Climate Change and Gender Inequality: Disproportionate Impacts on Women

Climate change is not a gender-neutral crisis. While its impacts ripple across all of humanity, women face disproportionately severe consequences due to deeply entrenched social, economic, and political inequalities. From the fields where they grow food to the policy rooms where decisions are made, gender inequality shapes how climate change is experienced, responded to, and ultimately resolved. Understanding this intersection is essential for developing truly effective climate solutions.

How gender roles shape the climate-resource relationship
Women excluded from climate decision-making
The knowledge gap in adaptation planning
The missing data problem
Different visions for climate solutions
Traditional sectors under threat
The fisheries crisis
Agricultural vulnerability
The human cost of climate disasters
Pathways to gender-responsive climate action

How gender roles shape the climate-resource relationship

Women in rural areas of developing countries are highly dependent on local natural resources for their livelihoods. They are charged with securing water, food, and fuel for cooking and heating-responsibilities that become increasingly difficult as climate change degrades these essential resources. Despite this intimate connection with the environment, women often lack control over the very resources they depend upon.

The disparity is striking: over 400 million women work in agriculture globally, producing the majority of the world’s food. In Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, women account for 60% to 80% of the agricultural workforce. Yet women own less than 20% of the world’s land, and female farmers lack equal rights to own land in over 90 countries. This fundamental disconnect between resource use and resource control creates a dangerous vulnerability.

Property and inheritance laws in many regions disadvantage women relative to men in both customary and statutory systems. Under many customary regimes, women’s access to land is based on their status within the family and consists of simple usage rights, not robust property rights. When households dissolve through separation, divorce, or widowhood, women are susceptible to losing even these limited rights. Climate-related economic pressures only intensify these vulnerabilities.

Women excluded from climate decision-making

Perhaps one of the most significant barriers to effective climate action is women’s unequal participation in decision-making processes and labor markets. This underrepresentation prevents women from fully contributing to climate-related planning, policy-making, and implementation. The UNFCCC has recognized the importance of involving women and men equally in climate processes, but progress has been slow.

The consequences of this exclusion are far-reaching. Energy transition plans often ignore women’s roles in household energy management, and disaster preparedness rarely draws on their knowledge. This leads to systematic biases in climate actions, resulting in policies that lack gender consideration in climate responses. When women are not at the table, their specific vulnerabilities go unaddressed, and their potential contributions go untapped.

Climate governance remains dominated by men, even as the health impacts of climate change disproportionately affect women, girls, and gender-diverse people. As the world prepared for COP29, concerns about gender representation reignited following the initial appointment of 28 men and no women to the organizing committee. Research consistently shows that greater women’s political representation correlates with more stringent climate change policies and increased ratification of environmental treaties.

The knowledge gap in adaptation planning

Women possess unique knowledge and experience crucial for effective climate adaptation and mitigation, yet their perspectives are often overlooked. In Fiji, for example, when communities affected by rising sea levels needed to relocate, women reported that men decided they had to move without even consulting them. Their testimonies demonstrated how climate change exacerbates gender inequalities by perpetuating cultural and societal norms that exclude women from decision-making.

This exclusion comes at a significant cost. Indigenous women have been at the forefront of environmental conservation, bringing invaluable ancestral knowledge and practices that build resilience in a changing climate. They preserve crop biodiversity and seed varieties, protect pollinators and local bee populations, use natural soil building methods, and maintain forests intact. Ignoring these contributions weakens climate responses.

The missing data problem

A persistent obstacle to addressing climate-related gender inequality is the serious lack of gender-disaggregated data related to both carbon dioxide production and climate impacts. Without specific data analyzing how men and women differently contribute to emissions and experience climate effects, policies remain gender-blind. This data gap obscures important differences in vulnerability, adaptive capacity, and climate solution preferences.

Research has revealed that women generally demonstrate greater sensitivity to risk perception and recognize climate change as a serious problem compared to men. Yet without comprehensive gender-disaggregated data across regions and socioeconomic groups, these insights remain anecdotal rather than systematically incorporated into climate planning.

The UNDP finds that only 23 of 120 Nationally Determined Contributions submitted by Climate Promise-supported countries consider indicators to explicitly track progress on gender, while only 18 commit to gender-responsive climate budgeting. Without this foundational data, climate policies cannot effectively address the unique challenges women face nor leverage their potential contributions to solutions.

Different visions for climate solutions

Research examining climate solution preferences reveals distinct gendered patterns. Women, across multiple studies and cultural contexts, consistently emphasize lifestyle changes and reduced energy consumption as critical approaches to mitigating climate change. This perspective often prioritizes community-based initiatives, behavioral changes, and consumption reduction.

In contrast, men demonstrate greater preference for technological solutions like carbon capture, geoengineering, and industrial efficiency improvements. This technological focus aligns with mainstream climate policy discourse, which predominantly emphasizes technical fixes over social and behavioral adaptations. On a household level, women are more inclined to alter daily habits for environmental protection and family well-being. They hold significant influence in decisions that directly affect family habits, energy usage, and waste generation.

Women drive 70-80% of all consumer purchasing decisions in wealthier societies, leading transitions to more sustainable lifestyles. They are more likely to recycle, minimize waste, buy organic food and eco-labeled products, and save water and energy in the household. Yet the world’s focus on technical solutions often marginalizes these perspectives on lifestyle changes, despite evidence suggesting that combining both approaches would yield more sustainable outcomes.

Traditional sectors under threat

Climate change disproportionately affects sectors where women’s livelihoods are concentrated, particularly agriculture and fishing. Hundreds of millions of people who depend on fisheries, aquaculture, and fish processing for their livelihoods, food security, and nutrition are at risk from climate impacts. Women represent a significant portion of this workforce-in countries like India, Cambodia, and Ghana, they constitute on average half of the fisheries workforce, particularly in post-harvesting activities.

The fisheries crisis

Marine species are shifting poleward at approximately 44 miles per decade as warming forces them toward cooler waters. This causes profound issues for fishers and fishing communities that depend on these species for their livelihoods. Sea level rise, predicted to reach 1-4 feet by the end of this century, threatens to destroy coastal ecosystems including mangroves and salt marshes-crucial habitats that maintain wild fish stocks and supply seed for aquaculture production.

Rising sea levels also bring saline water intrusion, which affects fish farms and freshwater fisheries, rendering many aquaculture operations environmentally and economically unviable. In regions where women dominate fish processing and marketing, these changes directly threaten their incomes and food security.

Agricultural vulnerability

Women farmers currently account for 45-80% of all food production in developing countries depending on the region. About two-thirds of the female labor force in developing countries, and more than 90% in many African countries, are engaged in agricultural work. As climate change makes traditional food sources more unpredictable and scarce, these women face loss of income as well as harvests-often their sole sources of food and income.

Related increases in food prices make food more inaccessible to poor people, particularly to women and girls whose health has been found to decline more than male health in times of food shortages. Furthermore, women are often excluded from decision-making on access to and use of land and resources critical to their livelihoods, compounding their vulnerability.

The human cost of climate disasters

By 2050, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty-16 million more than the total number of men and boys. When disasters strike, women are disproportionately impacted and more likely to be injured due to long-standing gender inequalities that have created disparities in information, mobility, decision-making, and access to resources and training.

Altered rainfall patterns lead to girls spending more time fetching wood and water over longer distances and taking on additional domestic labor. This increased exposure to hardship also means heightened risk of violence and a higher likelihood of missing school. Adolescent girls are more likely to be forced into marriage to alleviate financial difficulties caused by extreme weather events.

Climate-induced disasters also intensify gender-based violence. A 2025 UN Spotlight brief found that climate change is amplifying social and economic stresses that fuel increased violence against women and girls. One study highlighted a 28% increase in femicide during heatwaves. Without urgent action, climate change could be linked to one in every ten cases of intimate partner violence by the end of this century.

Pathways to gender-responsive climate action

Involving women in decision-making helps drive the adoption of climate change policies and strengthens mitigation and adaptation efforts by ensuring they benefit the needs of women. Countries like Bhutan have trained Gender Focal Points within different ministries and women’s organizations to enable them to coordinate and implement gender equality and climate change initiatives.

The evidence is clear: each 1% increase in gender equality is associated with a 0.6% increase in climate adaptation capacity at the country level. Countries with greater representation of women in Parliament are more prone to ratify environmental treaties and adopt policies that address climate change. Companies with a greater share of women on boards are more likely to adopt climate and eco-friendly policies.

Addressing the intersection of climate change and gender inequality requires systematic action across multiple fronts: strengthening women’s land rights and resource access, ensuring women’s meaningful participation in climate decision-making at all levels, collecting and utilizing gender-disaggregated data, and directing climate finance toward gender-responsive initiatives. If women had the same access to productive resources as men, farm yields could increase by 20-30%, feeding an additional 100 to 150 million people and reducing pressure on forests.

What do you think? How can your community better integrate women’s perspectives and leadership into local climate adaptation efforts? And what role should traditional knowledge held by women play in shaping national and international climate policies?

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Table of Contents

How gender roles shape the climate-resource relationship 🔗

Women excluded from climate decision-making 🔗

The knowledge gap in adaptation planning 🔗

The missing data problem 🔗

Different visions for climate solutions 🔗

Traditional sectors under threat 🔗

The fisheries crisis 🔗

Agricultural vulnerability 🔗

The human cost of climate disasters 🔗

Pathways to gender-responsive climate action 🔗