Background The FAO Forestry Department is dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. Women are critical to ensuring the future sustainability of forests and forestry. Their equal contributions in forest activities are urgently needed as increasingly urbanized societies are losing recognition of the multiple functions of forests and their importance for livelihoods and development. Read more Outcomes of the COFO 23/WFW Gender and forestry side event: bridging research and practice Increase the number of women in decision-making roles, their inclusion in the value chain and facilitate their access to markets. These are some of the key messages of a WFW5 side event that looked at how to take gender-sensitive actions in forestry to the next level. For gender policies to succeed, men’s understanding of and capacity to engage with gender-related issues is crucial. Presenting men with evidence of the added value to society and to a nation’s development of, for example, granting tenure rights to women is a powerful means of fostering new and equitable gender dynamics. Traditionally, women have always been key to many forest-related activities, but their roles most now grow beyond participatory to being represented in greater numbers and at higher levels in decision and policymaking. COFO 23 daily highlights New 2030 SDGs focus on gender issues! On 25 September, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was agreed at UN Headquarters in New York. The Agenda includes 17 proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets, with SDG5 working to “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” Thanks to its cooperation with IFPRI-PIM, FAO is already making data available through the Gender and Land Rights Database (GRLD) to contribute to monitoring and implementation of SDG5, and will continue its efforts to mainstream gender in forestry projects and programmes as it works to achieve SDG15, which focuses on land and forests. Learn more FAO Forestry Initiatives on Gender  Forest and Farm Facility In the 10 countries where FFF is active, projects to improve gender mainstreaming are underway, notably through the promotion of FAO Market Analysis and Development training, which in particular benefits women and as well as its gender sensitive Monitor and Learning framework. FFF approach enables the collection of more precise figures on women’s activities such as the percentage of women in producer organizations and their participation and involvement in external relations. Gender mainstreaming has become essential to the success of FFF’s work and the empowerment of rural women.
 Community Based Forestry (CBF) Conducted by Forestry’s Social Forestry Team, this project is the first ever global assessment of the extent and effectiveness of CBF management. Two of the indicators in the global assessment are equity (e.g. equitable sharing of costs and benefits) and inclusiveness (e.g. engaging marginalized individuals and groups, including women and youth, and sharing equitably in decision making processes and benefits).The assessment framework was tested in several countries in 2015 and the approach is expanding in 2016 to maximize potential social impacts.
 Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT): The VGGT is intended to help countries evaluate their forest tenure related policies, laws, institutions, and administration to identify gaps in the good governance principles of the VGGT, identify actions for strengthening governance of tenure, and to prioritize areas for improvements in tenure. The VGGT has two implementing principles that contribute to gender equality: human dignity (non-discrimination) and justice (gender equity). The VGGT specifically calls for gender sensitive policies/laws as well as gender sensitive processes and procedures in the recognition, protection, or transfer of rights.
 UN-REDD: The UN-REDD programme has worked to mainstream gender in its project countries. It produced a ‘Guidance Note on Gender Sensitive REDD+’, which explains how to increase women’s engagement in participatory activities and monitoring in UN-REDD countries. In addition, the programme ensures regional collaboration. For instance, the UN-REDD Programme in Asia-Pacific is part of a regional collaboration between UNDP, WOCAN, Lowering Emissions in Asia’s Forests (LEAF, funded by USAID) and The Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC). Mobilizing each partner’s comparative advantage and/or expertise, the regional collaboration promotes gender sensitive REDD+ activities.
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