The livelihoods of many women around the world depend on the conservation of protected areas. Pham Thi Kim Phuong, for example, bikes every morning to harvest clams and snails from mudflats in a protected areas. However, as Lorena Aguilar, Global Senior Gender Adviser at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), explains that the promotion of gender equality in protected area conservation is often overlooked. A study by the IUCN’s Environment and Gender Information (EGI) platform demonstrated that gender equality is rarely written into policy: only nine gender keywords were mentioned out of the 1,290 World Heritage Convention State of Conservation Reports analyzed. Aguilar notes the missed opportunities here, as protected areas should be engines not just for conservation, but also gender equality, and calls for gender mainstreaming in protected areas management. Photo credit: Peter Howard/IUCN
