 Welcome to the session on gender, the only gender discussion forum in this first Global Landscapes Forum. So we're very hopeful we'll be having more forums in the coming years. During this morning's opening plenary session Rachel Kite posed one very important puzzle or one very important problem for climate change and I think it applies generally and it is this. She said that there's a lot of good information that is being generated by practitioners, by NGO activists, by researchers on climate mitigation and adaptation but she feared that not much of it is getting where it should. Not much of it is leading to transformative actions on the ground. Now this is not unique to climate only. I think in the gender arena a pretty similar thing can be said. A lot of very good research over time, a lot of very good information and knowledge over time has been generated by different people or by different actors on the landscape and fortunately not much of it has been used to actually advance or create actions that advance gender equity. Okay and so this is an ongoing puzzle for many of us. Today's session is actually trying to think through this puzzle. It's trying our session presenters. We'll be trying to generate insights on how knowledge that's produced and co-produced at different levels by different actors jointly or individually can actually lead to certain outcomes, to certain actions on the ground that can advance our goals of gender equality. So I think it's a very important session and I think what's even more important is that it's counterproductive you know to try and do anything with one arm tied behind your back and increasingly the development community is recognizing this and hence the focus on gender equality. It's difficult to do anything with one arm tied behind our backs. So let's give our panelists a chance to begin the discussion to begin the conversation and then also we will have a chance to hear back from all of you who are here. So a very warm welcome and thank you for coming to this session. My name is Esther Mwangi. I work with the Center for International Forestry Research. I coordinate the gender program for the forest trees and agroforestry group of CG research centers. So thank you so much for coming. Thank you Esther. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thanks to Esther. We have a comprehensive precise overview about the aims and expectations of this session today. So thanks again. Welcome everybody especially the brave gentlemen who have joined the session today because they are not very so many but anyway you are especially welcomed. My name is Antonia Andougar from Copacoyaca. It's the organization which represents farmers and agrooperatives at EU level and I will be moderating the session this afternoon. We have a key issue to tackle during the next two hours and a half and on behalf of the whole panel I kindly invite you and encourage you to be active part in the discussion because we will give you the opportunity to break out into groups and then come up with your own expertise, your own messages. Gender balance is in policymaking and in business is a major issue in the European Union and I've been very happy this morning listening to Ambassador Sisulu because she said that the term farmers and their husbands mainly in Africa and in India should be further used and I believe it's a fair expression and I do agree ready to be further used. In the specific case of European women farmers they have a forum where to rise their voice at EU level thanks to the women committee, the Copacoyaca women committee and we see that many of their concerns and revindications are shared by women all over the world. So the experiences and the expertise provided by our panelists today will show that the work ahead to successfully link gender knowledge to action is challenging worldwide. Before introducing our speakers I would like briefly explain how we would like to structure the discussion today with you. First of all they will present the views, their experiences and then we will have a short time for burning questions, clarification questions but the real time for discussion will come afterwards because I will ask you to break out into three groups. I think it's feasible because the group will allow that and you will discuss two questions which are there, one of them the second one has some questions and roughly for 40 minutes and you will come up with your messages and we'll be able to share with the rest of the group for five minutes. So it will be on you how to structure the discussion who will be chairing your small group who will be reporting back to plenary. We'll leave it on to you. So I will not take more time about these issues just remind that we have four relevant people here with us for relevant ladies in different fields, research, advice, business even we have a farmer and farm leader herself but who have common goals driving their work. Welcome to all of you and thank you for accepting the invitation to participate to this session. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Adora Johnson from Eufro the first lady my rights from the International Union for Forest Research Organizations. She is a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science. In her last research work which has been recently published she analyzes how dominant ideas about the environment, development and gender equality shape the spaces in which women and men take action and how it happens through global discourses and grassroots activism. Then we have the opportunity to listen to a farm leader Mrs. Carlson. Mrs. Carlson was the first woman elected president of the Wisconsin Farmers Union in February 2003 and has been very active and serving in her local county and state farmers union committees and boards and not so long time ago she was a youth leader for her local chapter. She was president of the IFAP women's committee and she's currently serving as facilitator and chairperson of the World Farmers Organization women's committee. Afterwards we will be listening to Dr. Quezada from WEDO the Women's Environmental Development Organization. She works in the establishment of links between gender equality and various environmental issues and she has been involved in different pioneer activities to ensure that the climate change agreements promote gender equality and women's rights. And finally Mrs. Petri CEO of Wand World which is a private sustainable organization operating primarily in Africa. She mainly works in ensuring that gender issues are integral to key strategies and projects such as the Western Cape climate change strategy and action plan South Africa. Mrs. Petri has pioneered a systematic analysis approach in the search for solid sustainability solutions to complex trans-boundary issues and she's played a key role in facilitating the shaping of a science policy institutional finance dialogue which has become the African regional climate change program framework in developing practical responses to climate change issues. We have also three reporters, I welcome them. Mrs. Shijapati from CIFOR, Mrs. Boomba from FANPAR and Mrs. Stephanie from the German Pharmacist Association. So Mrs. Arora Jonsson, the floor is yours. Thank you. Okay, thank you Antonia and thank you Esther for inviting me for this gender session. It appears to me that there is this resurgent anxiety about gender these days in environmental policy and practice and we heard Bruce Campbell talking about it as well, about the CGE organizations getting very interested in this issue. And I believe that the landscape approach with its focus on a geographical context, with its overlapping relationships make the importance of gender even more apparent. But as Esther said already, gender research has become more sophisticated and theoretically strong. There is frustration among researchers, policymakers and practitioners that much gender research appears to have little influence on the ground on environmental practice on the ground. Scholars feel that our work is hardly taken up in policy and practice, whereas practitioners complain that gender theories are far removed and all the theoretical concepts are far removed from the everyday work of development interventions and environmental interventions. So gender research in many cases has provided us with precise and theoretical concepts to understand society. But the link between research and everyday work seems to be more elusive. So what I want to do today is to think with all of you about some of the reasons for these problems associated between the gap between knowledge and action. And since we are sandwiched between two weeks of climate negotiations, I thought what I would talk about is gender research in climate change. And especially the kind of research that has appeared extensively in policy documents and project documents and so on. And one thing that became really obvious to me when I started doing this and looking at the research on gender and climate change was the need for us to continually evaluate what is it that we know about gender in the environment and to think critically about the taken for granted things we have in our field, what we take for granted, the truths and the consequences of doing that. But before I go into that, I'd like to clarify what I mean by gender. And so when I say gender, I speak of it as a category of analysis. And with that I mean studying the organization and relationships of power in environmental work and can be power relationships between and within groups of men and women related to ideas about masculine and feminine behavior. So the thing to remember is gender is not women, though it's often assumed to be. But that gender is a relationship. And we are studying this organization of relationships and how it determines outcomes in the real world. So what does gender have to do with climate change? I found that in this literature, most of it deals with women. And in this, two themes stand out. One is that women are more vulnerable to climate change or that women are virtuous in the sense that women are more environmentally friendly. And these two assumptions are based on three truths about women in our field. And that is that the women, that women in general are the poorest of the poor. Women are more prone to die in natural calamities. And women are more environmentally conscious. And these arguments actually have a geographical bias to them. So the arguments about women's vulnerability occur more in the global south. Whereas the arguments about virtuousness are more in the north, or although there is overlap. So to examine the efficacy of these arguments, I decided to look at them a bit closely and look at the kind of literature associated with these. And I realized that much of it seems to be unconvincing. And yet these truisms persist. And why was that? So I looked at why that might be the case and what are the implications of those truism on work on climate change and gender. So I looked at these arguments. To look at the argument about the poorest of the poor, I examined the literature on poverty. And to understand if women really died more in natural calamities and why it is said, it's said to be, I looked at the research on natural disaster and post disaster reconstruction. And thirdly, the research on environmental behavior. So I start with the first one, which is that women are the poorest of the poor. Now there is general agreement and evidence actually to show that the poor in the developing world will suffer the most as a result of climate change. From there, several have drawn the conclusion that since women represent a disproportionate share of the poor, they will be, they are likely to be disproportionately vulnerable. Now, how do we know this? It is said that 70% of the 1.3 billion people in the developing world living below the poverty line are women. Now, this is stated repeatedly in several documents on climate change and gender. It is also believed that gender differences are greatest among the poorest, because for reasons as such as women need the least and the last, there were bank reports on this and so on. These statements are echoed in all policy documents that take up the question of gender and climate change that I have examined, at least up to 2011. To give you an example, two years ago, the Nordic Council of Foreign Ministers opened a portal called Equal Climate. The Finnish Foreign Minister is reported to have spoken about how women are affected more than men by climate change. And that is why he says climate change is also a question of gender equality. My examples often from the Nordic countries, since I am based there, but there are examples like this in other places. Another similar statement comes from the Swedish bill on climate and energy policy and where they state that many developing countries are specially vulnerable to climate effects because of poverty, conflicts, lack of gender and social equality, environmental degradation and lack of food. In other words, a lack of gender equality leads to greater vulnerability. Now this sounds fairly commonsensical and being a government bill, I suppose they didn't feel the need to substantiate it or give references or show the linkages. In the same bill, gender is not supposed to play a major role in the countries in the North, with exception perhaps in the transport sector. So with this I come to the second truism, which is that women tend to die more in natural disasters. In fact, it's claimed that women are 14 times more likely to die in natural calamities caused due to climate change. Again, this is cited in almost all policy documents and a lot of academic reports as well as the US Congressional Bill. As evidence, it decides the Asian tsunami, especially in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, the largest number of fatal diesel women, the Bangladesh cyclone of 1991 and the European heat wave of 2003. There is one exception though, which is Hurricane Mitch. But there are, where more men were supposed to have died. But this also has gendered reasons, as scholars point out because they say in Latin America there is this culture of machismo. So when the water's rose, the men jumped into the water trying to save women and children and they died instead. Now the third truism. And this occurs more in literature in the north, in Europe, especially in Northern Europe. Women are considered more sensitive to risk, more prepared for behavioral change and are likely to support more drastic environmental policies. There is in fact a quantitative study in Sweden which seems to indicate that women worry more about the environment. In a study commissioned by the Swedish government and published in 2007, considered to be a semiland report on climate change and gender, judging from the way it's been cited in innumerable academic and policy documents since then, the author asks rhetorically, who are the polluters? And the answer, you can guess, is men. And why is that? Men drive more while women use public transport or cycle. A Danish study suggests that men eat more meat, which leads to greater life, more livestock, which leads to more methane and hence they're more polluting. And then of course there are consumer studies on men spending habits and so on, which I'm not going to go into right now. So basically the conclusion of the report on climate change and gender, a report like I said that has been cited widely, is that richer poor men pollute more while women leave a smaller ecological footprint. So after reading all this, most of us in this room, you can imagine as a woman it feels quite satisfactory to know that we have nailed down the social group that's responsible for climate change and we can feel good about being the virtuous part of the population. But as you might have been able to guess, this research is also problematic and for a number of reasons that I will go into now one by one. Firstly, coming back to the argument about women being the poorest of the poor, scholars like Sylvia Chan for example have looked at these arguments more closely and show its link to the feminization of poverty concept within development studies that has in fact been contested by several scholars. The 70% figure that that is that women make up 70% of the poor is anecdotal rather than statistically rigorous. No scientific study has ever been cited to show that this assertion actually holds. Aleh Marku, a demographer who already in 1995 began examining this, claimed by looking at empirical evidence, found that this figure was implausible given the age distribution of the global population and its household characteristics, meaning basically that we don't have that many women in the world to justify the claim. Other scholars like Nyla Kabeer have shown that women and men behave not just as women or men in the labor market but as family breadwinners so it would be difficult to say exactly what do we mean by rich or poor. Cecile Jackson in a pathbreaking work in 1996 called the poverty trap, which draws on a lot of qualitative and quantitative work to show the inconsistent sees in the argument that all women headed households are the poorest, which is one of the cornerstones of the feminist feminization of poverty concept. So why are these arguments about women's poverty actually dangerous? One reason is that it promotes the fallacy that poverty alleviation will automatically lead to gender equality and this is something I'm going to come back to a bit later. Now I come to my second argument that in general more women die in natural disasters. In fact 14 times is more. Now again there's a lack of data to show this but since this was fairly new not as old as the 70 percent figure I thought it might be worthwhile to figure out where it came from. So it took us a while to finally trace it down to the report which was the origin of this statement and we finally found the author who had written it and we asked the person, we wrote to the person and said so where could you send us the data for this and apparently this person said that this statement was made at a natural hazards conference in Latin America the person couldn't really remember when it was somewhere in the 80s and it was well the person picked it up and put it in a report and since then it has been quoted extensively everywhere in all policy documents. It could be true but we don't really know. In 2007 Neumeyer and Plumper looked at data from 141 countries over several years and indicated that the impact of disaster on life expectancy is clearly contingent on socio-economic factors meaning for example that yes women will die more where they are socio-economically disadvantaged. Similarly research from Uri Sain India for example shows that it's difficult to speak of vulnerability without thinking of cast in class. Households that were much more vulnerable to the flooding were those of the lower class and the cast who had their houses by the riverbed. Of course they can be an exception to that as well. In another bout of funding in Uri Sain it was actually the lower class and cast women who were better off because they were able to avail of a scheme that gave them concrete houses which made that made their houses survive the flooding where the upper class women actually suffered. So Sarah Bradshaw who has done a great deal of research in Nicaragua after Hurricane Mitch writes that while poverty is a key component of vulnerability it is not only not necessarily the best component in terms of predicting impact and of course she points out the need for better data. Here again in Nicaragua for example there is no data to prove the assertion that more men died in Hurricane Mitch than in than women. So what we can say about disasters though is that they exacerbate existing inequalities. So the point is our analysis must be context dependent and the solutions or theories we propose need to take account of that particular context. And lastly I come to the third assertion that women are more environmentally conscious. Although much of this research press the more recent research is based on quantitative surveys on transport preferences and consumption they ignore differences between women or differences between men for that matter and tend to club their motivations, perspectives and actions into a homogenous whole. A lot of the climate change literature goes back to the early women in development debates that have been subjected to intensive critique since then. Researchers like Binagraval for example have shown how people's responses to the environment need to be understood in the context of the material reality, the division of labour, property and so on. Maureen Reid in a study of in Northern Vancouver in Canada studies what she calls the other women who were vociferous supporters of forestry, conventional forestry and certainly not pro-environmental. She writes that some women's activism that does not fit into this mold of the pro-environmental and progressive tends to be ignored in the research and gender and environment. As she writes we need to examine the embeddedness of women's responses and also the fact that women do not automatically behave in one way or the other but that women's identities and agendas are shaped by the circumstances. So the question is despite rigorous research to the contrary why do policy makers but also researchers and activists keep falling back to these cliches and one is the sort of a policy reason which I'll come back to later but also there are the several reasons. Arguments about women's vulnerability and virtue are driven in large part by the desire to put women and unequal gender relations on the map of climate change discourse. There are a few references as you know to gender in the expert oriented and technical literature on climate change and its various programs. The same can be said of the policy literature. As one gender activist stated these are the arguments that politicians respond to. Feminists are pushed to and choose to. Simplify, sloganize and create narratives with the power to move. And my aim is not to thwart these efforts which are important. Women are in fact virtuous or vulnerable in several many contexts but pushing these arguments out of their context can have unfortunate consequences. Firstly the credibility of this research is undermined and there's a lot that's been written in critique which I'm going to take up right now. But also secondly ideas about women's vulnerability of virtuousness prevent a static concept conception of women's roles. Women are made into a homogeneous group suffering because of their sex while all men are villains. And as we know the world is so much more complex than that. As you can see in this picture for example with this woman getting on to her jet. Thirdly and what I consider most pernicious it is that it leads to an assumption in research as well as in policymaking or development work that we know what the problem is. Women are vulnerable or virtuous and gender and power relations are ignored. So in that way gender is made invisible in debates on climate change. If we go back to thinking about gender as a relationship of all relationships of power. So for example when you look at these pictures of climate negotiations you can see one of the problems that is evident at all level of the climate change discussions. And that is the lack of women in decision making fora. Again reflecting an organization of power relations. This thinking also denies agency to women because we already know what all women are like. They the vulnerable or virtuous. So as a result there are no efforts to understand what are the relationships that produce vulnerability and how they might be changed or why women might choose to be virtuous and how that might or might not be supported. Moreover generalizations like these make it impossible to meet the highly specific needs of particular groups of women or men and to take advantage of the potential for climate change mitigation in different contexts. So all the policy and resources are directed at women. There is little understanding of the gendered experiences of that poverty. These can have an unintended negative impact. Greater responsibility for overall poverty reduction is put on women and poverty alleviation actually becomes what many scholars call a feminization of responsibility. Basically it becomes a case of directing resources through women and Sarah Bradshaw in a work in Nicaragua she gives an excellent example of this in her work where a lot of the money was given to women to take care of community rebuilding the community and not very many of the people felt that they personally benefited from that. There are some scholars for example Melissa Leach who claim that the idea women's closeness to nature served strategic reasons policy purposes in the 1980s when women's labor resources and skills were mobilized for a range of different programs such as tree planting, soil conservation and so on. So basically they will assign the role of saving the environment without addressing whether they had actually had the resources or the capacity to do so. So now when there is increased attention to gender it is heartening to see that. But we also need to be alert to how that's going to be translated in practice for real life women and men. And lastly another result of this kind of thinking is how it reinforces North-South biases to the detriment of women both in the North and the South. The corollary of the victim in the South is the heroin of the North. And how does that make itself evident? For example gender is not considered as important or relevant in the Swedish environmental context or actually for those of you who were there for the opening of the gender café yesterday when Bruce Campbell made this what I think was an excellent opening of introduction to the gender café spoke about the gender differentiations out there in the rural world whereas actually if you think about it the gender differentiation is this conference or all these places are equally gendered not just out there. This is also clear in the bill on climate and energy that I cited earlier in Sweden. Another statement comes from the Swedish defence research agency and I quote they say since climate adaptation has a higher degree of international interdependence if gender inequity aggravates climate problems in other countries this can have significant indirect impact effects in Sweden. Now why is this attitude problematic? Because underlying this is an assumption that gender is nothing that we really need to worry about or work with in environmental relations in Sweden and if we do it is because of problems that come in trailing from other countries. However previous research including mine in Sweden showed that although development and a certain standard of welfare make issues of gender inequality appear to be less urgent questions of gender and power in environmental work are equally relevant in Sweden as they are in the global south. In Sweden however power relations can take subtle forms that make gender discrimination in fact even more difficult to contest. As development researchers have pointed out it is so much easier to make gender an issue of poverty than to view gender disadvantage is crossing boundaries of class and ethnicity. Moreover it is so much easier to speak of gender equality is among some poor people far away than to turn attention to the gender character of governments or development agencies or our universities. So what is it that I want you to take back with you about the knowledge that we generate and the actions we take. Firstly we need to challenge not just the technical expert oriented discourse and climate change and its instruments but also the tendency to reinforce stereotypes. Secondly gender needs to be seen in its particular context in its landscape so to speak. We need to examine how exactly vulnerability is produced in particular places and in relation to outside forces. Challening funding funds to women does not have to be positive and infrequently not in infrequently has negative impacts. We need to know how and in what context women and men find themselves able to deal reliably with the unequal effects of climate change. And thirdly policy needs to be flexible and provide for diversity otherwise agenda policy is of little use. There are countless examples of development workers and others who just give up in frustration because they can't really see how a particular gender policy is going to be it's meant to be applied in their context. So how can gender research lead to better action? I think by helping to ask questions and figure out what the problem really is so taking a step back. No amount of technical solutions are going to solve our problems if you don't know what our problems really look like in particular contexts or landscapes. We need to understand also need to understand our own role in propagating myths about gender and keep challenging our own blind spots. So thank you. That's what I wanted to say. Thank you very much doctor. Sorry I have to state you. Yeah, just in case someone yeah and mainly to come up with the key messages you have delivered. So I think your presentation has been really inspiring and it shows how the reflection on gender becomes the more and more sophisticated and in many cases has provided concepts to understand reality. But you really has obliged us to wonder and to question ourselves about what we do know and what we take for granted. It has been really interesting. Has anybody question or clarification from Dr. Arora Johnson before the discussion afterwards? OK, thank you. Mrs. Carlson, please. Poverty, vulnerability, etc. I mean, we are left almost in a vacuum and we do need to respond to policymakers and to actions because I mean, otherwise we are silent and we say, oh no, sorry, we are still questioning. It's correct. It's not correct. I mean, there must be a balance between these all putting question on everything and moving forward. There are answers, of course. I don't when you question to see where that data comes from, you question to see how valid it is. Now, all the other data that I presented as a response to it was rigorously conducted research. So you need to know where it that's what I mean. You need to know where it comes from and why it's being used in what context for what purpose. So you have your answers there. That's what I mean. More flexibility as well, depending on what you're talking about instead of having one size fit all model that will not apply everywhere. May I, because we will have time afterwards in the groups and we'll try to distribute ourselves to cover. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. I am Sue Carlson and I chair the Women's Committee at the World Farmers Organization. The World Farmers Organization, for those of you that don't know, we have farmers in all continents and over 60 or farm organization members from nearly 60 countries. And I'm really very pleased that the WFO could be part of organizing and actually being here today. And really how appropriate it is that women farmers are represented here today. As women perform two thirds of the world's working hours and produce over 50 percent of its food, but only earn 10 percent of its income. Women own less than 2 percent of its property. This is worldwide and receive less than 5 percent of all bank loans. And of the 1.2 million or billion people living in poverty less than a dollar a day, 70 percent are women. And hopefully that's a factual statement. I got it from FAO. Yeah. Yes. Well, I appreciate your research on this. But and in Africa, we can see women own just only 1 percent of the land and are responsible for over 60 percent of the food production. We can go through all the statistics. I think throughout the day you've been hearing these and know them. And I agree with SEMA's definition of gender. And it's not that we are women, but it's how culture views men and women. And it's really up to us to help influence the next generation to make positive changes. And when I wanted to say within the WFO, we do have a women's committee, but it's not that we are in an island. We are not an auxiliary. We are with immersed into all of the pillars, all of the policymaking, all of the decisions of the organization. But we also know that women throughout the world, women farmers are disadvantaged in many ways and we need to empower them and help lift them up. So I thought about this when I was asked to represent women farmers here today. I thought about the unending acronyms and jargon and the terms that are used in all these climate change discussions. We've been to several cops and substance and it is overwhelming. And I just and I also want to say when we attend a lot of these meetings, it's generally researchers, scientists, university people. Generally, we're the only farmers in the room. And there could be 600 people making decisions or ideas for us, but yet they don't really know what we need. We even were at a session where they had a conference and I don't even want to not trying to make light of this, but how to talk to a farmer. And so it's kind of interesting to us, you know, we are real people and we do understand how all of this works. But often, especially when speaking with women farmers around the world, if we ask, you know, what's going on with climate change in your area, they just give us a puzzling look, you know, what does that mean? But the minute I ask, you know, has your weather changed? Then I receive these exuding responses. So there really isn't a one size fits all answer. Is this technology being transferred to women farmers? I think you'll be surprised. We're going to go around the world to a couple of farmers, women farmers in each area and see what they say about it. So we had a conference a few weeks ago in Lusaka, Zambia, and one woman farmer said, we know that something's going on. The rainy season is not the same. The rains are starting later than they used to and they stop sooner. Sometimes they stop later. So how do I know when it's the best time to plant my seeds? I often don't. I'm losing out on an income by not knowing when the best time is to plant my seeds. Well, because she has no local weather forecasting or weather alert system available, this is one of the many signs of the great gaps that exist between the global development or the global research agenda and the farmer community. Alternatively, I witnessed an example of knowledge transfer in Zambia just a few weeks ago without realizing the impact it would have. Mrs. Sianga, who describes herself as a farmer in the middle, no longer a small subsistence, smallholder farmer, not a large commercial farmer, attended our WFO and National Farmers' Unions. We had a special day for International Day of Rural Women to honor them. And we had a climate session panel. This was the first the women had ever heard about climate change. And we had top-level, high-level experts explaining this. But they also received very practical information. So she is a very literate woman. She holds a diploma in clinical medicine. She's a farmer. She's a mother. And so she, I called in just to do a small interview with her because I was really interested to see how the variety of women, because we can't just stereotype. I wanted to hear what was going on in her farm. And she told me that now, since she's attended our climate session, she's really eager to learn more about how can she adapt, how can she mitigate, how can she change practices. So I started to ask her questions about, you know, about her farming practices and how she receives her knowledge. So she explained to me they don't have extension agents that come to their farm. It's just non-existent. But what they have is where she learns about practices, about how to farm, is from her credit facilitator. He is the person she goes to for her loans. And he explains the crops that she should grow, how to grow them, and actually how to market them. So that's her source of information. So she would really like to see more extensionate, have an extension agent, or even have more credit facilitators because there's only one for the whole district. It's just not enough to get to everybody. So I asked her if there was, she felt equal access for men versus women in this technology and information. She really felt there was. They have policies and laws in place. But she said where there are women are so disadvantages, the majority of women in her area are illiterate. They simply can't read or write. So to get a loan, you have to bring records of your farming, you know, how much you've produced, how much you've earned, your bottom line. They don't have that. They don't know how to keep those records. So she tries to help the women farmers in a lot of things. She gave some examples by talking about measurements. I just can't say a leader. I have to show them a leader of milk and say this is what it is. So more visual, simple explanations. They're getting an education. They're trying to encourage that for their children and they want the next generation to have these opportunities. So that's where she feels their disadvantage just because of being illiterate and not having access. The same would be true then for this technology transfer because they can't read or write and they don't have meetings that explain it. Obviously it's not being transferred. But what I was really fascinated to find out was what she's doing on her own and how is she, some of these things she's picked up from her credit facilitator. And she says that you can see here she's adopted irrigation, a drip irrigation. She said the weather has just changed so much. They have flooding so she's had to move her vegetable production up to higher ground. And she needs to find a way to cover the plants because the colder season is actually much colder than it used to. Everything is changing. Last year they had army worms come through and destroy much of the maize. She had a bull worm on her green beans. So she's trying to find organic ways to manage this. So her yields are improving. But then her problem is getting it to market. She finally has a truck but it doesn't do much good when the roads are completely impassable and she needs to drive 25 or 30 miles to the market. And so she needs storage. There's no cooling for her vegetables so they quickly rot if she can't get them sold. So we talked about ways she could possibly think about processing or dehydrating or preserving what doesn't get sold. I liked what I heard this morning with the minister from Rwanda speaking about their cooperative taking ownership for them of their produce that couldn't sell and keeping it the market and selling it for them. So that would be a good solution. OK. So then so these are you know lots of the barriers the problems but yet I can see it's being adopted whether she's learned it from research and she also has other challenges that we all face you know unstable markets. Can she sell her things. The price is very low often much below the cost production. And so those are unique concerns for farmers throughout the world. So let's we'll go to Uganda next. Rose is a farmer near Kampala and she tells me that the government of Uganda through her Ministry of Water and Environment is promoting a tree planting program and where these incentives it incentivizes farmers who have five acres or more to plant trees. So the landowners prepare the land they're given the seedlings and then the farmer maintains that and then they actually tell with the help of the government help them do a good job of maintaining these forests until it's ready to harvest. So this is what Rose does. She plants fruit trees and pines. She has an acre of mangoes oranges and jackfruit and she has four acres of pines and this increases the carbon dioxide absorption from the atmosphere. So she's very well aware. This is one way to mitigate climate change and she's adapting. So through her government agency this technology is being transferred to her. So she practices water harvest and she uses that for watering her livestock, for irrigating her backyard crops and then also for her home use during prolonged dry seasons. And then she's reduced the use of wood for fuel and also the use of charcoal for cooking by switching to biogas for the cooking and the lighting in her farm. In Indonesia there is a group of women, the Indonesian women farmers and rural women's organization called Puatani and Mrs. Lani Eugenia, their general secretary said many of their barriers to technology transfer is cultural. She said women need to put aside at times these cultural ways and take a risk to plant or harvest earlier or later to improve their yields. And she cites these examples where women farmers are working together for example to harvest fruit and she describes that as social capital which can benefit women on a wider scale. So farmer organizations, women's organizations such as Puatani play an important role in facilitating advocacy processes by addressing different needs and the priorities of women farmers and enhancing their potential to adapt to climate change. Technology transfer also brings to mind what my colleague Sarala told me in India. She said they've made advances in India. You know there's a lot of cooperatives for women, women working together, making their lives better. But she said even though they have extension agents, they're men and it's just inappropriately culturally inappropriate for the woman farmer to go out and speak to the male extension agent. So she recommends more women being trained as extension agents until that gender bias or that cultural difference is that bridge is made. So what I found is farmers from developed countries do have more opportunities. I'm from the U.S. I'm a farmer in North Dakota. So we actually have more opportunities for technology transfer. And I would say sometimes it's taken for granted. And I don't mean that, you know, in a haughty way. It's just we do have this more accessible to us. And we can quickly adapt to climate change. And I'll just tell you what on our small farm or our farm in North Dakota. We grow small grains. And just a decade ago, we couldn't grow corn or soybeans, which we are now able to do because of different varieties of seeds. And the climate is warmer. Things are shifting very rapidly. And so when we say climate change, it doesn't always mean a negative for some areas of the world. It's a positive. And so we look at that as a positive. We are able to expand our varieties of what we grow from. We grow flax and sunflowers, wheat, other edible beans and small grains. We can also buy crop insurance risk management was talked about earlier. And you know, that would be a good thing if all farmers and women farmers around the world were able to have access to that risk management tool. And of course, many farmers around the world are continually changing and innovating with the times. My friend Jeanette in New Zealand tells me and I'm going to read what she said because at first I was thinking, this is interesting. And she really has a very good point. She said we do not refer to climate change as such. It's all about sustainable farming practice. So in the New Zealand context, we don't change our farming practices for the carbon, but for the betterment of the whole system. We've talked about holistic approaches today. And that's what their view is. She said, we're always changing and adapting new techniques and information so that we can adjust to the change and sustainability. It's the key we weigh. For example, this could mean using crops and pastures that need less water that are deep rooted for drought tolerance or using trees to prevent erosion, but can still be grazed by cattle. As science and understanding helps increase our knowledge, we make changes to better improve our farming systems. So we look constantly at our farms as a whole system, not just production focus and we change our systems as they need adjusting. So we can see, yes, technology transfer is happening many places in the world. And Kati from Finland tells me that their farmers are adopting to climate changes by having experienced a warmer climate as we are in North Dakota. So they're planning more protein type grasses and harvesting them as silage or the cows are grazing. That means they have to buy less protein. That's a positive for their farmers. They're buying risk management for their crops and for their forests. So if there is loss because of weather or pests, she said right now they're experiencing mosquitoes that carry blue tongue to the cattle, something they hadn't experienced and are having to find ways to combat that. And let's see, I was going to show you this is just a little bit of our farm in North Dakota. We don't have a lot of trees, but we happened to my father-in- law and my husband planted a grove of trees there, which was really lovely. So even though women may be illiterate in many parts of the world, the example that Pua Tani in Indonesia exemplifies would work in villages throughout the world. Once one farmer is innovative and starts a successful practice to improve her yield, it will quickly spread to others and whether they're literate or not. So in my opinion, this is what we need to improve technology transfer. Listen to what women farmers need. Respond to those needs. Being mindful of their cultures. Identify one or two women farmers to adapt practices to their farms. It'll quickly be picked up by others and incentivize these changes. Farmers are the biggest investors in agriculture, larger than university, larger than the private sector. We invest a large amount of money in ourselves, but we also need everyone benefits when we do have more yields and more food and it should be incentivized. It's always the carrot or the stick. That's the better approach. I think it's good to utilize visualization like Mrs. Siyanga does to help her women farmers in her area to use simple and clear examples and concrete examples and provide adequate extension agents, as Serala mentioned in India, who have them local and engage farm organizations. The farm organizations when they are so vital, they are the ones that can make policy happen, have changes. It's good to have women leaders on those and they should also be helped in ways that they can provide educational opportunities for their farmers. Then I think empower women farmers to step up to decision making positions. Bottom line is everyone wants a profit. Farmers are no different. We shouldn't apologize when we make a profit and to be a commercial farmer is not a bad thing and as I said it comes at a cost and everyone benefits from the food security we provide and as we always say remember no farmers, no food, no future. And the next thing is to encourage our youth. With over 40 percent of youth in Africa unemployed right now and of course in many parts of the world what an opportunity. We need to show them that agriculture being a farmer is a dignified occupation. One that is sorely needed and we should do all we can to help them and encourage them to be our next farmers. And I want to close by starting to tell you about a, this is my friend Alice from Malawi. And we had such a good time at the commission on status of women in New York City in 2012. And I think she asked the best question when we were there. We went to the global compact and there were like 400 businesses and they had signed this compact and they were going to be greener and doing all these great things which was wonderful. We had a very good time hearing what was going on. And from very, very high level X for as bonky moon was there. And it took us a while to get her to be called on, but we did eventually. And this is what her intervention went like just a little bit. She said, you know, this is all well and good. This is just incredible technology. But how can I get this on my farm in Malawi? And no one could answer her. No one had the answer. And they came up to us afterward and said that was the best question of the day. So everything I do, any policy we make at WFO, any projects we might take on, any things we are thinking about that question always brings in my mind. How will that help Alice on her farm in Malawi? So even though access and availability to knowledge and technology varies widely throughout the world, what I do know is that women farmers, wherever they may be, wherever they may live, they all want the same things. We all want to receive a profit for our work. We all want to educate our children and we all want to leave our land better than we found it. So in terms of COP 19, we are truly disappointed with what's happened here this week. And what farmers want is a work program on agriculture to uncover the state of scientific knowledge about agricultural adaptation and mitigation. This would benefit not only farmers, but it would also ensure food and nutrition security. So thank you very much. I appreciate your attention and I'd be happy to answer questions now or at the end. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Carlson. Thank you very much. I think it was very interesting to have some figures in the beginning. You remind us how important the issue is with figures. It's also crucial and also to remind us that climate change is not always assumed with farmers, not really understood the concept itself, but put into place every day with the daily practices. And also very good to see specific examples about the complicated, the complex process of technology transfer, not only because of physical barriers, but mainly cultural, which are even more difficult to overcome. Any questions specifically burning issue? Okay, for discussion. A lady over there. Thank you. I'm Eva Christer from Germany, from the Climate and Lines and the Global Network on Gender and Climate Justice. Sorry that I couldn't hear the first speech, but I like your speech very much. But then I think where is the demand relating to that all women and girls can go to school and get the same right to read and write and get professors from mathematics and ecological, agricultural politics and so on at universities. So I think we have to say that part of the budget of either of the Green Climate Fund or of Adoption and Medication Funds, the conditions for women to participate is that they are in all countries, all girls have the right to go to school and that there should not be the other demand would be that there should not be an overburden by women that they are forced anyway and cannot really decide how many children they want because otherwise we are only burdening them with moral work. No, I couldn't agree more. And when I talked to Mrs. Sianga, I asked her, I said, with the women that can't read or write in your village, would they want to receive an education? And she said, they really don't want to. They just want their children to. They want their children to be better. I'm not saying that's the way it is around the world, but it's a question that's very burning in my mind. And I totally agree. Everyone should be encouraged, men, women, girls, boys have equal chance. Thank you very much. Is this working? Good afternoon, everybody. I'm going to bring, I think, a more practical, well, can't be more practical than yours perspective, but certainly a perspective that's come from research that we've done around the world around this issue of woman and time and change. I am looking at woman in this issue, in this question. On the program, it says bridging the gap. I changed that to be on the vulnerability trap. And I did that as I was preparing the presentation and just realizing that this is really what I was going to talk about today. So the research that we did around the world is based on case studies. I think it was around 20 or 22, representative of developing countries all over the world. And it was done for a book, which is this one here, Woman Adapted to Climate Change, that we did for the COP 17 president who was, COP 17 was in South Africa. So the COP 17 president was the Minister for International Relations and Cooperation. And she said in her foreword to the book, I won't give you the whole foreword, my reflections on adaptation initiatives from around the developing world show that women often take the lead in these endeavors. It is no surprise that women play an important role in developing and passing on indigenous knowledge, innovative strategies and practices to alleviate poverty and to survive in the face of climate change. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to take us beyond the vulnerability of women and start looking at how women help us build resilience and are a good bet for investment opportunities and that we're not victims. We're actually an agent of change. So that's really the thrust of where I want to go today. So my starting point is that women are on the move. It's taken nearly two decades. So it's a long time in the negotiations and the related activities that go around the cops for gender to emerge as a focus on the multilateral climate change agenda. But we're getting there. And I think where I want us to go today is to think about how we can get there further. And Sue, you took us there a little bit now. Thank you for that. But there are a lot of issues that are on the negotiation agenda that I'm not sure researchers are marrying themselves with and vice versa. So there's a gap at the moment between what policymakers are doing and talking about and what researchers are feeding them or not feeding them. And we need to close that gap which was why I originally called this talk bridging the gap. So let's look at why it's taken two decades. I think one of the main reasons is that for a long time mitigation was our main focus in the negotiations. And adaptation has recently gained traction on the agenda which brings about a much sharper focus on the issue on the issue of women. And this I think is because developing countries have been pushing for the adaptation agenda and they've been pushing it because, I should say we have been pushing it because we have very personal experiences as we've heard from Sue just now from examples in Malawi and Zambia of facing climate impacts. So it's good news that the emergence of a gender perspective in the climate change research is coming at a time where there is a renewed interest in the rights of women. And I'm going to come back to that issue just now as well. What we saw in COP 17 in particular was a much sharper focus of gender in the actual negotiating text. It's a little bit broad. And this is one of the areas that where I think research can play a role is bringing that broad focus in the text down into sharp reality. And I'll talk about that just now as well. But it also came through a range of issues. You spoke about technology transfer. You're absolutely right. It's one of the big issues we're pushing for at the moment and we don't have as much access. It's also access to finance which is another big issue and it was in the betting down of the Green Climate Fund at COP 17 that this issue of gender really came to the fore in the negotiations. And that was good. So as I was saying earlier, we believe that the argument needs to go a step further. We need to move beyond the vulnerability paradigm and we need to focus on women's resilience. So what does women's resilience mean and why do we want to invest in that? It's a combination of adaptive and innovative capacities in the face of demanding challenges. Our focus is not on women as victims. I was saying this earlier, crying out for beneficial intervention from multilateral agencies in the outside world although hundreds of millions of women are deserving of this. But our focus is much more on women as being innovators in their own right. And this is a quote from the book that I was talking about just now. So I'm going to start by giving you my key messages. Learning never ends. I think we know this. And I think what I've loved about the research that we did for this book and looking at case studies from all over the world and when I say there were 20 odd case studies in the book, we looked at about I think it was about 80 to get down to that number. But in all of them, this issue of learning and how women apply that concept of adaptive management or learning by doing was remarkable. I mean, it just stood out in every single case study that we looked at. And therefore it's no surprise that women are key to combating resource loss and increasing food security. And the reason is simple. I mean, women tend to be the caretakers of the homes and families. They are in Africa, which is where I come from and mostly where we work. They tend to be the ones that stay at home. Whereas men often are part of the migrant labor movement, travel much more, run away sometimes when the going gets tough, whatever the reason is. But women tend to stay at home more. And therefore are much more focused on food security. One of the things we've learned is that women learn by cooperating. I think, you know, we talk about cultural differences and gender differences. And I'm not going to get into that whole debate. But what we have seen from our research, which is very much case study based and on the ground basis, that women tend to cooperate more willingly, shall we say. One of the main messages that I want to give is that empowered women become drivers of real change. And women are able to empower themselves. It's the enabling environment that is missing. But and it's drive drivers of real change in the sense that that change gains traction. And we'll talk about that more just now as well. Diversification and uses of new technologies generate alternate sources of income. In times I've given the example of drought here. It's in the time of any extreme event or any climate related impact. And you'll see from the case studies that I will show you that this is what women tend to do and can do it really well. Women can be effective decision makers, but their quality issue is important. Fountains of useful knowledge and are very good at facilitating the replication and upscaling of technologies. So I'm going to take us through four case studies. I'll spend more time on two of them that demonstrate some of these key messages that try to choose case studies that were represented by all the messages I wanted to give you. And I also wanted to focus a little bit on getting away from very localized case studies. And this one is a very good example of mentorship across borders. So I said just now that women have demonstrated an ability to cooperate really well. This is an example of what I mean. So this case study is based on Northern Kenya and neighboring Ethiopia. And what happened here is that this is a story that takes place in a pastoralist community with very remote range land. So you can imagine for yourselves what this means for women having to farm and manage livestock. Where the livestock is critical because it is the walking bank account. As it's been made, the points being made in earlier presentations, women don't often have access to the formal banking system. But I'll come back to that point and just now as well. So because the dependency on livestock in a highly vulnerable area was just too risky, a woman's based project in Kenya started having a look at what the alternatives were for diversification. Because lots of livestock would leave people destitute over that. And we've seen this time and time again. So the project was built on four notions. Collective action, microfinance, inspiration and capacity building and access to market. And how they started it was they put in place as a collective, a group of women, an association that forces compulsory savings and then as a collective use those compulsory savings in adverse conditions. So if a drought comes, can't feed livestock to invest in projects. The kinds of projects were quite diverse. Sometimes in different types of livelihoods, but sometimes even further reaching and more forward thinking in things like educating their children to be able to do different things with their lives. And the improvements that were seen were arranged from improved incomes, housing, hygiene, education and economic status. And in the hygiene aspect, it was really interesting. It was one of the biggest issues we faced in Africa with climate change is water, both from a scarcity and sanitation perspective. And the hygiene here was on cleaner water. So that was some of the investments that were made. The interesting thing about this was these women were doing well with this project in Northern Kenya and started helping their neighbours across the border in Ethiopia. So that was how we saw trans-boundary learning. And somebody made the point too, I think it was you, that if somebody takes something on other people, learn it. And this is exactly what happened in this case study. Just going back to the international negotiation arena, climate finance is one of the biggest issues that's occupying our minds at the moment. And what we are finding is that women's groups and women in the based investment can be a key to unlocking climate funding in developing countries. Africa has not had a very good track record in accessing climate finance in the past. It's something we work on to try and improve. And what we are finding through our work is that this is a really good opportunity. This project that I've given you here is Senegalese example where the climate hazards are based on coastal erosion and fisheries. And women in this instance are managing the fisheries. The stats around fisheries and fisheries losses for Africa are around 50% by 2050. And that's without not being able to manage production yields more efficiently, et cetera. So again, this was a woman organisation based approach and very much focused on capacity building and training. And the whole project is about going through the value chain of fisheries and right through from catching the fish, harvesting, processing and access to market. When we looked at all these case studies you'll see there's some common themes and denominations if you want is what is the adaptation? What is the strategy? What is the enabler? What are the lessons? And what are the opportunities for scaling up? And most importantly, how can you make this sustainable? I don't have time today to go through all of these. But this issue of scaling up and sustainability is absolutely critical. And one of our criteria for choosing the case studies that made it into the book was would this be able to be scaled up and was there some element of sustainability? Another example that I really love from this book is this issue of looking at how to spread women's farming expertise. This particular example comes from Bolivia and it was a case study that we used in a number of different themes to demonstrate a number of different lessons. But it was an agricultural program that focused on using traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge of climate prediction and crop planning to improve decision making in agricultural production and risk management. Now the point has been made today that farmers in Africa and other developing countries that don't have access to monitoring equipment battle to know when to plant and are losing their crops as a result. And it is a huge financial and livelihood risk. The reality, and I really want to emphasize this because we've been fighting this monitoring of climate issue for a long time is that it's decades, it's decades if ever that we have the level of monitoring equipment that you might have or I know you have in the states and other parts of the Northern world. We are poles apart in that regard. So we have to look at the alternatives. And this is a battle that I keep fighting. I'm not saying no to monitoring. I'm not saying no to weather stations. Wonderful if they come. But we've got to look at other ways of doing this. And this is one of the areas that I wanted to emphasize around where research could play a much better role. And when we started working in the space we got told by the scientists, the academics that we can't use indigenous knowledge. There isn't a good way of factoring it into our research. I'm happy to see that this is shifting and it's an agenda we've certainly been pushing. But it is absolutely critical. So it is the reason that I love this project or this particular case study so much. And one of the key lessons we learned from this issue of using indigenous knowledge and training in a risk management approach is that it's essential, a risk management framework we know is essential in harsh climatic environments. But it's cheap. It's a very cheap option. So therefore it's very practical. And these are the kinds of things that we need to focus on. So I get very nervous when I have a look at options that get put on the table around tech transfer, et cetera, that I just look at it and I think how on earth is this going to work in the places where we operate? And I think you made that point with your Malawi story very, very eloquently. It's absolutely critical. So one of my other key messages for researchers that are trying to feed into policy is please be realistic in what you're looking at. Because most solutions, I spent about an hour and my colleague Charlotte was there longer. Yesterday afternoon in a mitigation renewable energy forum and they had a whole session financing mechanisms. And I did come in late, admittedly, but when I had a look at the financing mechanisms that they were talking about, there wasn't one in a list of about 12 that had any possibility of any traction in the places that we work. So this issue of realism is critical. I said I would talk a little bit about equal rights and the rights-based issues. Laws for land is critical. And again, I'm not sure how much colleagues here know about the African and other developing world scenarios, although we are worse in Africa, is that often women don't have title to land and yet women are increasingly responsible for farming and making decisions. So I mean, this isn't just about being nasty to women. This is a very practical issue. If women cannot make a decision about how they farm the land, how on earth are they expected to grow the crops and produce the food that we need? It is a very real situation. So I'm happy to report that we have a good case study example from Kenya where the legal frameworks have been reformed and the reform process is continuing. So the constitutional reforms happened in 2010, in August 2010, which allowed women or allow women equal access to land and equal rights and decision-making by default, equal rights and decision-making over land. And what the government is now going on to do, we still need to see some evidence of it, but it's starting to happen, is intention to support women-based projects and this is being done, or the intention is to do this through a revolving fund that is being established that will provide project subsidies and allow people to pool their resources. So it's not a fully funded fund in terms of government funding, but it is an opportunity for collectors. What we have seen is that women in Africa are quite good at forcing savings in a collective manner and managing those. So it does make us feel that this option can work. All right, so I'm gonna move on from the case studies. I could talk about them forever and you're welcome to go and read the book. It's on our website and it's a beautiful book, the photographs that you've seen here are from it. But let's just talk about how we globalize this idea and how we take this idea of investing in women-based adaptation and to take the notion of to invest in women is to invest in the future further. Just to reiterate, women in some of the world's poorest countries, some of the most disadvantaged people in the world are women in poor countries, we've heard that today, are also proving that they are adept at coping with the impacts of climate change and this benefits all of us. And more importantly, women are adapting, innovating and replicating successful innovations for the benefit of all of us. So what does this mean? We need to position women to inform global climate finance and I'm saying this because this was something that made it into the negotiating text in 2011 in the establishment of the Green Climate Fund and the operationalization of that fund is ongoing at the moment. The rules are being negotiated, the principles for allocation, et cetera, et cetera. That is a very good place to make sure that gender issues are robustly incorporated. We need to work towards, and it's a similar argument, establishing women-led investments as a significant portion of the global funds. Investment portfolios, and this can only happen if they are supporting policies. It's not enough for the criteria to be in place if where the money goes to, if the money goes to a project in Mozambique if they haven't got policies in place to support it. Mozambique was a bad example actually because they've got one of the world's only gender and climate change strategies. But I think my point stands. And so what this means is that national policies need to make sure that their priority has the creation of domestic conditions for implementing investment decisions that benefit women and the multiplier effect. And I think one of the key things we need to do is recognize women's role in agriculture and in improved land use management. The point's been made very well today, a couple of times already, that women are better, I think you said, at environmental, or care more about the environment. But what we have learned in our case study research is that women are better at land use management because they tend to look further forward. They tend to worry about where their children are going and what's going to be left for them. So it does help in terms of accelerating the pace of change. Promoting gender equality, I think it's one of the key messages. It's a broad statement. And it's one of the kinds of broad statements that gets made in the negotiating text that I'm talking about that needs to be anchored much more. And I think one of the things we want to do by promoting gender equality is to accelerate the pace of change. But we need to do that sensitively because at the same time we are dealing with cultures and we're dealing with cultural norms. So I've given this analogy of going from the kitchen to the negotiating chamber, which is the reality of most women's lives, actually. And that negotiating chamber can be in the multilateral negotiations. It can be negotiating with their husbands on whether or not they can have rights over managing the land. Or what's cool to send their children to. So it's an important analogy for where we are at the moment. But the reality here is that the climate change phenomenon confronts all of us on all levels. Whether we're in the kitchen or whether we're sitting in plenary at COP 19 trying to reach some kind of agreement. In the negotiations while in the kitchen, though, it's typical that cultural norms get in the way of change. It's a barrier to change. In the negotiating room, it's often about longstanding conditions of macroeconomic dominance and subordination. The effect is the same. And possibly what's behind it is the same. Something that Muhammad Yunus said to Time Magazine and it was about the story of Bangladesh and how empowering women, which took 25 years plus, has made such an impact on that country. He said that the most dramatic thing that has happened to Bangladesh in the last 25 years is the total change in the status of women. They have become more aware of their ability to handle the lives and make decisions. For example, about how many children they will have. The story with Bangladesh you probably know is that women got jobs in the clothing industry, in the textile industry. There's been a lot of noise that's been made about how badly they were paid, blah, blah, blah. But the good news of that story is that those women became empowered. They were earning their own incomes for the first time ever. And what you could start to see was the changes in social decisions. And that's the only way that you're going to get to them. So I'm going to just leave you with some last thoughts as we think about how we invest in equality as we need to build on the lessons we've learned and we need to continue to use practical action for evidence. There is nothing I've learned in the last, in my years of working in the negotiations in Africa. There's nothing that works better than bringing some real evidence to the table. But the evidence doesn't need to be so robust and so data oriented that we get delayed. And I think somebody in the audience made this point earlier about effecting change. But these kinds of case studies in this basis of evidence really strengthens our position in the negotiations. We need to deepen the research for scaling up. So there's a lot of lessons we've learned about what can work and what can't. Any of you that's seen the UNEP adaptation gap report will see that there are loads of possible adaptation options. But how do we get traction? How do we get scale? How do we make those replicable and work in a meaningful way? A big thing on the negotiation agenda and for good reason is this issue of monitoring review and validating. MRV as we call it. And I think that as we go through our research and as we deepen and as we have a look at what can be scaled up, we need to have constant MRV in place that can help us build the story out and can help us feedback into the negotiations. I think I've said enough about stop portraying women as victims and let's focus on opportunities and resilience building. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. This is Petri for sharing with us your research outcomes on this reflection on going beyond the vulnerability concept already mentioned by Sima in the beginning. And showing us women as innovators and as drivers of change. And any question from somebody to Mrs. Petri? Thank you. Dr. Quezada, please. Hello. Hi everyone. My name is Andrea Quezada from the Women's Environment and Development Organization. I'm not a doctor. I'm very honored that I would have been called like that. But I do do some research. Perhaps it's not as exhaustive as yours. And hopefully I can bring some of the evidence at a very small scale and as well very focused on a very specific topic today. So today my presentation is going to be sharing the action research that we have been doing to try to incorporate gender considerations and understanding what the gender dimension is from the social and environmental standards for Red Plus. And to guide you through the journey that this past year and a half has been for us and for the Red Cess Secretariat, I'm going to set the background, then tell you a little bit about the action research itself, how we formulated what we're proposing and then tell you about the outcomes. So that would be the structure of my presentation. We have been hearing a lot today about the importance of defining gender. We have been hearing as well the importance of focusing on women. It is a reality for all of us that despite many efforts, gender equality is not a reality for most part of the world. We know that women and men do not have equal rights, voice, responsibilities and opportunities. These are interplaying with other inequalities. Sometimes I say that it's like being sick in a bed and you have several covers on top and all of these covers do not let you go and get your medicine. So all of these inequalities are interplaying. And in some cases, the cover that holds it all tight starts with these differences between women and men. Of course, it's country dependent. It's also based on your economical status and multiple things are playing. So why is this important to Red? That's one of the questions that we were asked many times. Well, for us, it was two arguments. The first argument, it's a human rights approach. You should respect the rights of both women and men and promote their full enjoyment with any development activity, even if it is an environmental payment for environmental services as Red has been proposed. But the other approach is more of a business case. Why do we need Red projects that take into consideration gender considerations? And that is the analysis that I actually will present today. In the analysis that we have as well, we mentioned why sometimes you need to focus on women. And I know that many of you know already the answer after the great presentations that we had today. But that does not mean that the focus should be only on women itself. For us, one of the key essential actions of any environmental program or project is to work transforming these unequal relationships between women and men. And that at the end, they have the same opportunities. So that for us is how we define gender equality with some nuances and some more specifics. But it's more viewed in that way as well because I do come from an advocacy organization. We have policy. In Cancun, we made tremendous strides. And in Cancun, 11 different gender sensitive policies in different areas of climate change were agreed upon. From there, Durban also had a huge success in terms of the number of the inclusion of this policies in text. We actually have a compilation for those of you interested in the language and policy itself. But one of the key policies that started us off in 2010 wondering about the gender dimension of red plus was this one. Countries that are developing their national strategy should address gender considerations. There was a lot of advocating for that, but then the question remained for various countries. What is a gender consideration? How do I do it? So then in Durban, we also had a breakthrough because we managed to, or parties, not we, I shouldn't say we, parties agreed that gender considerations were crucial for the system for providing information for safeguards. That's a tongue twister for me, not native English speaker. So that means that when countries are developing this system that will feed into the Cancun safeguards, they need to provide information that addresses these gender considerations. Again, the term gender consideration. What does it say? What are the implications? How do you work with it? Still a big question. Now, this story then moves into the actual work with the red social and environmental standards. And that is a tool that is designed to be able to aid countries in developing this safeguard system at a program level, not at a project level, for the national level. That's very important to keep in our brains. I'm sorry I'm going to sometimes move among these scales, but we're moving at the national level. And this is based on seven principle. Each one of these principles has criteria and indicators that are being proposed. Countries then have to interpret the indicators and do an entire process of strengthening their governance structure and as well doing this interpretation process for content on the social and environmental standards or safeguards that need to be included in red. Why are they called standards and not safeguards? That's a question that many people have because safeguards are more on the no-do harm. And the idea of a standard as the secretariat has proposed it is that we're not only looking for no-do harm, we're also looking for a do good. For us to start changing how we are developing these environmental initiatives at country level and particularly climate change initiatives such as red. So we were approached as, and when I say we as we do, was approached by the red CSS secretariat. And they asked us to provide suggestions to their second version of the standards. However, we decided that as an organization we could no longer rely on the case studies alone. It could no longer be a desk job. We needed to start understanding what was, what were these standard considerations and what was the standard dimension from multiple levels. Yes, there are many case studies from the forestry world, from the agricultural world that show you multiple things that women are important stakeholders, that they're natural resource managers, that they have a different vision about conservation. It shows also some of the inequalities that perhaps prevent them sometimes from engaging in many of these initiatives. It also shows as well some of these studies, these relationships and how they're interplaying to either promote the success of these environmental initiatives or halt it back. So we said, yes, based on these things we do have a certain notion of what these suggestions could be. But we thought that it was very important to understand what was the reality of the different countries, to elucidate what are then these patterns and how does the information from all of these case studies as well contrast it to what was happening at a national level. Basically asking them what they wanted to see what were they concerned. Because of course, men and women have different needs, preferences, and as well, contribution. So we designed this action research. And this action research was again to guide us in a process of having at the end a tool, a standard tool that will allow countries to move in this scale from gender sensitive line to being gender transformative. And of course these definitions, I'm going to quickly define them, but then I want to really focus on what does this mean for red. Because I think that there has been a disjoint sometimes approach when we talk about gender equality and climate change initiatives. We really need to think what these terms then mean for the particular initiative. So genderblind is when, of course the gender dimension is not considered, although there's a clear scope for consideration of it. We've heard many various cases here to support that, but sometimes it is an option not to include it. Gender sensitive is to understand and give consideration to the social, cultural norms and discrimination in order to acknowledge the different rights, roles, and responsibilities, not only of women, but of men as well. And that means that then these programs will start in a process to differentiate between their capacities, their needs, their priorities, that they ensure that the views of both are integrated and taken seriously to consider as well the implications of decisions on the situation of both women and men, and to take actions as well to start a level field of closing the gender gap. I'm sorry, I moved my hands too much. Then the idea is to have and to move into the gender responsive area. And what is that? Is that the planning, the programming, the framework itself recognizes, again, that gender considerations and to pay attention to these gender issues, the previous ones that I mentioned, is central to contributing to the success of their project, but also in contributing to promoting gender equality and women's rights. That means, again, that you will have strategies that have gender as a separate topic, but also mainstreamed. We don't want gender to be at the end of a sentence, for example, and gender, no. We want it to be mainstream in benefit sharing, in land tenure issues, in improvement of livelihood, even in conservation of biodiversity itself. It also means that you have to have specific strategies how to do it. Yes, it does take more time and more money to do a gender sensitive consultation. So when we go back to climate finance, for example, climate finance needs to recognize this and as well, donors need to recognize the importance of that difference. And also, it's going to have different budgets, as I was mentioning. There needs to be this allocation. When do you move into gender transformative? When you actually take it all the way to project level. This is where you start seeing changes in the relationships between women and men. You start seeing changes in governance structures and it becomes unavoidable that addressing gender inequalities is central to any development outcome. It is completely tied. So, how does it relate to red? So we were thinking, you know, what happens if red is gender black? Well, it will challenge the success of red plus program and its safeguards. A safeguard system is not going to work if half of the population is not involved. So let's think of, for example, one of the common safeguards, doing a consultative process on red. If in this consultation process in countries, for example, which is the pattern, women tend not to be able to participate in decision-making arenas, then this consultation process from the get-go is not well done. So just a very simple example, if anybody's interested in understanding a little bit more of these rationales, I can elaborate later with questions or in our session. The governance structure as a program, if it's completely gender blind, has the same caveat. It will have enormous gaps. Then we have that if it's gender sensitive, it starts to move into the effective, efficient, inequitable red program. Still not what we want. If it is gender responsive, we'll start seeing that then the results are going to become effective, equitable, and sustainable. And then when it is transformative, is what we actually would like to see. These positive development outcomes and transformation of an equal gender relationship. So how did we do this? The how. We had the policy, right? We started at the international level and then we started to interpret as an organization what this means as well. That's why we have the blue arrow to start understanding what this could mean at a national level. But when we went to the countries, we started getting information from the national and from the local level. To do what? To be able to create that loop, to feed into the red says second version. So all of the suggestions that were done to the second version were based on the information from the desktop, but mainly on the information that was coming from the countries. But we couldn't stop there. Because now we have this guidance, but countries were asking the how. And that led us to move again back into the national level and provide a checklist of actions to be able to fulfill with some of these indicators, criteria and principles that were gender sensitive. And I have this little arrow dash here because we think that these actions can be adapted, can be prioritized to work for a project level. But it hasn't been tested yet. So, very simple. We had five sets to do this from a methodological point of view. We did an analysis of a gender differentiated use access and control of forests. We created information baselines. We analyzed risks and opportunities from both the male and the female perspective of red. We understood what the current situation was with regards to both gender inequalities and to the red status and tried to join these two. Then we tried to uncover which were the relevant gender issues under red for each country. And this was not an imposition. This was asking actually a multi-stakeholder platform that included from grassroot women to decision makers, what were these? And then providing concrete suggestions to promote gender equality and women's rights. As I've said, we did this in four countries that were using the red SAS, Ecuador, State of Acre in Brazil, Nepal, and Tanzania. We did this, as I mentioned, through a multi-stakeholder process. The process itself is not something I'm going to go in detail, can go later. May Now comes, as I said, we have a publication. Go quickly. First book of the publication has all of the theory, the rationales, the country experience, and some of the lessons learned that we had with regards to this triple yes idea. This triple yes is that the implementation of these gender sensitive policies needs a comprehensive process that focuses on enabling conditions that develops a strategy and that implements actions. And by enabling conditions, we think it's very important to focus on the gender sensitive policies at a national level, the political willingness, the women's networks, the strength of them, and the technical capacities and knowledge among government and key stakeholders. Want to focus my last minute that I have on the tech lists themselves. The tech lists have three type of tech lists. Essential actions to develop a gender sensitive red program. This should be followed throughout all of the phases. For example, one of them is to work improving their relationships between men and women. Now, as I said, these are general suggestions. It is up then to the countries to elaborate and adapt to the country's situation. Then we have one that focuses on the principal's criteria and indicator. The content, it's divided in seven principles, benefit sharing, land tenure, among many others, and then actions to ensure that the country level process is gender sensitive. That means that they're providing guidance into aspects, the content and the process. And the process is to be able to create these, as I said, more of a gender responsive governance process. So the idea then, and just to finish, is that by using the tech list itself, you manage to move down the scale. The tech lists are not exhaustive. They are a living document. They are not perfect, but I invite all of you, program implementers, project implementers, to use them, to comment on them, to improve them, and as I said, to be able to see if they work or not. Because I think that when we move away from the policies into the implementation area, we have to be very critical of our own work and our own contributions as well. And just to leave you with my information, you can download the publications at our website, and I have some CDs as well to share. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Andrea. Sorry for the time constraints, and thank you very much for sharing with us in this passionate way the gender dimension in the red process and how you try to achieve a transformative outcome out of it. So I propose we split up in groups. We will have unfortunately a lesser time for seeing the beginning.