Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA)

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“Incorporating a gender perspective in all climate change policies and initiatives is critical to solving the climate crisis” ^[1]

The Global Gender and Climate Alliance was created in 2007 at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali. In 2005, the IUCN and WEDO decided that a coordinated global strategy on the issue of gender and climate change was needed. Along with the UNDP and the UNEP, these organisations officially launched the GGCA at the UNFCCC COP-13 in Bali.

The GGCA works to ensure that climate change policies, decision-making, and initiatives at the global, regional, and national levels are gender responsive. ^[1]

The Alliance

The GGCA is a UN-NGO alliance working on the issue of gender and climate change. The alliance brings together many national and international institutions and organisations working alongside each other to underline the importance of gender in climate change decision-making, policies and initiatives. The alliance today includes more than 25 different institutions, UN agencies and civil society organisations.

The "steering committee" is led by the IUCN, WEDO, the UNDP and the UNEP. Other institutions which make up the alliance include:

The Food and Agriculture Ogranisation FAO
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM)
The Convention on Biological Diversity Secretariat
The International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR)
The UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)
The UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)
The World Health Organisation (WHO)
Energia International Network on Gender and Sustainable Energy
The Gender and Water Alliance (GWA)
The International Alliance of Women (IAW)

Aims

The primary goal of the GGCA is to ensure that climate change policies, decision making, and initiatives at the global, regional and national levels are gender-responsive.

The GGCA has four complementary objectives:

To integrate a gender perspective into policy and decision making in order to ensure international mandates and other legal instruments on gender equality are fully implemented.
To ensure that financing mechanisms on mitigation and adaptation address the needs of poor women and men equitably.
To build capacity at all levels to design and implement gender-responsive climate change policies, strategies and programmes.
To develop, compile, and share practical tools, information, and methodologies to facilitate the integration of gender into policy and programming. ^[1]

Work

The GGCA has been recognised as a unique and effective partnership in its work on gender and climate change decision-making and initiatives.

Some of their key areas of work include gender mainstreaming in adaptation to climate change efforts and in financing mechanisms, the establishment of gender-sensitive strategies on technological development and on mitigation actions and the creation and adaptation of international law instruments as a framework for mainstreaming gender in climate change.

The GGCA has, for example, created a training manual aimed at increasing the capacity of policy-makers so that efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change are gender-sensitive. ^[1]