Principles to Guide Action
There is no one-size-fits-all checklist for how health and gender-focused funders should incorporate a climate lens into their strategy. Based on our review and expert interviews, we have distilled some guiding principles for investing at the intersection of climate, SRHR, and gender equality:
01. Locally-led
Communities experience climate change impacts differently based on their location and vulnerabilities. Prioritize local leadership to understand social vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities. Avoid replicating interventions without adaptation; collaborate with local partners to tailor interventions to specific climate risks. Engage with local and national government climate adaptation programs, and advocate for gender and SRHR considerations to be included in climate investments and policy agendas.
02. Gender-transformative
“Resilience” is a useful and widely-used concept; However, it often defines success as a rapid return to “normal” without considering whether “normal” is something that should be returned to. Funders have the opportunity and responsibility to work in partnership with women and girls to build a future state of resilience that is gender-transformative and advances their integrated needs in the face of a changing climate, rather than focusing on returning to a status quo baseline that disadvantages women. In addition, women and girls are not a homogeneous groups who will benefit equally from an intervention; Gender impacts a person’s climate vulnerability and adaptive capacity, and is compounded or alleviated by other factors such as age, income, ethnicity, tribal ancestry, caste, rural vs urban context. This must be recognized in planning, design, and evaluation of investments.
03. Systems-minded and cross- sectoral
Climate risks are intertwined and complex. Solutions that build resilience to the impacts of climate change often will not fit neatly into conventional categories, i.e., a purely “health” intervention vs “livelihood” intervention. Taking an integrated systems approach to solving climate change is crucial because it recognizes the interconnectedness of climate change with social, economic, and environmental factors. It enables funders, policy makers, local implementing partners, and affected communities to work together to more accurately identify the root causes of poor health outcomes. With this broader understanding and local leadership, health, gender, and climate actors can work together to enable adaptive, resilience, and mitigation strategies that address both the risks faced by women and girls, and the opportunities to reduce environmental harm. Funders need to be open to novel partnerships and ways of measuring impact in order to develop appropriate and effective interventions.
04. Flexible, iterative, and with a longer-term view
The interdependent and layered impacts of climate change are unfolding in real time, and there is still much to learn about what interventions are effective in enabling resilience, particularly for marginalized populations. The impacts of climate change are far from fixed; they are evolving and are actively influenced by the choices we make over the coming years around greenhouse gas emissions mitigation. As such, building community resilience and mitigating the effects of climate change requires an innovation mindset and a higher risk tolerance: prioritize learning, flexibility, and adaptation. Effective investments will support longer-term commitments with embedded learning cycles to adapt, learn, and track impact.
