This article was written by Open Data Watch, a non-profit organisation working at the intersection of open data and official statistics to promote data openness and completeness.

  • The problem: Addressing climate change without inclusive data risks leaving behind the world’s most vulnerable, including women and girls. A closer look at gender-related data through the recently launched Gender Data Compass highlights the low availability and accessibility of data that are pertinent to measuring and monitoring the impact of climate change on women.
  • Why it matters: Gender data is essential for addressing climate change as it helps identify and understand how the impacts of environmental shifts disproportionately affect men and women.
  • The solution: The effort to bridge the gender data gap and integrate gender perspectives can start with a robust gender data system built on reliable data collection and easily accessible data for everyone. To achieve this, we need focused efforts in supportive political action, adequate capacity at national statistical offices and adequate financing for gender data. This will strengthen evidence-based policymaking and create gender-inclusive climate action.

Availability and openness of gender and climate data

As highlighted by the recently launched Gender Data Compass (GDC) report by Open Data Watch, many indicators needed for designing inclusive climate change policies lack disaggregation for understanding the specific vulnerabilities of population groups. This information is crucial for making targeted and inclusive policies that address the specific vulnerabilities and challenges confronted by different genders in the face of climate change.

The Gender and Climate Data Nexus: The Key for Inclusive Climate Action - bar graph

Exploring the GDC's extensive dataset with 53 gender-relevant indicators for 185 countries, we unveil significant inadequacies within the current national databases for their availability and openness. The latter indicates how freely data can be accessed, reused and analysed by everyone within and outside a country’s government. For instance, the environment category which includes four indicators of mortality linked to environmental factors — food and water-borne illnesses, vector-borne illnesses, natural disasters, and pollution — exhibits the lowest availability and openness across 185 countries. Similarly, data scarcity is evident in areas such as health, nutrition and women's access to financial resources and agricultural holdings, which are among the least available. This substantial information gap impedes our understanding of how climate change directly affects lives and hampers the development of targeted interventions.

Addressing the challenges posed by the intersection of climate change, gender and data deficiencies requires urgent action and collaborative efforts.

The impacts of climate change vary by region. Small island developing states — mostly found in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands — are particularly vulnerable to increasingly extreme weather patterns. While these island states are uniquely threatened by climate change, their scores are notably low in categories like environment, health and nutrition, agency and economic advancement, with the Caribbean scoring very low in the living conditions category.

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Building stronger gender data systems

While availability and openness scores are measures of the revealed capacity of a national statistical system to produce and publish gender data, an essential environment for creating a robust gender data system requires three broadly defined foundations to support it:

  1. Institutional frameworks to support the collection, publication and use of gender data that are built with effective legal, policy and coordination frameworks. These frameworks should establish the terms of reference for the national statistical offices and empower them to produce and disseminate gender data. It should align gender data collection programmes with national development goals and climate-focused plans. Without strong institutional foundations, efforts to produce and use gender data for greater impact receive insufficient political and financial support.

  2. The statistical and technical capacity to collect, analyse and use gender data to empower nations to inform their citizens and address country-specific gender issues. Periodic surveys and censuses and the real-time data availability in crucial areas, particularly education, health and civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) constitute a core gender data system. Without the technical capacity to conduct surveys and censuses and maintain administrative data systems, decision-makers are left in the dark without current data to guide evidence-based decisions.

  3. _Adequate funding _— both at the domestic and international levels for the sustainability of gender data systems. International donors are crucial to developing and strengthening emerging statistical systems while sufficient domestic funding reflects political will to prioritise gender data and results in robust and sustainable data systems.

The Global Conference on Gender and Environment closed ahead of COP28 with a call to action to all world leaders, policymakers and other key actors in gender and environment data systems to urgently strengthen multi-stakeholder partnerships to support the production, uptake, financing and inclusive management and governance of global gender and environment data. There is momentum in political will to prioritise the important work of generating better gender data that supports gender-inclusive climate action. This political will should propel countries to focus their efforts on building a robust gender data system that is both technically and financially sound, and international donors can focus on countries faced with climate change.

Addressing the challenges posed by the intersection of climate change, gender and data deficiencies requires urgent action and collaborative efforts to improve the availability of reliable and open gender data. As we embark on the latter half of the SDGs, Open Data Watch and its partners remain steadfast in our commitment to support countries in strengthening their capacity for robust gender data systems.

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