The need to have adaptation planning for climate change meaningfully address gender realities was returned to the spotlight as the world celebrated International Women’s Day on Tuesday.

Intersectionality, explained the report released by the Adaptation Fund (AF), is about how gender overlaps with other sociocultural factors, including race, religion, health, and age; and supports the understanding of inequalities that affect women and girls, as well as men and boys. It is therefore important, it advanced, that gender considerations form a part of adaptation interventions from design through implementation, monitoring and evaluation. “In recognising people’s agency and resilience, intersectional approaches facilitate moving beyond a narrow focus on gender safeguards and prevention of gendered harm to proactively addressing how adaptation measures can promote gender equality, the empowerment and agency of women and girls of all backgrounds,” reads a section of a February 2022 research report on the Study on intersectional approaches to gender mainstreaming in adaptation-relevant interventions.

Professor Michael Taylor, dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona shared, “For the Caribbean, the latest report provides the ammunition to demand bolder and more transformative responses to climate change. It would be sad and ultimately to our detriment if, as a region, we let this moment pass without coming together, and in one voice doing so,” Dr. Donovan Campbell, senior lecturer and head of the Department of Geology and Geography at The UWI, said it is ‘mission critical’ to rapidly secure the funding for the needed interventions. “The report clearly shows that vulnerable, small island developing states are facing severe constraints to adaptation, and the financial needs are much higher than estimates (previously) presented,” he noted.