Gender Impact Assessment of Climate Change Mitigation Policy in Lithuania

Abstract

The gender aspect of climate change and climate policy has been getting an increasing amount of attention in the global climate change and climate justice debates. However, most of the focus so far has been on the developing countries and climate change adaptation, where the linkages between climate change and gender issues are the most apparent. It has been explored to a much lesser extent in the context of the developed countries, and this is what this study is set out to do on a small scale. It attempts to analyse the Lithuanian climate change mitigation policy using the Gender Impact Assessment framework that is an official gender mainstreaming tool in the European Union. The results of the policy analysis suggest that Lithuanian climate change mitigation policy produces gender-specific impacts in all climate policy areas, but many of them are difficult to quantify due to the lack of gender-disaggregated data. Policy suggestions drawn from the results include generating gender-disaggregated data and further implementing gender mainstreaming at all levels of climate policy design and implementation.