Renewable, clean energy and gender equality are preconditions for sustainable development and for tackling climate change. Women’s knowledge, empowerment and collective action are central to finding and building more environmentally sustainable pathways to manage our environment; to adapt to climate change; and to secure access to sustainable energy.

Gender, environment and climate change are cross-cutting issues that need to be addressed simultaneously to achieve sustainable development goals and to address existing inequalities. Although positive changes are emerging, several challenges remain to integrating gender issues more comprehensively into climate and energy policies in Africa, and to linking such policies more closely to programming and budgeting to ensure implementation of those activities.

Recognizing this challange the UNDP-UN Environment Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) and UN Women have collected their experiences in a new draft working paper ‘Empowering Women for Sustainable Energy Solutions to address Climate Change.’ The Working Paper draws on the experiences of both organizations and aims to present potential solutions to the implementation challenge of gender-sensitive environment and climate change policies and development programming.