GENDER & BIODIVERSITY

Guidelines for Mainstreaming Gender into National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans

In the international year of biodiversity (2010), the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) published a report entitled Guidelines for Mainstreaming Gender into National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans. The first chapter pulls together biodiversity and gender equality. Both is selected as a win-win situation. The second chapter offers an instruction how to include gender into the National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAP). The Guidelines are available in English und Spanish.

BioDIVA - Transformation knowledge towards gender-equitable and sustainable use of agrobiodiversity

The rapid loss of agrobiodiversity poses serious challenge for human societies. The loss of landraces due to uncoordinated land use hits particularly women who use and conserve agrodiversity with their local knowledge.

As a first step to approach the dilemma, the BiodDIVA research group and its partners invites to discuss the challenge of gender-equitabel and sustainalbe use of agrobiodiversity. The start-up workshop marks the departure on a four years inter- and transdisciplinary inquiry on the social-ecological perspectives of agrobiodiversity at the case of rice in India.

Programme and contact details

Criticizing REDD from a gender perspective

The so-called REDD-Mechanism (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) has been widely discussed in regard to the follow-up process of the Kyoto Protocol. It focuses on market-based financial compensation for "avoided forestation". This means that governments and companies owning or buying forests are remunerated if they abstain from deforestation. The forest protection and conservation efforts by indigenous and other women directly depending on forest products for their livelihoods, especially in the Global South, are hereby ignored. In the definition of REDD, plantations of fast-growing timbers like eucalyptus also count as forests even though these are exactly those monocultures which currently replace tropical forests and prohibit women access to formerly publicly used resources. At the latest climate conference in Poznan, the genderCC network has issued an intervention paper on REDD. It has also compliled a factsheet on "Forests, deforestation and plantations from a gender perspective". Further Informationen on activities of genanet and genderCC in UN climate change negotiations you find on our respective subpage.

CBD COP 9: Women's statement in the plenary

During the first week of COP9 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) the women's caucus drafted a position on women and biodiversity which was presented in the plenary at May 23, 2008.

The invisibility of women and plantations in the CBD

The CBD recognized in 1992 the “vital role of women in the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity” and affirmed “the need for the full participation of women at all levels of policy-making and implementation for biological diversity conservation” (Preamble; paragraph 13).
In spite of that, women have remained as invisible as ever within the deliberations of the CBD’s conferences of the parties.
A position paper by the World Rainforest Movement stresses the invisibility and that it is not only the vital role women play for forest conservation, but also the vital role forest play for women's livelihoods.

Survey about the attitude of Europeans towards the issue of biodiversity

A new study of the European Commisions Eurobarometer shows clear differences in women's and men's attitudes towards biodiversity.
Women and older respondents seemed to be the most convinced that the protection of biodiversity was important; they were more likely to strongly agree with each of the statements why the issue was important. For example, while 64% of women strongly agreed that the conservation of biodiversity was a moral obligation, only 41% of men did so. Respondents that reported making personal efforts to protect biodiversity were more likely to be female, older and living in rural areas. For example, 71% of women and the same proportion of respondents older than 55 said they were actively protecting biodiversity, while only 64% of men and 58% of the 15-24 year-olds said this.
When looking at those respondents who declared they were willing to do even more for biodiversity conservation than they were currently doing, the same patterns for gender and occupational status emerged; there were again rather more women, and more self-employed respondents or employees, that expressed a willingness to enhance their efforts to help protect biodiversity.

Life as commerce

A position paper presented by the Global Forest Coalition on the occasion of the CBD criticising market-based conservation mechanisms because of their negative impacts on (among other) women's livelihoods.