March 5th, 2015 - By Lorena Aguilar, IUCN’s Senior Adviser on Gender.
Every year on 8 March, International Women’s Day (IWD), the global community comes together to champion the rights of women. This is an opportunity to not just celebrate women, women’s achievements, and progress towards equality, but to also take stock, to study the gains made and to dig deeper into the challenges.
Women continue to play an integral role in addressing the complex challenges our world faces on a daily basis but data shows our contributions as women are still undervalued.
This year’s IWD recognises the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) — a key global framework agreed to advance women’s rights and make comprehensive commitments under 12 critical areas of concern, one of them being the environment. Two decades later, BPfA remains an inspirational roadmap, lighting the path towards a more just world, a path on which many significant steps have been taken.
But how far have we come? The theme for this year’s IWD is ‘Make It Happen’, but how can we make it happen without tangible data to measure results?
Reliable, well-founded data is essential for smart, evidence-based policy and for implementing commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment, not least in relation to the environment. However, there is a lack of accountability and monitoring systems. IUCN’s Global Gender Office (GGO) has endeavoured to address some of these gaps by developing a monitoring mechanism that holds institutions, countries, and conventions accountable — the Environment and Gender Index (EGI).