Implications of gender roles in natural resource governance in Latin America and the Caribbean

Introduction

This article analyses relationships between gender and key natural resources —such as biodiversity, water, energy, food and mining— in Latin America and the Caribbean. It provides a comprehensive overview that identifies the main economic, social and environmental impacts, as well as the opportunities for incorporating gender perspectives into public policies for natural resources in the region. One of the main factors that has created a differentiated impact between men and women is the unequal access to ownership and control of natural resources, which creates a gender gap in natural resource governance (understood as governance of the ownership, modes of appropriation and distribution of the costs and benefits of renewable and non-renewable natural resources, so that society as a whole can benefit from their exploitation and/or conservation). Furthermore, this has a major impact on the unfair division of labour, wherein women are overburdened with care duties (see diagram 1), a situation that has been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Diagram 1

Consequences of inequality between men and women in access to natural resource ownership

Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), on the basis of official figures.

Despite this panorama, there are still gaps in the policies for addressing the relationships between gender and natural resources. The 2030 Agenda emphasizes the need for gender mainstreaming, with nine Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and a total of 29 indicators that can be broken down by sex; many of them, however, are not yet measurable (United Nations, 2015). Significantly, none of these gender-sensitive indicators are related to the environment or natural resources. Progress must therefore be made in analysing the interdependence between natural resources (environmental dimension), gender issues (social dimension) and productive activities (economic dimension) to encourage the design of more comprehensive policies within the framework of the 2030 Agenda.

The Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, a subsidiary body of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), has been working on gender issues in the region for over 40 years (ECLAC, 2017a). At the first Regional Conference on Women, held in Havana in 1977, attention was drawn to the need to include a gender perspective in ensuring access to and improving domestic water supplies, and to implement public policies in order to increase women’s access to land ownership, and through that, access to natural resources and their governance. Forty-three years later, the fourteenth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, held in Santiago in January 2020, examined gender challenges in the context of climate change and its close relationship to natural resources, highlighting the greater vulnerability that women face through unequal access and governance at a time of increasingly frequent disasters and their negative effects. Thus, the Santiago Commitment, adopted by the region’s countries on that occasion, contributes to the mainstreaming of gender considerations in policies related to the governance of natural resources.

The Regional Gender Agenda seeks to close the gaps in this area by supporting public policies that guarantee women’s autonomy and rights, and by presenting recommendations to address the causes of inequality, policy proposals and perspectives in favour of gender equality, women’s human rights, intersectionality and interculturality, parity-based democracy and inclusive sustainable development (ECLAC, 2017a). On this last point, in 2016, the thirteenth session of the Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean adopted the Montevideo Strategy as a tool to address the challenges facing the region in the comprehensive implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda and the mainstreaming of the 2030 Agenda (ECLAC, 2017b).

This tool identifies four structural challenges that must be resolved to attain the SDGs in consideration of the region’s context and its gender priorities and challenges. As regards natural resources, each of those challenges presents major problems on account of the dependence of the region’s productive structure on natural resources and its vulnerability to climate change. It also identifies patriarchal cultural patterns that need to be eradicated before women can effectively enjoy their rights in various areas, including the environmental sphere (see diagram 2).

Diagram 2

Regional Gender Agenda, structural challenges and their links to natural resources

Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Montevideo Strategy for Implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda within the Sustainable Development Framework by 2030 (LC/CRM.13/5), Santiago, 2017.

Therefore, in order to comply with the 2030 Agenda, Latin America and the Caribbean must address the structural challenges that perpetuate gender gaps and ensure the full exercise of women’s human rights to ensure them a life of dignity. Achieving this demands an understanding of the relationship between gender dynamics and natural resources, of the particular vulnerability of women to climate change and their economic dependence on natural resources, and of the sexual division of labour, where natural resources are fundamental for the provision of food and care and in which activities women play a leading role, because of cultural and patriarchal structures. At the same time, gender inequalities are also present in the governance of natural resources. Because of this, a clear gender focus at a comprehensive, multisectoral level must be incorporated into access to natural resources and the environment and the management thereof.

The following sections explore the dynamics of how gender differences relate with natural resources and then examine the consequences of gender inequity in the economic, social and environmental spheres as regards the management and governance of water, energy, agriculture, biodiversity and mining. An overview of the core messages is provided in the conclusion.

Dimensions of gender and natural resources in Latin America and the Caribbean

Women and men interact in different ways with natural resources and the care economy, both in unpaid activities in the household (e.g. managing water, energy and food) and in income-generating activities inside or outside the household (e.g. land tenure and agricultural work). This is a result of culture, but it also has to do with their relationships with the territory, the environment and biodiversity.

Inequalities related to traditional gender roles lead to pronounced inequalities in time use. Globally, women spend 2.6 times more time on unpaid domestic and care work than men (UN-Women, 2018); moreover, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the average is slightly higher, with women working 2.8 hours for every hour of unpaid work that men perform (ECLAC, 2020). Global data indicate that “women perform most of the domestic work, such as cooking and cleaning” and, at the same time, they “are the main caregivers of children and adults needing care” (UN-Women, 2018).

This overload of care work leads in turn to a greater dependence on natural resources, as well as to greater vulnerability and impacts on account of difficulties in accessing and controlling them, especially in rural areas. For example, difficulties in accessing nearby water sources mean a greater workload for women and girls, who are generally responsible for fetching water. The lack of access to sources of clean energy for cooking implies, in many places, responsibility for collecting firewood, which at the same time exposes women to the negative impacts of smoke on their health. In addition, since women are generally responsible for taking care of sick people, older adults and pre-school children in the home, health problems resulting from a shortage of clean water or energy also mean a greater workload.

At the same time, although women play a fundamental role in productive activities —agricultural work in particular— there are still marked gaps in access to the control and management of natural resources, as well as in the associated forums for participation. For example, only 20% of the region’s agricultural farms are led by women (FAO, 2017). This lack of control over the land also translates into a lack of participation in water management, with little representation on basin councils or irrigation user boards.

All these gaps also imply gender-differentiated impacts related to environmental degradation and climate change. For example, the pollution of water sources by extractive activities, the reduction of agricultural productivity or the appearance of new disease vectors as a consequence of climate change, have a greater impact on the care activities that women mainly perform.

This highlights the complex and multidimensional relationship between women and natural resources and underscores the need to mainstream a gender approach in policies related to the governance of natural resources and the environment, as proposed by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Regional Gender Agenda.

Economic dimension: unfair division of labour in natural resource governance

Women and men have traditionally used natural resources in different ways and their gender roles are associated with different sets of knowledge and different responsibilities, although there is an increasing participation of women in all processes. In forests, for example, women harvest non-timber products; in fisheries, they are often involved in collecting algae and molluscs from beaches and in processing catches landed by men; in family gardens they are the guardians of the seeds and maintain exchanges by enriching genetic variability and product diversity, thereby increasing resilience to factors such as climate change. Since they are traditionally in charge of family nutrition and health, it is also women who supplement it with wild products from their surroundings.

Despite all this, there is a huge disparity in decision-making about natural resources, with fewer women in decision-making positions in both the public and private spheres: land ownership and water rights, positions of legal representation and oversight over forests, fisheries, protected areas and other resources. This undermines their autonomy and further marginalizes them.

Of total rural employment in Latin America and the Caribbean, just over a third is female (35%). That reflects an increase from 33.9% in 2005 (ILO, 2019) and, in fact, Latin America and the Caribbean is the region of the world where the participation of women in rural employment rose the most between 2005 and 2020. The Andean region and some Caribbean countries are particularly notable for their high levels of female rural employment: in Peru and the Plurinational State of Bolivia, women accounted for between 45% and 47% of rural employment in 2020. In contrast, female rural employment rates in Central America are not as high: in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala, for example, women occupy between 25% and 30% of rural jobs.

In the region’s rural areas, informal employment is a major source of vulnerability. Most jobs are not covered by contracts and earn low wages or are paid in kind. Women employers make up only 17% of the total, yet women account for 60% of family workers in the region’s rural areas (ILO, 2019). Likewise, women engaged in the agricultural sector work, on average, more unpaid hours than employed women as a whole, while the number of hours men spend on unpaid work remains virtually the same regardless of the economic sector in which they are active (ECLAC, 2016). The long hours that rural women spend on unpaid work limit their participation in the market and, consequently, their ability to earn incomes; this ultimately affects their quality of life (ibid.).

Land is the key input for agricultural production in the region; for historical and current reasons, however, the gender distribution of land has always been very unequal and remains so today. According to studies into land concentration, Latin America and the Caribbean is the region of the world with the greatest inequality in its distribution: 1% of properties occupy more land than the remaining 99% (Gómez and Soto Barquero, 2013). Moreover, within that tremendous inequality, women suffer even greater gaps in access to land, ranging from less than 8% in Guatemala and 12% in El Salvador to almost 31% in Peru and 30% in Chile. Only 20% of the region’s agricultural farms are led by women; however, women perform a large proportion of work on the land (see figure 1). In Central America, this figure drops to 15%, and in the Caribbean and South America it rises to 23%, according to the latest available census data (FAO, 2017). The figure is trending upward in some of the region’s countries: between 2006 and 2017, the number of agricultural farms in Brazil headed by women jumped from 660,000 (13%) to 950,000 (19%).

Figure 1

Women who work the land as a proportion of the total in Latin America and the Caribbean

Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), on the basis of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “Sustainable Development Goals” [online] http://www.fao.org/sustainable-development-goals/indicators/es/

In addition, the plots of land that women own are generally smaller, of poorer quality and under more insecure tenure (Guereña, 2016). In terms of agricultural land area, women’s participation is even lower. In Brazil, for example, the area of their units amounts to only 9% of the country’s total agricultural land (Brazil, 2017 Agricultural Census).

It should be noted that while in many cases there is legal equality in land tenure, it is not observed on account of traditional and religious practices (UNEP/IUCN, 2018). Inequalities are multifaceted, intersectional and combine in a perverse circle comprising such dimensions as being female, indigenous and poor.

This unequal participation in ownership leads to unequal representation on the boards and representative bodies of campesino organizations, and on irrigation water users’ organizations and committees. In Peru, for example, in 2013 only 4.23% of all irrigation user board managers were women (CNDDHH–Pacto de Unidad 2015, cited in Silva, 2018). Costa Rica, despite being one of the region’s most advanced countries in integrating gender issues into its public biodiversity policies, still reports a high shortfall in women’s representation in local governance structures. Women make up about 30% of the membership of local water councils and, in local forestry councils, they have no representation at all (Muñoz, 2019). Another UNESCO/IHP study (2016) in Central America indicated that the management of both surface water and groundwater was the responsibility of users’ associations, water boards or water committees in all the municipalities analysed. It found that around 1,120 people were in charge of local water governance, of whom only 27% were women.

Access to other key inputs, such as technology and financing, has proven to be unevenly distributed in other sectors, and agriculture is no exception. Rural women heads of household report no negative gaps in either age or education compared to their male counterparts who do have access (ECLAC/, 2020; Srinivasan and Rodríguez, 2016). Levelling out access to both technology and financing would conceivably bring about an improvement in total productivity in rural areas and ensure progress towards meeting the 2030 Agenda.

According to the UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme, “if women had the same access as men to productive resources – including land and water, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30%, raising total agricultural output in these countries by 2.5 to 4%. This could reduce the number of hungry people in the world by around 12 to 17%” (WWAP, 2019).

Mention should also be made of women’s participation in another sector that is closely linked to natural resources and the economic dimension: the extractive sector. Mining is one of the pillars of the economy and the generation of income and foreign exchange in the Andean region. However, the direct jobs it generates are heavily dominated by men. Female labour participation in mining in Andean countries is far below that in other mining areas. It should be noted that in several countries of the subregion, this trend is reversed in artisanal and small and medium-scale mining: one example of this is Colombia, where female participation stands at 70% (Benavides, Vinasco and Albornoz, 2020).

Figure 2

Women’s participation in the mining workforce in selected countries

Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), on the basis of official data: Bolivia: CEPALSTAT, 2011; Chile: National Geology and Mining Service (SERNAGEOMIN), 2019; Colombia: data from the sustainability survey of the Colombian Mining Association (ACM), 2019; Ecuador: data from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC), Manufacturing and Mining, 2015; Peru: data from the National Mining, Petroleum and Energy Society (SNMPE), 2018; Canada: data from Statistics Canada, Table 282-0008 11; Australia: Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The incorporation of new technologies such as digitization and automation is changing the needs and skills of the mining workforce; this is helping overcome many of the sector’s gender barriers, which are linked to physical strength. These new jobs, however, are strongly dependent on the disciplines of basic science, technology, engineering and mathematics, where women are underrepresented.

According to the report by RMF (2020), there are few initiatives to address gender issues in the communities where mining companies are present or within their governance and management bodies and workforces. The report reveals that companies are still falling short in protecting against harassment and gender-based violence and that the sector is not yet systematically addressing the issue.

As regards the institutional framework for gender, all the Andean countries have signed up to international and national regulatory instruments for gender equality and have developed numerous national plans with a gender perspective or created gender offices, committees or units within their ministries of energy and mines. Particularly noteworthy in this sense is Colombia, which launched its “Gender Guidelines for the Mining and Energy Sector” (Benavides, Vinasco and Albornoz, 2020), which focuses on linking women to direct jobs, management and leadership positions, community participation and the value chain, promoting a culture of gender equity, building inter-institutional interconnections and preventing violence against women. The challenge is to broaden mining policies to instil a gender-equality perspective in the region’s mining sector, and to operationalize and implement those policies. Despite the progress made, there is still a long way to go.

Another area to be considered is the energy transition, a key trend for the economies of the twenty-first century and which ECLAC has identified as the first of seven sectoral systems that can dynamize and serve as driving forces in the reconstruction of the regional economy with equality and sustainability in the post-pandemic period (Bárcena, 2020). This is a splendid opportunity to move towards a renewable, distributed, low-carbon energy system with enormous environmental and social benefits, including job creation (Pistonesi, Bravo and Contreras, 2019), although many challenges remain regarding the gender perspective and the active inclusion of women. According to ILO/IDB (2020), over 80% of the jobs created in decarbonization programmes will be in male-dominated sectors, and so women will not benefit from this job creation unless the current occupational segregation is addressed.

A study by IRENA (2019) consulted women, men and organizations in the renewable energy sector in 140 countries (for a total of almost 1500 surveys) and concluded that women’s participation in sector’s workforce was 45% in management, 35% in technical areas and only 28% in professional positions involving science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The average across the board was 32%: above the 22% reported in the oil and gas industry, but still low.

The energy sector faces great challenges, and it should take advantage of the dynamics and strength of the energy transition process to solve its structural challenges: a social pact for the sector that takes on the fight against energy poverty, and that also provides opportunities for study (vocational training) and greater participation and incorporation of women in these sectors.

Social dimension: the impacts of gender inequality and inequity on natural resource access and management

As already noted above, women have culturally and traditionally been assigned a caretaking role, closely related to the management of water, food and energy in households.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, 65% of the population has access to safe water (delivered to the home, available when needed and free from contamination), 31% have access to at least a basic service (an improved source accessible within a 30-minute walk) and 4% have access to limited (distant, more than 30 minutes away), unimproved (not free from contamination) or surface water (WHO/UNICEF, 2017). However, the closing of gaps in access has mainly occurred in urban settings, while clean water sources and improved sanitation are difficult to access in rural and peri-urban areas. In rural areas of Latin America and the Caribbean, access to piped water in the home increased from 37% to 68% between 1990 and 2015, while in urban areas it rose from 88% to 94% (WHO/UNICEF, 2017).

Water is indispensable for sustaining life and a key element in housework, including cooking, cleaning and laundry, tasks that are undervalued (unpaid) and that, in contexts of poverty and social vulnerability, affect the lives and time-use decisions of women and children, who bear the chief responsibility for obtaining this resource for care work (Ayala, Bogado and Cañiza, 2020). If there is no water in the house, the burden of fetching it is unevenly distributed: 72% women (64% adults and 8% girls) and 28% men (24% adults and 4% children) (IDB, 2016). Thus, water collection responsibilities in Latin America and the Caribbean have different gender patterns. In Paraguay, for example, 68.7% of women in urban areas are responsible for fetching water, together with 54.2% in El Salvador and 53.7% in Panama (Borja-Vega and Grabinsky, 2009).

In the field of energy, in contrast, these inequalities relate to responsibilities in securing and managing household energy (wood, biomass), a task that can be very time-consuming and risky for physical security, especially in households not connected to the electricity grid. At the same time, the use of such energy sources as wood and biomass are linked to health problems caused by pollution inside the home. All of this underscores the situation of “energy poverty” (UNDP, 2018) (energy access level: minimum and maximum temperature, lighting, etc.) faced by many of the region’s women heads of household.

With regard to food, in most the region’s households it is women who are responsible for both securing ingredients and preparing them, a burden that imposes clearly differentiated time use patterns.

In addition, as regards food consumption, there are also gaps in the performance of the food system. In Latin America and the Caribbean, women suffer from the consequences of a food supply where nutritional quality depends largely on price. No country in the region currently has an obesity rate for women equal to or less than that of their male counterparts. In fact, the region’s obesity gap is close to nine percentage points. In Central America, the obesity rate for women is 31%, compared to 22% among men and, in the Caribbean, the gap is even more pronounced (31% versus 19%) (WHO, 2020).

Environmental dimension: gender-differentiated environmental impacts and policies

The degradation and environmental crisis caused mainly by the loss of biodiversity, deforestation and resource over-exploitation, added to climate change and pollution, are the main factors threatening human development and attainment of the SDGs, both globally and in the region. Moreover, those threats are also interconnected with gender inequalities.

As already stated, women are in a structurally different situation from men as regards various issues related to natural resources. Thus, factors such as gender, ethnicity, poverty, marginalization and rural locations are intertwined with closely interconnected environmental and climatic vulnerabilities. There is empirical evidence to reinforce the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which since 2001 has recognized the differentiated impact of climate change on women (Casas, 2017), reinforced at COP20 in Lima in 2014 and reaffirmed in 2015 through the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda and at the 2019 New York Summit.

The foreseeable consequences of climate change in the region include reduced water availability, reduced agricultural productivity, heightened pest and disease vectors, reduced marine productivity and increased desertification and savannization. All these elements have and will have gender-differentiated impacts, in a regional context where —as described above— access to water, land and other factors of production is unequal, as are the responsibilities for the provision of vital resources for care activities.

Likewise, the impacts of pollution caused by anthropogenic activities are also uneven. For example, the impacts of mining are gender-differentiated mainly on account of the different roles played by women and men, which leads to inequalities in access to and control of resources and in the exercise of rights and responsibilities. As a result, women’s abilities to take advantage of the opportunities offered by mining projects vary, and do their capacities for coping with the risks they pose. The negative impacts of mining on the environment also undermine women’s abilities to provide food and clean water for their families and, at the same time, can increase their workloads. In spite of that, current policies and practices in the mining sector do not address these gender differences adequately (IFC, 2018; Hill, Madden and Ezpeleta, 2016; Oxfam Internacional, 2017).

In addition, inequalities in access to and control of resources also have important —but often invisible— implications for programmes and projects associated with the conservation of biodiversity. Thus, for example, even conservation initiatives that seek to benefit local or indigenous communities, such as restoration efforts or payments for environmental services to maintain forests that ensure water capture, do not directly benefit women, but rather the men who are predominantly the legal owners of the land, increasing the gender inequality gap.

Although this has primarily been a problem almost not addressed in the implementation of some projects for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and for climate change mitigation and adaptation, a gender approach from the outset —to balance out the existing gaps— is gradually being mainstreamed into environmental policies and programmes. Urgent, concrete progress with adequate budgets is required to avoid trivializing the problem within the various policies and sectors and to address this inequality.

In 2008, the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted a Gender Plan of Action, the first such effort under a multilateral environmental treaty (UNEP/IUCN, 2018). A review of National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and the CBD Secretariat found that 27% consider women as relevant actors, yet they are often treated as a vulnerable group (17%) rather than being recognized as agents of change in the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. Paraguay is the country that most mentions the word “women” in its NBSAP; the Dominican Republic, in its first National Biodiversity Strategy (NBS) in 2011, highlighted that women are leaders of reforestation brigades; and El Salvador, also in its first NBS (2003), noted that urban women’s work on sanitation, recycling and water management is often unpaid (IUCN, 2017). National Biodiversity Strategies generally fail to address the issue of equitable access to natural resources in order to curb current inequalities; accordingly, although it plays a structural role in maintaining inequalities, this topic will not be followed up on. However, it is addressed in the goals of the 2030 Agenda.

International gender equality treaties notwithstanding, progress in the environmental sector remains poor. Leadership and decision-making remain predominantly male: in six of the nine decision-making processes analysed in the sector, women number less than a third (IUCN, 2015, cited in UNEP/IUCN, 2018).

The international treaties and their synergies are an opportunity that the region could take advantage of to bolster progress in reducing gaps, since different strategies must be applied in the same territory and several of the gender inequality gaps are transversal to the different issues. In 2019, ECLAC supported the innovative Biodiversity, gender and climate change initiative for Latin America and the Caribbean, which involves people from nine countries with an emphasis on academia, civil society organizations and government institutions. The work included exchanging experiences, seeking overarching information and beginning the development of a comprehensive conceptual framework. While the environment and gender sectors are relatively new and their interrelationship is more of an emerging issue, and the same is also true of climate change, it will progress in importance and deepen the different dimensions and structural challenges of inequality gaps, and embracing it also offers an opportunity to advance toward several SDGs simultaneously and synergistically.

Conclusions

• There is a complex and multidimensional relationship between gender equity and natural resource policies. That relationship involves care work, which falls disproportionately on women; the productive sphere, where there are significant inequalities in access to and control and management of natural resources; and the existence of differentiated vulnerabilities to the effects of climate change and the environmental impacts of human activity.
• There are structural inequalities that place women at clear economic and social disadvantage: pronounced inequalities in ownership of and access to key resources such as land and water, inequalities in the quality of employment and in decision-making venues, and inequalities in the economy of time. The latter has been particularly aggravated in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Inequalities translate into a pattern of economic growth characterized by exclusion, since women are not as well positioned as men to take advantage of the opportunities generated by economic growth. This is evident in industries such as the extractive sector, where the benefits are mainly reaped by men, due to the predominance of male employees. Accordingly, the gender perspective must be included in job creation policies to reduce the gap and to avoid its reproduction in the new schemes for changing the energy matrix from fossil fuels to renewables, where the gender aspect can made invisible through the better environmental conditions achieved. At the same time, the impact of these activities —linked, for example, to the contamination of water sources— affects women in a differentiated way given that they are mostly in charge of care work.
• Special attention should be paid to land control and ownership, as a result of which the economic benefits of land sales are unequally distributed, women can be insecure in their land ownership and they generally have access to smaller plots of lower quality land. This goal is covered by two different SDGs of the 2030 Agenda.
• The impacts of climate change are expected to exacerbate the serious consequences of the environmental crisis and affect men and women differently, inasmuch as such issues as reduced water availability, loss of agricultural productivity or the emergence of new vectors of disease are especially linked to the care work carried out by women.
• This is linked to and exacerbated by highly inequitable cultural patterns and traditional gender roles, and by a sexual division of labour that assigns greater use of women’s time to unpaid domestic work, which is largely dependent on access to and the provision of natural resources such as water and energy. Lack of access to resources such as water and electricity increases the time used for housework, especially for women and girls, and exposes them to greater vulnerability.
• The exclusion of women from governance is also notorious, at the local, regional and national levels, in participation venues dealing with resources such as water, seas, land and forests. This leads to their exclusion from decision-making, which is something that those sectors’ development policies must address. To that end, a gender perspective must be integrated into the design and monitoring of measures for improving the governance of natural resources, especially during the pandemic; investments must be made in women’s leadership and support to their formal and informal networks.
• Those efforts must be based on the interrelations that exist among the various SDGs, where there is an urgent need for an integral and multidimensional approach, which implies the mainstreaming of the gender perspective in all public policies related to natural resource management.

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