Mainstreaming gender within local government climate and disaster risk assesments: a review of methodology and practice in the Philippines

The GIDRM has been supporting the Department of the Interior and Local Governments (DILG) in the Philippines to harmonize climate and disaster risk assessment (CDRA) method-ologies. Using this entry point of agenda coherence, the GIDRM aims to support Local Government Units (LGUs) with a common basis for different planning purposes.

This paper presents findings of an in-depth gender review of the toolkit and processes utilized by LGUs in the Philippines to conduct CDRAs. It is comprised of a systematic document review of the toolkit available.

The authors conclude with a series of practical recommendations (pp. 15-16) to GIZ and the Government of the Philippines (GoP) to strengthen gender mainstreaming in CDRA planning in the Philippines such as: 

• integrating gender-specific elements holistically from the very beginning of the methodology. Doing so would ensure that the issues are sufficiently reflected throughout, in order to fully inform final outputs, planning, and policymaking
• substantially revisiting the methodology itself so that it balances a broader set of issues, including gender. Doing so would also improve the methodology from the technical perspective of disaster preparedness, while also making the process more practical given Philippine LGU resource constraints. 
• restructuring the process to balance the focus on mapping with community-based approaches that especially reach women and other disadvantaged populations to co-generate understanding of exposure, risk, and vulnerability