Spotlight Session on Gender Transformative Disaster Risk Reduction

Understanding how people’s lives are impacted by gender norms, roles and relations within a given culture, society and economy is critical to understanding and reducing disaster risk. Women, girls, boys, men, and people of diverse gender identities have distinct needs, capacities, skills, and vulnerabilities in each context that shape the ways that they experience and recover from disaster and climate change impacts. Gender norms and roles also result in gender differentiated exposure to hazards, which along with women's limited access to information and risk communications has resulted in women dying and suffering economic losses at much higher rates than men in several recent disasters.  

This spotlight session will build on commitments outlined in the Agreed Conclusions of the 66th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, on the theme ‘Achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls in the context of climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes’. It will showcase examples of gender-transformative DRR, highlighting the need to prioritise and invest in gender-transformative DRR, women’s empowerment and leadership in an intersectional way in order to support risk-informed sustainable development. 

The session objectives are the following: 

• Showcase best practice and case studies that demonstrate the impacts that gender-transformative DRR can have on reducing discriminatory social norms and contributing to inclusive and sustainable risk-informed development that is grounded in human rights. 
• Demonstrate ways in which efforts to build back better after COVID-19 have reduced underlying gender inequalities that increase women’s disaster risk.  
• Recognise women leaders across Asia and the Pacific who are building resilient societies.  
• Showcase the effectiveness of diverse women’s and girls’ engagement in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of DRR efforts.  
• Demonstrate how countries have mainstreamed gender and women’s leadership, and the prevention and response to gender-based violence into the development of national and local DRR strategies and share effective implementation of these strategies. 

The session will be available to delegates of the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, in-person and online.