The Global Support Programme (in short, GSP) for National Communications (NCs) and Biennial Update Reports (BURs) has just published results from the three year regional pilot initiative  “Gender mainstreaming into climate transparency and measurement, reporting and verification (MRV)” for five  Western Balkan countries - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia-and Lebanon.

The initiative aimed at providing guidance to developing countries on how to mainstream gender equality, step by step, in the development process of NCs and BURs as well as at facilitating countries in sharing experiences and lessons learned during the process.

The document features Macedonian efforts in progressively gaining the pace to gender responsive national climate actions and highlights several good practices, among which Gender and Climate Change Training Manual, targeted gender and climate change country specific research, mobilizing women political groups as gender and climate change advocates.  

The most important thing learned is that the gender aspects can increase efficiency of implementation of Macedonian Climate Actions. Moreover, the pilot initiative enhanced cooperation between the Ministry of Environment and Physical Planning and the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies, and mainstreaming gender and climate change into the new policy documents that are under development.

This pilot gave the boost for gender and climate change in our country, and UNDP is committed continue supporting integration of gender aspects into climate actions through its ongoing projects.   Next steps:

• Identify various tools to collect sex-disaggregated data and gender information
• Encourage youth leadership into climate action and transparency
• Support cooperation among woman parliamentary networks from the region in exchanging experiences and perspectives in design of climate policy and actions
• Support cooperation of NGOs, research and private sector in the area of gender and climate change
• Communicate the correlation between gender and climate change to the public