Comprehensive Action for Climate Change Initiative (CACCI) Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Factsheet

CACCI is a global, USAID mechanism designed to help countries develop and implement ambitious climate policies and practices to mitigate climate change and increase resilience. CACCI contributes to USAID’s Climate Strategy by helping countries implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), while ensuring inclusion and local ownership of solutions and their benefits. These efforts support USAID’s target for aligning development and humanitarian assistance programs with NDCs, NAPs, and partner country climate policy priorities in at least 80 countries by 2030.

Climate change has been called the single biggest threat facing humanity, with communities worldwide experiencing hotter temperatures, more severe storms, rising ocean levels, and greater food scarcity on a magnified scale (UN). These impacts harm the health and well-being of individuals and populations through air pollution, disease, displacement, poor nutrition, violence, and poverty.

The severity with which these impacts are experienced varies drastically based on gender, class, race, ethnicity, disability, geography, and other categories of identity. Individuals with multiple and intersecting forms of exclusion in developing countries, where adaptive capacity is more limited, experience the health, economic, and social impacts of climate change disproportionately. This underscores the importance of applying a gender-sensitive and inclusive lens in addressing the impacts of climate change and in framing and implementing mitigation and adaptation efforts.