Assessing gender and climate objectives interactions in urban decarbonisation policies

Gender studies have highlighted how policies and actions that are not drafted and planned with a gender perspective tend to produce a gender bias. Climate policies are not an exception. Measures to mitigate and adapt cities to climate change might lead to undesired outcomes regarding gender equality or, in contrast, may help to improve equality. Ideally, cities should prioritise actions that aim to reduce their carbon footprint but also help promote gender equality. The aim is to facilitate the inclusion of gender perspective in the 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030 European Mission. We propose a Multicriteria Decision-Making Method to assess urban policies and relate them to climate and gender criteria. We describe urban decarbonisation policies with non-negative gender outcomes and compare their impact when using climate and gender criteria. The objective is to analyse how the prioritisation of actions varies from different perspectives: one taking into account the field of expertise of the different experts and the other taking into account the different typologies of criteria separately. A DEMATEL-ANP technique is used to determine how policies contribute to climate action and gender equality. Experts in different areas and city planning respond to the DEMATEL-ANP model by comparing and relating criteria and actions. The results show which policies have a significant potential to reduce cities’ carbon footprint and increase gender equality. Prioritisation of policies changes when only gender criteria or climate criteria are considered. Regarding the former, it can be concluded that gender criteria will contribute to closing the gender gap while having a widening impact on decarbonisation. Nevertheless, including gender criteria is not enough to avoid bias, and multidisciplinary teams must participate in the decision-making process.