From December 3rd to 4th 2015, Mrs. Vu Thi Bich Hop – the Executive Director of the Centre for Sustainable Rural Development (SRD) participated in the workshop "Engaging men and women in REDD+ business: effectively addressing the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation" in Paris, France at the invitation of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
The workshop brought together the key partners of REDD+ in order to share and discuss the findings and testings of REDD+, from which more extensive discussions were held over REDD+ contributions in accounting issues and changes in purposes of land use. This was also an opportunity for countries to share the lessons learned in the process of working at a local level, as well as figure out how to raise the role of the parties, including the private sector, men and women in the implementation progress of REDD+. During discussion on the topic of REDD+ and gender, Mrs. Hop contributed comments based on a number of research activities on the FLEGT and REDD+ linkage of SRD and the Vietnamese Non-Governmental Organization on FLEGT (VNGO-FLEGT) Network in Vietnam.
During this time in Paris, Mrs. Hop attended some side events of Vietnam delegations in the framework of the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21). She also participated in the “Global Landscape Planning Forum”, a big side event of COP21.
At the interactive session “Reaching the most vulnerable: practical approaches to supporting gender equitable community based adaptation in Africa and Asia”, Mrs. Hop, as a representative from Vietnam, shared the contents of adaptive agriculture to climate change based on SRD experiences in local areas. Through group discussions, this session’s purpose was to co-produce evidence on what works well for adaptation, success factors, the emerging challenges and barriers to achieving successful adaptation and the reasons for these. Community Based Adaptation (CBA) tackles the injustices of climate change through a holistic approach, which strengthens both adaptive capacity and gender equality, enables the access and use of climate information and aims for integration of resilient livelihoods and disaster risk reduction.
In the framework of the activities of the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) in the COP21, SRD’s project on women’s participation in disaster risk mitigation and climate change adaptation was introduced in the publication “Gender equality and women’s human rights are fundamental to combating climate change”, released by WGC. This project is considered as a non-technical solution and was implemented by SRD. Specifically, from 2014-2015, SRD worked with 5.700 women in 2 lagoon communes in central Vietnam to promote their voices and to include them in village rapid response teams as active contributors. This initiative was within the framework of the project “Rural, Indigenous, Migrant, Urban Poor Women in the Midst of Climate Policies and Projects” funded by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) and shared by an SRD officer in the launch of this publication.
In addition, in the framework of COP21, an SRD officer was invited to a number of other activities such as WGC’s activities; film screening at the People’s Summit: “Women of the Lagoon: confronting climate change in coastal Vietnam”, funded APWLD through SRD; sharing the project “Rural, Indigenous, Migrant, Urban Poor Women in the Midst of Climate Policies and Projects” at the launch of the APWLD’s publication “Gender equality and women’s human rights are fundamental to combating climate change”.
-SRD-
Centre for Sustainable Rural Development (SRD)
No.31, Alley 19 Kim Dong Street, Hoang Mai District, Ha Noi
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