Gender and Climate Change: Five Things You Should Know

1. Gender equality matters for effective and equitable climate action
2. Women and girls are often disproportionately vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters and climate change where their endowments, agency and opportunities are not equal to those of men
3. Empowerment of women is an important ingredient in building climate resilience
4. Low-emissions development pathways can be more effective and equitable where gender-informed approaches are adopted in their design
5. Climate financing mechanisms are beginning to adopt gender-sensitive approaches in program design and results frameworks but more needs to be done

These five key messages will form the basis of a note to be made available in Durban, highlighting country examples where progress is being made with World Bank support, including through the CIFs, carbon finance, GFDRR (e.g. EAP's new guidance notes on integrating gender in disaster risk reduction), and gender mainstreaming in IDA/ IBRD lending.

Social Dimensions of REDD+

Deforestation and forest degradation are the second leading cause of global warming, responsible for about 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. New proposals to use international financial mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD+) have radical implications for the ways in which tropical forests are valued. These, in turn, entail significant social risks and opportunities, particularly for indigenous peoples and forest-dependent local communities.

In the context of a developing carbon market, equitable outcomes will partly depend on the authority to manage and trade emission reductions. Property rights to carbon are complex and contested, but are an essential ingredient for effective carbon markets. REDD+ is potentially a significant source of monetary benefits or revenues for tropical forest countries. How such benefits should be shared nationally between different stakeholders is a central pillar in achieving effective and equitable REDD+ regimes.

Social Development, in collaboration with ODI and REDD-Net, recently completed a series of analytical studies on the social dimensions of REDD+, focusing on the role of carbon rights, benefit-sharing and community forestry in designing effective and equitable REDD+ regimes. The reports are accompanied by a series of case studies and policy briefs, aimed at informing policy-makers and practitioners.While socio-economic and governance contexts vary significantly among the countries reviewed, the following general findings can be highlighted:

• The clarification of legal rights to emission reductions can help empower local communities to participate in REDD+ but might also be used to justify re-centralizing government control over forest resources;
• Successful benefit-sharing mechanisms for REDD+ depend on clear processes to determine actors’ eligibility, the scale of benefits (and costs), and governance arrangements; and
• The engagement of communities in REDD+ can draw important lessons from community forestry experience but will have to adapt the latter to the idiosyncracies of carbon finance such as price volatility and stringent M&E requirements.

Social Protection & Climate Resilience

The fields of social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation have developed in parallel silos from different institutional and disciplinary homes. In recent years, there has been growing awareness of the value of integrating these three spheres for building resilience of the poor. To address this emerging agenda, the World Bank, the UK’s Department for International Development, the Institute of Development Studies, and the UN Economic Commission for Africa convened an international workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March this year on "Making Social Protection Work for Pro-poor Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation." Bringing together 120 policy makers, practitioners and researchers across the three fields, the workshop had two core objectives:

1. To understand better how social protection can be used to strengthen the poor’s resilience to climate and natural disaster risk in developing countries, and
2. To create a forum for cross-regional learning about good practice for realizing the potential synergies between social protection, disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation.

Over 3 1/2 days, participants held rich discussions, pooling their own country knowledge and experiences with those of others. Through a series of field visits, they witnessed how climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction are being integrated into Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Nets Program. Participants were enthusiastic and committed to integrating the three fields, but at the same time realistic about the challenges and constraints to integration. Practical recommendations made to take the agenda forward included: virtual networking to continue the learning; follow-up events with a specific country or constituency focus; practical collaboration at country level; and further collaborative research, including the development of indicators for resilience across the three disciplines.

The event also provided an opportunity for collaboration between the Sustainable Development and Human Development Networks in the Bank, including using the discussions to inform the Bank's new Social Protection and Labor strategy, currently under development, which includes a focus on resilience. SDN and HDN are also jointly developing tools to facilitate the integration of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation into social protection systems, with support from the Rapid Response Fund; and are collaborating in client training activities to address the integration of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in social protection systems.

Financial Innovations for Social and Climate Resilience

Poor households have a number of options to smooth consumption and remain resilient when disaster strikes, including relying on family or community support. However, community support measures can break down in times of disaster, which affect entire communities. While traditional insurance for disasters is often unaffordable to the poor, a number of pilot programs have been testing the use of index insurance over recent years. With pay-outs based on independent triggers rather than an assessment of individual losses, administrative costs are reduced, insurance becomes more affordable, and pay-outs come faster. Proponents of index insurance also claim that it can help to eliminate moral hazard, enable productive investment, and promote ex ante risk reduction.

With this great potential to strengthen the resilience of the poor, index insurance has received a great deal of attention in the global discussion on adaptation financing. The Cancun Agreements that emerged from COP16 in December 2010 included the development of a work program on insurance related instruments for adaptation. Social Development is leading an initiative on Financial Innovations for Social and Climate Resilience to evaluate experience to date with market-based risk financing instruments that aim to target poor households. The study is gathering evidence on:

• Coverage and inclusion: Is microinsurance for disasters affordable and accessible to the poorest?
• Sustainability and scale: Are these pilots sustainable in the long term? Can they be scaled up to support the billions of poor in need of climate change adaptation support?
• Transformational impact: What is the evidence regarding livelihood transformation, poverty reduction, and long-term resilience building in the face of increasing climate risk?
• Value for money: How does insurance compare to other types of interventions, such as safety nets, contingency financing, investments in disaster risk reduction, etc. in relation to value for money?

The study findings will directly inform UNFCCC's discussions around loss and damage due to climate extremes, expected to conclude by COP18 next year. Recognizing the complexities and multiple points of view involved in communicating around these issues, Social Development has also partnered with Parsons the New School for Design to co-design a communications strategy for the initiative.

Practical Tools

In recent years, the World Bank has greatly scaled up its support to client countries in better managing the risks associated with climate change. There is also growing recognition that climate change and country-level climate response measures both have major distributional, social and poverty implications. In order to better address the social dimensions of climate change through IDA and IBRD-supported investment and development policy lending, and through dedicated or additional forms of climate finance such as the Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) and carbon finance, demand has been growing for practical guidance on the tools and methods available to help guide social assessments. Social Development recently completed two such operational guidance notes:

Operational Toolkit for Social Resilience and Climate Change: this toolkit considers the major challenges involved in addressing the social dimensions of climate change and outlines how social development approaches can help task teams and their country clients address such challenges. It provides an overview of the main analytical and operational tools available for assessing the social dimensions of climate change and highlights country examples focusing on social resilience and climate change.

Guidance Note on Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) for Climate Change Development Policy Operations (DPOs): This note highlights the general ingredients for a successful and inclusive PSIA and political economy analysis in climate change DPOs by providing an overview of the specific issues arising in the analysis of the distributional impacts of climate change policy measures. Good practice examples are offered from recent operations including those in Mexico and Vietnam. The note will be available online on November 30, 2011.

Groundbreaking DPOs: In Mexico, the Strengthening Social Resilience to Climate Change is the first lending operation whose central, explicit theme is the reduction of the impacts of climate change and variability on the poor. The DPO aims to strengthen resilience of the poor through policies to (a) promote sustainable territorial development and reduce natural disasters risk; (b) strengthen long-term climate change adaptation planning; and (c) implement pro-poor climate change mitigation measures in the forestry sector. Vietnam is developing the first ever climate change DPO to be implemented in an IDA country. Vietnam has identified climate action as a policy priority and established a multi-sector platform to mainstream climate change adaptation and mitigation. Several programs, such as the National Target Program to Respond to Climate Change (NTP-RCCC), established in December 2008 and covering the period 2009-2015, are intended to integrate climate action into development strategies, programs, and provide a unified platform to address climate change.

Cluster Recruitment

Emcet Tas
Consultant
473-0197
etas@worldbank.org

Emcet is a doctoral candidate (Ph.D. exp. 2012) at the Department of Economics, American University, Washington, D.C.. His areas of specialization are economic development, international economics, gender and political economy. He holds an M.A. in Economics (American University) and a B.A. in Economics and International Studies with minors in Politics and Government and Management (Ohio Wesleyan University). He has previously served as adjunct faculty and teaching assistant at American University. He has also consulted for the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Group (PRMPR), Global Development Network (GDN), Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the World Bank's International Trade Department (PRMTR). Emcet is a citizen of Cyprus and Turkey and speaks Turkish and English.

Emcet's dissertation studies poverty dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa from a holistic perspective by using combined qualitative and quantitative methods and data sources. His research was recently granted a number of fellowships and awards, including J. Epstein Award for Outstanding Work in Development Economics (American University), William R. Waters Research Award (Association for Social Economics) and Info-metrics Summer Fellowship (Info-metrics Institute). Recent publications include “Gender Equality in U.S. Labor Markets in the 'Great Recession' of 2007-10” (with Caren Grown, in M. Starr ed. Consequences of the Economic Downturn: Beyond the Usual Economics, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2011); “The Impact of the Global Economic Crisis on Women's Well-Being and Empowerment” (with M. Floro and A. Tornqvist, Sida Women?s Economic Empowerment Publication Series, 2010); “Post-Taliban Recovery and the Promise of Community-Led Development in Afghanistan” (with Deepa Narayan and Philibert de Mercey, in ed. D. Narayan and P. Petesch, Moving Out of Poverty: Rising from the Ashes of Conflict, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).