Experience from Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) initiatives around the world shows that women's involved in decision making and planning processes is key to success.
Photo: Shutterstock / Frazao Production Women in the Brazilian Amazon depend heavily on forests to provide food, energy and medicine for their families and communities. Despite this fact, women are often excluded from large-scale forest management decision-making processes, and women’s needs and expertise are often ignored at all levels of land use planning and implementation.
Experience from around the world shows that women are key to successful conservation and environmental restoration initiatives. With unique knowledge of their environment, Brazilian women, like millions of others, are ideally placed to make decisions about how to manage natural resources in ways that will benefit all.
Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) is an innovative approach to restoring the natural function of degraded land in ways that benefit nature and women and men equally.
While it is clear that gender equality is fundamental to the success of FLR efforts, (please see case studies from Uganda, Armenia and Brazil), key questions remain around implementation. How can women's existing roles and knowledge be leveraged to advance the restoration process? Will a lack of rights to land or title mean that women are left out of FLR initiatives? How can the large and growing global restoration movement benefit women and men alike?
To begin to answer some of these questions, IUCN, the World Resources Institute, women’s organisations, government agencies and other key partners gathered to share expertise and build capacity on gender issues in Brazil’s landscape restoration efforts.
A greater understanding emerged of what it means to integrate gender equality into Forest Landscape Restoration. It was noted that, in Brazil, women are often more willing than men to engage in restoration work and take new risks within their regular activities, and thus FLR efforts should be targeted to – and led by – women.
Mainstreaming gender equality means more than involving women in agenda implementation; women need to be involved in goal setting and decision making throughout all planning processes. Women’s participation in the development of conservation initiatives ensures that these will reflect the needs and priorities of all community members, and can generate maximum benefit.
IUCN will showcase its gender and FLR work at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in September. Those attending the Congress can join the IUCN Global Gender Office Knowledge Hub session on 4 September, from 2am to 7pm.
