of women - particularly from Indigenous Peoples (IP) and local communities (LCs) - who are on the frontlines of conserving and sustainably using biodiversity has shown, time and again, to be effective in efforts to make meaningful changes across the global spectrum of challenges.
Supporting women in these efforts requires funding and institutional support. It is encouraging, then, that at the previous biodiversity summit (COP15) in Montreal in 2022, Parties to the Convention adopted a Gender Plan of Action (2022-2030) that provides clear and thorough guidance for achieving goals tied to gender equality and biodiversity. The plan has clear expected outcomes, objectives, and indicative actions, delineating timelines and responsibilities.
The Gender Plan of Action builds on a previous similar plan. Helpfully, a review of the prior effort identified several challenges that need to be overcome to mainstream concerns for gender equality in the Convention. These include gaps in capacity development; collection and analysis of gender-disaggregated data and reporting; and finance.
Sustained presence and voice
Despite progress, issues related to gender equality and inclusion are often treated as an add-on – as opposed to an integral part – of biodiversity action plans. This leads to inefficiencies, including how limited biodiversity resources are used, and generates missed opportunities. Greater coordination of efforts among the many sectors of government involved in biodiversity conservation, and among governments, NGOs, research organizations, the private sector, and other concerned actors – locally, nationally and regionally – could help fix this.
The effective and sustained participation, voice, and influence of women – in particular, from IP and LCs and other people facing exclusion – are crucial for advancing gender equality and inclusion and biodiversity targets, yet they are generally absent from biodiversity governance structures and processes.
The full and effective participation and leadership of grassroots women in biodiversity-related processes central to their livelihoods is a human right. Full and effective participation is also essential for successful biodiversity conservation because grassroots women’s groups have deep understanding of local ecosystems, cultural practices, and gender dynamics. Ensuring their participation in biodiversity-related decision-making is key to aligning national policies with local realities.
Significant adjustments to the usual approach to gender and biodiversity must be made, and the intention of the brief is to guide countries so that by 2030, when the current Gender Plan of Action concludes, we see tangible and long-lasting results demonstrating that gender equality has advanced through biodiversity conservation action.
Right skills, people and places
Countries, even with the best intentions to integrate gender considerations into environmental plans, often lack the practical ability to achieve results. Most countries struggle to bring gender equality into their biodiversity actions, partly due to a lack of expertise and resources to develop these capacities. Changing this will require focused efforts on awareness-raising and capacity-building for policymakers, practitioners, and women’s groups to enable them to contribute fully and effectively to CBD processes.
The Gender Plan of Action outlines actions to boost the involvement of women and girls and enhance the capacity of governments and other stakeholders to address gender equality through biodiversity policy and programs. The full involvement of women’s organizations and providing them with the needed resources will enable them to lead sustainable biodiversity actions in their communities. Similarly, the governments that support them need to build their capacity to understand how to provide appropriate support and to use their authority to work across political or jurisdictional barriers.
A first step is to strengthen the capacities of gender-biodiversity focal points and the CBD country representatives tasked with supporting knowledge exchange, sharing with them valuable experiences and best practices, peer-to-peer learning, mentoring and coaching on gender equality issues. Another step is to tailor capacity building to specific needs, involve hands-on learning, and include both women and men. Additionally, the efforts should be aligned with broader biodiversity programs.
Data gaps: Embracing collaboration and local knowledge
More gender-responsive data collection, analysis and application of findings is critical for more successful biodiversity action. The Gender Plan of Action underscores the need to collect data disaggregated by gender and other relevant social characteristics such as age and ethnicity, and to develop capacities to produce and apply this data.
Costa Rica’s data-driven approach to developing gender-responsive biodiversity policies
Costa Rica conducting gender analyses and gap assessments in the environmental sector to inform the development of a Gender Action Plan as part of its carbon-capture through forests (REDD+) strategy by Using gender-disaggregated data from a 2014 census. The analysis revealed that only 15.6% of farm owners were women and that they had limited access to land, technical assistance, and financing. This data-driven approach led to gender-responsive changes in policies, governance, and finance, to ensure that women and men benefit equally from biodiversity and restoration efforts.
To generate efficiencies, data collection to guide gender-responsive biodiversity action should be coordinated across relevant multilateral environmental agreements (such as the three Rio Conventions on climate, biodiversity and desertification). This will help increase the amount of data needed to guide more targeted gender-responsive biodiversity action. Data collection should embrace and involve IP and LCs and women’s organizations, incorporating their diverse knowledge systems. These efforts are needed to track and understand progress – or shortcomings – of implementation efforts against gender equality and biodiversity conservation commitments.
Finance and top-level collaboration
More international and national finance -both public and private - is crucial for the gender-responsive implementation of global environmental agreements. For the efficient use of these resources, investments must be integrated, coherent, comprehensive and coordinated across environmental conventions, policies and gender action plans, such as those adopted under the three Rio Conventions, which include the CBD.
Financing for gender equality and biodiversity is often separated but there are growing efforts, such as through feminist foreign policies and gender-responsive budgeting, to combine these finance streams. Governments are key to ensuring efficient resource allocation and utilization by coordinating and aligning environmental programming with gender equality objectives.
Crucially, women’s organizations and women-led initiatives need unrestricted, timely and predictable funding for their biodiversity initiatives. Building the capacity and access of women, particularly from IP and LCs, to secure financial resources, assets, credit and other financial services will significantly enhance their biodiversity and sustainability efforts.
Written by Marlène Elias, Director of Gender and Inclusion of the Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT. Additional writing and editing by Sean Mattson and José Luis Urrea
The Team
Marlène Elias
Director, Gender and Inclusion
