As dust settles on negotiations at COP28, development researchers and climate activists continue to drive the need for real solutions. Shortly before COP, Leia Achampong, spoke at our webinar on development and climate finance on how the climate crisis is indebting women and how a lack of access to gender-responsive climate finance is exacerbating inequalities. Below, we highlight some of the key points Leia made to demonstrate how the current models of development and climate finance are impacting communities and particularly women.

You can watch the whole webinar here.

Climate finance is part of the solution but it needs to be of a high quality. There needs to be greater access to new and additional, debtfree, gender-responsive, climate finance grants.

Middle income countries are not all eligible for ODA. All countries in the global South have access to UNFCCC climate finance, but there needs to be coherent, common rules of access across bilateral and multilateral climate finance contributors.

To ensure climate finance has synergies with development goals, tag data on gender responsiveness of climate-related ODA and UNFCCC climate finance. This makes it easier to aggregate levels and determine best strengths. There is a lot of data that is missing.
Climate ministries in the global North must speak to their counterparts in development ministries to put structures in place to tag and report on data on gender responsiveness on climate finance. Development ministries in the global north have these systems in place because they are tagging data and information on ODA at far higher levels.

It’s important not to replicate systems in development finance that have shown to be ineffective at achieving progress towards the SDGs e.g. blended finance, Private Public Partnerships.

These systems have been shown to increase indebtedness in the global South. At times they are more expensive than highly concessional finance. This has implications on the effectiveness of climate finance within a community.

With such high financing needs, a lot of countries seek finance from international finance institutions such as the World Bank, which has a history of using policy conditionalities. This is being replicated within climate finance spheres such as climate goals integrated into World Bank development policy lending (which uses policy conditionalities or green policy conditionality).

The policies this leads to are gendered, for example austerity leads to public service cuts to services which are typically used by women.

You can read more about the need for greater access to climate finance and more engagement of women in decision-making in Leia’s recent paper for UN Women: ‘Accelerating the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls by addressing poverty and strengthening institutions and financing with a gender perspective’