Rio Conventions Pavilion (RCP)

The penultimate day of the RCP at UNFCCC COP21, Gender Day, convened on 9 December 2015, in Paris, France. In the morning, participants took part in a session titled ‘Filling in the Blanks: Building the Evidence Base on Gender and Environmental Sustainability,’ which aimed to assess the current state of gender and environmental sustainability knowledge, and to identify opportunities and gaps for monitoring the progress of SDGs’ implementation.

In the afternoon, three sessions took place. The first afternoon session, titled ‘Focusing on Results: Bringing Forward Policy Actions and Sharing Experiences from the Field on Gender and Land Rights,’ aimed to share policy actions and experiences from the field to identify means and approaches to enable equal rights to access, ownership, and control over land. The second afternoon session, titled ‘Addressing Climate Adaptation and DRR through a Gender Lens,’ began with a panel discussion in which participants identified gender-responsive actions to foster climate adaptation, DRR, and opportunities for scaling-up, while bearing the SDGs in mind. They also heard experiences of local action from projects in Bangladesh, Guatemala, India, and the US. The final session, ‘Exploring Synergies in the Rio Conventions to Support the Achievement of the SDGs’ brought gender focal points from the three Rio Conventions together, as well as representatives of UNDP, the GEF, the GCF and Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). Panelists discussed how the Rio Conventions could support achieving the SDGs, how each specifically relates to gender issues, and areas that still need to be improved to ensure better inclusion of gender across the three Rio Conventions.