Tokyo, Japan– The second meeting of the Transitional Committee (TC) to design the Green Climate Fund (GCF) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) concluded yesterday in Tokyo, Japan. The Cancun Agreements, adopted at COP16 at the end of 2010, established the “Green Climate Fund” to provide assistance to developing countries.

As the international community now works to design this global climate fund, WEDO and its partners are working to ensure the equitable and effective allocation of funds for the world’s most vulnerable populations.  At the regional Transitional Committee meeting in Tokyo, women and gender issues were highlighted in various ways:

The women and gender constituency had the opportunity to deliver an intervention, stating: “Gender equality as a cross-cutting issue must inform the Transitional Committee’s discussions about every aspect of the fund – from the statement of principles to statement of governance, from the fund’s scope to beneficiaries, from actual gender-balanced representation in the Fund’s Board and other decision-making bodies to the institutionalization of monitoring and evaluation and redress mechanisms . The Green Climate Fund must be created as a gender-responsive climate finance mechanism by mainstreaming a gender perspective across all funding windows and funding instruments.” Click here to read the full intervention or watch by clicking below (intervention starts at 41:12).

In addition, Liane Schalatek of the Heinrich Böll Foundation spoke on a civil society panel at a workshop on “Best Practices and Lessons Learned”  prior to the start of the official meeting. The focus of her presentation was on engendering the Green Climate Fund. During the June UNFCCC meeting in Bonn, WEDO, alongside Heinrich Böll, Action Aid, and the UNDP Gender Team created a two pager entitled “Key Principles for Incorporating a Gender Dimension into the Green Climate Fund” for distribution at the Transitional Committee meeting. Ms. Schalatek used this as a basis for her presentation.

Also at the June meeting in Bonn, WEDO, as part of a cross‐constituency civil society coalition of the “Friends of Gender’ made a submission to the Transitional Committee. You can find this on the UNFCCC website by clicking here.

WEDO will continue its work monitoring the design of the Green Climate Funds to ensure climate finance is gender responsive.

Click here to read Rachel Harris’s article on climate finance after the UNFCCC meeting in Bangkok, “Gender and Climate Finance: Progress Side-Tracked So Soon?“