This policy brief presents findings from a collaborative effort led by the CBD Women’s Caucus and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) to better understand how women-led and community-based organisations generate and use biodiversity data with a gender perspective. It highlights the critical role that women and girls in all their diversity, including from Indigenous Peoples, and from local and Afro-descendant communities, play in producing knowledge that informs conservation, sustainable use and rights-based approaches.
Drawing on diverse experiences and practices, the brief explores how gender-responsive biodiversity data is currently collected, managed and applied across contexts. It identifies key strengths, including the centrality of lived experience, traditional knowledge and community-rooted evidence, while also examining persistent barriers such as limited funding, weak data systems, restricted access to decision-making spaces and insufficient recognition of this work.
This report forms part of the broader initiative “Advancing gender justice in biodiversity data and policy”, led by the CBD Women’s Caucus in collaboration with IIED. The initiative aims to strengthen the capacities of women’s organisations to generate and use gender-responsive data, support the co-creation of evidence to influence biodiversity policy, and foster collective learning processes across regions.
Learn more about the initiative here.
