This Far…Go Further: Women and the Carbon Market!

Tasneem Balasinorwala and Diya Deb

As we make our way one step at a time to make carbon markets and carbon projects the domain of women in the local communities, we looked at the Gold Standard Guidelines on gender equality requirements.

What is Gold Standard:   

The Gold Standard has been  developed by the WWF and other environmental organisations identifying social and environmental aspects that contribute to the achievement of sustainability goals. It is an additional standard among UN-registered projects (“Gold Standard CER”) and it has also been applied on the voluntary market (“Gold Standard VER, Voluntary Emission Reductions”) since 2006 and has projects in 80 Southern countries. Gold Standard has developed a new standard, the Gold Standard for the Global Goals(GS4GG), in response to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) measuring the impact on areas such as health or water supply, thereby triggering quite new investments for projects.  ^[1]

So given that PowerSouth is based in Berlin, co-founded by two Indian women with an aim and ambition to make carbon markets key level playing fields for women in the local communities, we did some  scanning.          

The Gender Equality Requirement and Guidelines  is a commendable document that takes the needed steps in changing gender equations on the ground. But more needs to be done.

Why we say this?

Economic empowerment of women is of central importance for a healthy, resilient economic system and gender equality.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda sets out to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”². The formulation of SDG5 suggests that there are two parts. Firstly, gender equality refers to the equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities of women and men and girls and boys³. Secondly, empowerment of women and girls concerns their gaining power and control over their own lives. This implies that to be empowered they must not only have equal capabilities (such as education and health) and equal access to resources and opportunities (such as land and employment), but they must also have the agency to use these rights, capabilities, resources and opportunities to make strategic choices and decisions⁴.

So simply reaching women (e.g. including them in meetings or trainings)…

…. does NOT ensure they will be empowered (e.g. in control over that income or making choices of foods for their households)

…does NOT ensure that they will benefit (e.g. from increased income or better nutrition).

 A gender advocate will be more than happy to share how mere presence is way different from  active and inclusive participation and decision making.

Gold Standard for the global goals gender policy:

The Gold Standard gender policy states that ‘This Gender Policy expresses Gold Standard’s intention and commitment to enhancing and promoting the goals of gender equality, social inclusion and female empowerment within the Secretariat, throughout Gold Standard certification procedures and as an integrated measure of the social dividends of Gold Standard certified projects. These goals are not ‘accidental’ co-benefits, but are deliberate and intentional goals at both the implementation level as well as at the portfolio aggregate level for all Gold Standard certifications. And applied across 4 levels a) institutional b)Project level c)Certification and d) at the sector level

The Gender Equality Requirements & Guidelines applies to all new projects that are seeking certification under the Gold Standard for Global Goals (GS4GG). These Requirements & Guidelines will not apply retroactively to projects registered with previous versions of Gold Standard and transitioning to GS4GG.

‘Sensitive’ is just not good enough, easier for sure

The basic framework of the guidelines is around ensuring gender sensitivity and that is a worthy first step but it does not highlight or emphasize  empowerment or leadership aspects.. Having the level of knowledge we have, we should all know that more needs to be done  for women at the  intersection  of local and marginalized communities. We basically need to make the right moves beyond boardroom gender dynamics, good PR by dealing with deep-rooted societal challenges catching the bull by its horns (no pun intended).

The Gold Standard has a mandatory side (Step 1-3)  and a not so mandatory side (Step 4-6) – the latter is where the proof lies in the pudding and where we believe the project developers following the standard are missing the wood for the trees. 

As we were framing our business proposal, we did some preliminary desk research on the reporting or evaluation of two consultancies in Germany on their SDG 5 contribution. Many if not all projects reported the following as their contribution.

• Training of local women – but only for skills for the tools for offsetting (cook stoves for eg)
• Awareness and information campaigns
• Saved time

To make our case in point, we zoomed in on some Carbon offset project based on the Gold Standard and looked at SDG 5 Gender Equality. This is what the project description shares:

• Many women from rural communities have never attended school, over 80% cannot read or write. With the support of the project, four agricultural cooperatives and two craft cooperatives for women are being founded and corresponding training courses are being offered.  No further information was provided on these initiatives which would be very useful for anyone interested in the nature and quality of impact. Plus training on what? Which women – there are women and there are women if you have heard of the term intersectionality^[5]. Is there market access and infrastructure for the products of the cooperatives?.

And here are some more

• The project creates shorter and less polluting cooking times, which women and children in particular are exposed to.
• Improving health conditions and reducing workload, especially for women as they are often responsible for cooking and collecting firewood.
• as the time-consumer task of collected firewood is eased
• 240 women employed by the project, representing about 25% of total workers.

Participation and decision making although is an important factor for SDG Target 5.5^[6]. It is noteworthy that the gender policy document has a very decent mention about this. But it does get contradictory when it states that The foundational gender-sensitive standards will address gender inequalities and gender-related risks identified in project gender analyses when a gender analysis is a non-mandatory step 4.

It would mean knowing if these projects have asked the women WHAT WOMEN WANT  and if the photo-ops and would-be stories would reflect this for real.

Tasneem Balasinorwala has been working in the civil society sector at the local, national, and global level. She has also been a founder of Pune Tree Watch as a citizen action group. She has worked on a range of projects around biodiversity, cities, climate and water and sanitation, gender and anti-corruption and she has been consistently working in communications and advocacy, networking and community engagement. Tasneem is co-founder of PowerSouth.

Diya Deb is a non profit strategist with years of leadership and grassroots experience in both national and international organisations. She is passionate about campaigning, and amplifying the voice of the marginalized and is currently working out of Berlin. She is an ardent reader, loves photography and traveling. Diya is co-founder of PowerSouth.