New Guidance Advances Gender Equity Efforts in Carbon Projects

Through sharing valuable insights from our projects, Acorn has supported Work and Opportunities for Women (WOW) and UK Aid in the publication of a new guide aimed at empowering women in agroforestry carbon projects. Historically, women have been underrepresented in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), even though it is widely established that women are disproportionately affected by climate change. The new guide, titled ‘Integrating gender into the design, implementation, and monitoring of carbon credit projects’, tackles gender-based inequity head-on, setting benchmarks and offering practical solutions to ensure that women’s voices are integrated into every project from the ground up.

The Vision for a New Gender Equity Resource

WOW is the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (FCDO) flagship women’s economic empowerment program, which has turned its efforts to assessing gender equity in the VCM. Women are not only key contributors to global value chains, but are essential climate stewards, offering unique perspectives on their local environment and agricultural practices. Their livelihoods tend to be more vulnerable to climate disruption, yet they face substantial hurdles in accessing leadership roles, financial benefits, and decision-making processes in climate crisis mitigation efforts like carbon markets.

Tanya Tawha, Acorn’s ESG Monitoring & Reporting Specialist, explains, “In many local contexts, especially in Africa, land ownership is usually male-dominated. Since project participation contracts are signed by the landowners, only the landowner can receive profit share from the carbon project. So, in situations where women are contributing essential knowledge, skills, and labor to the farming practices but don’t have land ownership, they are not directly benefiting from the program in the way the men are.” In some areas, patriarchal norms also hinder women from participating fully in project council meetings or voicing concerns during the project development period, particularly around sensitive gender-based issues such as the risk of sexual violence.

The new guide aims to address these challenges by providing specific recommendations on how to create spaces for women to engage meaningfully in project discussions, how to partner with local women’s organizations and develop culturally sensitive, women-focused leadership trainings. At the core of the guide is the central tenet that empowering women improves overall project outcomes for everyone: women are often the key to community-building, and research shows that when women are involved in environmental decision-making, projects are more likely to succeed.

Collaborating Across the VCM to Establish Guidelines and Metrics

Acorn and several other key players in the VCM such as Plan Vivo (Acorn’s project certifier), The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI), and others contributed their expertise and real-world examples to the WOW-authored document, giving an inside perspective on the gender-based issues that carbon projects face through several case studies. For example, in Acorn’s projects in Malawi, a pre-project feasibility study helped identify the techniques, both agricultural and on the payment delivery side, that would increase women’s participation. The local partners also enacted personal finance trainings that supported joint household decision-making.

Tawha, who contributed directly to the development of the guide, explains Acorn’s investment in these standards: “We’ve always had women’s empowerment as part of our key indicators for projects. The guidance put forward by the document will not only allow us to offer more effective project recommendations but will allow us to better monitor the outcomes and empower our local partners to do the same.”

The guide does so by suggesting metrics for tracking progress, such as the percentage of women in leadership roles, the distribution of profits, and the level of women’s participation in project meetings. These indicators are designed to help project developers continuously assess their impact and adjust their strategies as needed. For example, a project might set a goal to increase the number of women landowners who receive carbon revenue or to boost female representation on project advisory boards. The guide suggests periodic reviews to ensure that these benchmarks are met, helping ensure that gender inclusion becomes a fundamental part of project development that is always top of mind.

Why Gender Equity Makes a Difference

The purely economic case for project developers to empower women in carbon projects is becoming increasingly clear. As demand for high-integrity carbon credits rises, buyers are looking for projects that not only offset emissions but also meet rigorous social and environmental standards, and gender equity in particular is a factor that raises the value of a project’s Carbon Removal Unit (CRU).

But beyond the financial incentives, there’s consensus in the field that effective climate action simply isn’t possible without the inclusion of women. Not only are women essential to community-building, problem-solving, improving agricultural output, and contributing to sustainably-minded agroforestry design, but Tawha explains, “Inclusion is a human right, and too often, women don’t have the opportunity to be heard. This guide helps ensure that women are not only included but empowered to lead and make decisions that impact their lives.”