Welcome to the first edition of GEDA Insights, a new newsletter from the Gender and Environment Data Alliance!
Formed in 2021 as a commitment to advance the blueprint for feminist climate justice under the Generation Equality Forum, GEDA recently celebrated its launch at a hybrid event on the sidelines of the 77th UN General Assembly opening. As we officially get our operations underway, we are thrilled to formally introduce ourselves to potential partners and policy makers, to ensure that we collectively begin to fill the gap of gender and environment data as a tool towards more effective–and ultimately gender-transformative–climate action.
Seventeen founding members agreed to form this alliance, which WEDO and IUCN co-coordinate on behalf of the membership while the development of a full, independent secretariat is underway. We spearheaded the co-creation of this initiative in response to a clear need in our everyday work with governments, international organizations, and civil society for collaboration and compilation of data and information at the gender-environment nexus.
Since the 1990s, the plans, strategies and policy instruments that guide our work have called for increased investment and attention to gender data in this field. While we’ve made a lot of progress since then, no dedicated multi-stakeholder partnership existed to address this specific nexus–until now!
GEDA has lots of exciting plans for our future; Chief among them is a plan to begin an outreach and membership process in early 2023 to expand our network in reflection of our orientation as a feminist, global South-centering initiative with an intersectional approach and a commitment to breaking open traditional definitions of “whose reality counts.” We’ll also be developing a reference hub to compile and make available a range of knowledge products on gender and the environment, with an initial dual focus on climate resilience and environmental decision-making. As our work progresses, we’re looking forward to sharing a broad range of resources, spotlighting and supporting data-related work of feminist and grassroots organizations and academics, and eventually offering opportunities to strengthen capacities of data users and producers within governments, organizations, academia and civil society to fill gaps on the gender-environment nexus.
In this first issue of GEDA Insights, we share an initial roundup of resources from a selection of our founding members and an interview with the incredible feminist data and research practitioners we’ve hired to help scope the landscape of GEDA’s forthcoming interventions into this field. We hope you find this useful, and we’re excited to continue to engage with you as GEDA continues to define and expand its breadth.
Send us your feedback and ideas (email claudia@wedo.org until we have a dedicated GEDA domain!), and please forward this on to interested friends and colleagues.
In solidarity,
Bridget & Jamie
Burns, Director, Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO)
Jamie Wen-Besson, Senior Gender Programme Manager, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
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