A Global Gender Working Group has been established through support from the Amazon Green List Project financed by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The group brings together IUCN's Global Protected Areas Programme, Global Programme on Governance and Rights (GPGR), and South American Regional Office. The aim of this group is to strengthen gender mainstreaming in protected and conserved areas globally through the IUCN Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas Standard. The group will go in-depth into the Standard and the certification process in order to make recommendations to advance gender considerations across the different regions and jurisdictions. Interested readers can find out more about the preliminary findings of the group in this article.

The working group recognises the importance of addressing gender equality and women's empowerment, and is currently preparing a guidance document on how to integrate a gender-responsive approach in a coherent manner for the application of the IUCN Green List Standard. The Green List is the first global standard for fair and effective protected and conserved areas that also directly tackles gender issues in areas of governance and management. 

This guidance document will assist the diverse participants of the IUCN Green List, specifically Protected Area administrators, mentors, and Expert Assessment Group for the Green List (EAGL) members, to understand the connection and importance between gender and the management of protected and conserved areas. Moreover, it will serve to reinforce compliance with gender indicators already established in the Green List Standard, as well as in the other indicators where women, as a group with rights, must significantly and effectively participate in decision-making and benefit from the management actions that are promoted (the working group identified at least another 18 related indicators in the Standar).

Currently, the working group is gathering information through surveys in all the 49 sites certified under the IUCN Green List. The purpose of the surveys is to explore the application of gender indicators and attempt to identify good practices relating to gender within the IUCN Green List. These surveys are being conducted with PA administrators, mentors, and EAGL members. The collected information will then be systematised and analysed in order to construct case studies on the incorporation of the gender considerations in the management and governance of protected areas, to be uploaded to the PANORAMA Solutions platform. These inputs will support the generation of knowledge and provide evidence on the link between gender equality, the empowerment of women, and the rational use, management, and conservation of protected and conserved areas.

This is not the first time the IUCN conducts pioneering studies regarding gender issues and its linkage with the environmental sector. Recently, IUCN has made a global effort towards this understanding through a two-year global study on these intersections and links, Gender-based violence and environment linkages: the violence of inequality. This is the first global study that has been developed, certainly lighting the torch for further studies and projects to tackle this issue.

The gender approach becomes more important in the current health, social, and economic crisis around the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when some sectors are questioning basic consensus around the rights of women that have been consolidated decades ago through different international legal instruments. Through the development of these diverse studies and research, IUCN aims towards creating gender-sensitive governance in protected and conserved areas through equitable participation between genders. Gender-sensitive governance is also a significant means towards broader social transformation due to the degree to which governance institutions shape perceptions regarding the roles that women and men should play in society.

For more information on the Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas, see here.

For more information on gender and environment see here.

Written by: Belen Valenzuela

belen.valenzuela@iucn.org

For more information, please contact:

María Moreno de los Ríos – Governance and Equity for Conservation Program Manager

maria.moreno@iucn.org