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Gender inequality hindering progress towards Rio Convention goals


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FTA communications

Nature-based solutions can play a crucial role in solving the interconnected crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation – but their full potential will only be fulfilled if they are designed to address gender inequality.

That was the main takeaway from a new paper published by the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), one of FTA’s managing partners.

Land use decisions can generate synergies to address issues such as climate and biodiversity at the same time, the paper finds, and these decisions are influenced by social dynamics such as gender relations, which affect how the benefits of nature-based solutions are distributed within and across households, communities, and beyond.

To maximize these synergies and an equitable distribution of benefits, the paper calls for gender-responsive approaches that address the priorities and concerns of women and other marginalized groups, enhance their capacities, and facilitate their involvement in land use decision-making.

Three steps toward more equitable land use

“If we ignore power relations around who captures the benefits and plan interventions without thinking carefully about how resources are allocated and who participates, we run the risk of elite capture,” says Marlène Elias, the lead author of the paper. “It’s important to carry out a careful analysis of tenure and power relations among community members to prevent this elite capture.”

The first step toward addressing these inequities is to recognize the legitimate stakes, claims, and rights that different groups, such as rural women and men of different ages, socio-economic status, ethnicity, etc., have in/to restoration.

Once these groups have been recognized, it follows that they should have a voice in key decisions that affect them through their effective representation and participation in environmental management initiatives. Initiatives should safeguard their rights through measures such as grievance mechanisms and free, prior and informed consent.

Finally, practitioners must ensure that the costs and benefits of an initiative are equitably distributed. Costs may include labor, management and transaction costs, while benefits may be either direct, such as payments for planting trees, or indirect, such as those derived from ecosystem services.

“For example, if you’re not looking carefully at how labor is allocated within households, then women with land management and agricultural responsibilities could end up putting in labor without benefiting from it,” Elias explains.

“The benefits might instead be directed to heads of household, who tend to be predominantly men in most of the contexts we work in.”

Designing equitable nature-based solutions

Nature-based approaches are not inherently equitable – and they must be intentionally designed with gender and inclusion issues in mind, the authors emphasize.

For instance, collaborative forest management (CFM) can promote synergies by promoting forest conservation and restoration, combating biodiversity loss, deforestation and land degradation, and sequestering carbon at the same time. However, CFM can create these synergies even more effectively if it also enhances gender equality, such as by increasing women’s influence over forest management decisions and improving their access to forest resources. The paper cites several studies showing that women’s participation in forest management can be positively linked with both forest growth and carbon sequestration, with mixed-gender groups being linked with greater community compliance with rules on resource use.

Existing social hierarchies and norms often prevent marginalized groups from participating in and benefiting from CFM. Hence, approaches such as Adaptive Collaborative Management – a collective problem-solving approach – have been developed to address these exclusions by recognizing women and other marginalized groups as key stakeholders in forest management. Practitioners can improve the representation and participation of these groups in CFM by harnessing their unique knowledge and expertise, the authors suggest.

Another notable example is the U.N.’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative, which aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by sequestering carbon through forest restoration and reforestation. REDD+, which FTA has covered extensively as part of its flagship research on climate mitigation and adaptation, rewards individuals financially for conserving and sustainably using forests based on verified emissions reductions, and creates synergies by simultaneously combating climate change, deforestation, forest degradation and biodiversity loss, while also contributing to socioeconomic development.

Gender-responsive REDD+ can further improve these outcomes by incentivizing women and other marginalized groups to support, conservation, restoration and reforestation efforts. It must recognize that such groups will be disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change on the one hand, but that they are also valuable agents of change in climate action on the other hand.

Yet recognition is not enough to ensure that the benefits of REDD+ are equitably distributed. Formal measures such as secure land tenure rights are crucial to enabling women to benefit from these scheme, as women’s rights to land and other natural resources are often mediated by male relatives.

Download the publication [PDF]
There may also be trade-offs between climate mitigation and gender equality goals. The authors cite an example in Burkina Faso where parklands dominated by indigenous trees can significantly benefit women’s livelihoods but are not as effective at sequestering carbon as exotic tree monocultures, which are usually cultivated by men. Practitioners must assess the potential impacts of REDD+ on men’s and women’s livelihoods to determine how best to reconcile these trade-offs, the paper finds.

“The cases demonstrate that we should not assume that women’s representation in environmental initiatives alone will result in more equitable decision making and benefits,” the paper concludes.

“Gender-responsive policy will need to safeguard the rights of women and marginalized groups, strengthen their capacities to exercise leadership and influence environmental agendas, and ensure that they reap the benefits, and not only the costs and burdens, of environmental change.”

 

Sign up for the newly released eLearning course on Gender and Inclusion in Forest and Landscape Restoration

Read more on FTA’s research on gender:


This article was written by Ming Chun Tang.

This article was produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with ICRAF, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.


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New website showcases Forests, Trees and Agroforestry topics from the FTA 2020 Science Conference


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Are you looking for some of the key latest research findings, keynotes, videos regarding trees, forests and agroforestry contributions to sustainable development? Go to the newly launched web-portal of the groundbreaking FTA Science Conference 2020 by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA).

The fully digital conference, titled Forest, trees and agroforestry science for transformational change, ran from 14 to 25 September 2020 and drew more than 520 participants from 69 countries around the world. It featured close to 200 interventions from scientists involved in the FTA program spread over 10 days and 26 different sessions. It included keynote speeches, controversial panel debates on “hot topics”, and technical presentations and posters.

FTA 2020 Science Conference Book of Abstracts now available in PDF

The conference put an emphasis on collaborative research between FTA and the broader community, as 60% of the presentations were between FTA’s seven managing partners (CIFOR, ICRAF, The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR and TBI) as well as the many national partners. The 179 abstracts accepted for the event are now made available in a book on the new web-portal, with more coming next, such as selected videos.

The conference was organized around six key technical themes that are pathways for transformational change:

  1. Inclusive value chains, finance and investments
  2. Towards resilient and diverse landscapes and food systems
  3. Transforming livelihoods through agroecological approaches with trees
  4. Nature-based solutions to address the climate crisis
  5. Inclusive governance for sustainable landscapes
  6. Designing, implementing and evaluating research for development impact

Three plenary sessions allowed for overall framing, linking-up across themes, stock-taking of discussions. The conference featured two sessions addressing “Hot & Controversial” issues, be it in science, in development, or in the media:

  • Competing understandings of the restoration problem and solutions
  • Systemic approaches in a ‘silver bullets’ world.

Restoration has emerged in the last decade as a key global political objective and debates on the topic are intense. The “Hot & Controversial” session used a variety of techniques, including role-playing, quick polls and devil’s advocacy, to highlight and debate some of the most disputed points, allowing to discuss strengths and shortcomings of the argumentations behind, and to debunk myths.

An innovative “Green” Dragons’ Den event was organized for the second “Hot & Controversial” session, to trial five innovations coming from the program. These were defended by their authors in quick elevator pitches, trying to convince the Green philanthropist dragons to invest a “virtual” sum of three million USD. The audience was also called to a virtual crowdfunding exercise. The session was a “live learning” event, for scientists to get better at telling convincing stories on often very complex issues and tools, to best sell their results, as well as understand needs, objectives, and ways of thinking of investors.

***

It was the second time FTA organized a global virtual conference, after the first one held in March 2017 on “cool insights for a hot world”, that gathered 200 participants over two days.

For the 2020 conference, technical developments, including live (“synchronous”) online collaborative tools such as Mural, virtual poster rooms, live polling, role-playing sessions, and the experience of FTA’s events team, allowed for a lively and smoothness event, marking probably a new era for large scale scientific conferencing.

Participation from within the program was double the size of what it would have been if held in-person, and several high-level stakeholders could join for engagement sessions, for which otherwise they may not have been able to travel for a full week. Also, with 3 hours of “air time” per day, it left participants still with time for their other activities, while allowing participation from scientists in time zones situated 15 hours apart, from Vancouver to Hobart.

As a follow-up, the FTA is now organizing a series of “Science to Action” webinars, which are open to all, and which will focus on the way forward for actors on the ground. The first webinar was held on 26 November 2020 on the topic: Innovations to overcome barriers to access to finance for smallholders, SMEs, and women, and was developed in coordination with FTA partner Tropenbos International. You can replay the whole event here.

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Looking forward to engaging even more in 2021, as we wrap up a full decade of research since 2011.


By Sandra Cordon.

This article was produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA). FTA is the world’s largest research for development program to enhance the role of forests, trees and agroforestry in sustainable development and food security and to address climate change. CIFOR leads FTA in partnership with ICRAF, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, CATIE, CIRAD, INBAR and TBI. FTA’s work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.


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