Seventh sharing and learning seminar on gender and adaptation to climate change

Gender is a neglected dimension of efforts to mainstream adaptation to climate change into development. This is despite clear evidence that vulnerabilities to extreme climatic events and effects of poverty reduction and other development interventions often exhibit strong gender differences. Access to key financial, technical and social resources that could make women's livelihoods more resilient are often constrained by gender relations.

At the same time women are not passive recipients of the roles and circumstances in which they find themselves. A better understanding of the strategies used by women and men to cope and adapt could inform adaptation interventions so they contribute more to addressing inequalities in development. We anticipate that such analyses will need to pay attention to other intersecting dimensions of social difference such as socio-economic class, ethnicity and ecologial or natural resource contexts.

Despite this growing awareness of gender issues in development, the road to integrating gender-responsive dimensions into climate adaptation strategies remains unclear. This seminar aims to take these discussions a step further by interrogating the usefulness of "gender" in climate change adaptation practices.