Evolution of Gender Considerations in Climate Change Dialogue: From UN Conferences to Policy Implementation

The conversation around climate change has evolved significantly over the past three decades. What began as a scientific and environmental discussion has gradually incorporated crucial social dimensions, particularly gender. The journey from early UN conferences to current policy implementation reveals both progress and persistent gaps in how the international community addresses the differentiated impacts of climate change on women and men.

The United Nations and gender mainstreaming 🔗

The United Nations has been instrumental in advancing gender equality across its policies and programs. Gender mainstreaming emerged as a key strategy in the 1990s, representing a commitment to ensure that women’s and men’s concerns and experiences are integrated into the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of all policies and programs. This approach aims to ensure that both sexes benefit equally from development initiatives and that inequality is not perpetuated.

In 1997, the UN formalised its gender mainstreaming policy, through which the organisation and its member countries committed to incorporating gender perspectives across all endeavours. This was not merely about adding women to existing programs but fundamentally rethinking how policies affect different groups within society.

Historical milestones in gender recognition 🔗

Agenda 21 and the Rio Earth Summit 🔗

The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro marked a pivotal moment for both environmental policy and gender recognition. The conference produced Agenda 21, a comprehensive plan of action for sustainable development that identified women as one of nine major groups essential for achieving sustainable development. This recognition was significant because it formally acknowledged that environmental challenges could not be addressed without considering the roles, knowledge, and needs of women.

The Beijing Platform for Action 🔗

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, agreed upon in 1995 by 189 countries, became a landmark document for advancing women’s rights and gender equality worldwide. It identified 12 critical areas of concern, including women and the environment. The connection between gender and climate change was first recognised on the international stage through this platform, which flagged women and the environment as a critical area requiring greater attention for achieving gender equality.

The Beijing Platform solidified the gender mainstreaming strategy and established a framework for governments to take concrete action. It called for women’s active participation in environmental decision-making and acknowledged their unique knowledge of natural resource management.

Gender in global development goals 🔗

From Millennium Development Goals to SDGs 🔗

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) recognised gender equality as a specific development objective, marking an important step forward. However, it was the Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 that truly elevated gender to a foundational principle.

Sustainable Development Goal 5 specifically calls for achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. Ending discrimination against women and girls is not only a basic human right but crucial for a sustainable future. Research demonstrates that empowering women and girls contributes significantly to economic growth and development.

What makes SDG 5 particularly significant is its cross-cutting nature. Gender equality can be regarded as a cross-cutting issue in the implementation of all SDGs. Even though SDG 5 is a stand-alone goal, other SDGs can only be fully achieved if SDG 5 is realised, meaning the needs of women must receive the same attention as the needs of men.

Commission on Sustainable Development 🔗

Between 2002 and 2017, gender was designated as a cross-cutting theme for the Commission on Sustainable Development. This designation ensured that gender considerations remained visible across environmental discussions rather than being confined to women-specific forums. It reflected growing understanding that environmental sustainability and gender equality are deeply interconnected.

Climate change frameworks and gender gaps 🔗

The UNFCCC and early omissions 🔗

The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development led to the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC has since recognised the importance of involving women and men equally in its processes and in developing national climate policies that are gender-responsive.

However, the early years of climate change dialogue largely overlooked gender dimensions. Subsequent climate conventions and Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings initially failed to adequately incorporate gender aspects into climate discussions. The topic of gender remained absent from the agendas of early UN climate conferences for many years following the Beijing Platform.

The Lima Work Programme and Gender Action Plan 🔗

Progress eventually came through dedicated mechanisms. The first Gender Action Plan (GAP) was adopted in 2017, providing a strategy document to ensure climate action works for everyone. The GAP serves as a framework for integrating gender perspectives across all climate actions, including mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology, and capacity-building.

The Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender, established under the UNFCCC, has continued to evolve. At COP 29, parties concluded the final review and extended this programme for 10 years, demonstrating continued commitment to gender-responsive climate action.

IPCC’s recognition of gender factors 🔗

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has played a crucial role in establishing the scientific basis for understanding differentiated climate impacts. The IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report acknowledged that climate change impacts vary by gender, age, and class, with poor people most likely to suffer disproportionately.

Based on the findings of the IPCC, people who are already most vulnerable and marginalized will also experience the greatest impacts. Women are increasingly seen as more vulnerable than men to climate change effects, mainly because they represent the majority of the world’s poor and are proportionally more dependent on threatened natural resources.

Why women face increased vulnerability 🔗

Several factors contribute to women’s heightened vulnerability to climate change:

Economic disparities: Seventy per cent of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty are women. Women predominate in the world’s food production, contributing 50-80 per cent, yet own less than 10 per cent of the land.

Resource dependence: Women represent a high percentage of poor communities that depend heavily on local natural resources for their livelihoods, particularly in rural areas where they bear major responsibility for household water supply, energy for cooking and heating, and food security.

Limited access: Worldwide, women have less access than men to resources such as land, credit, agricultural inputs, decision-making structures, technology, training and extension services that would enhance their capacity to adapt to climate change.

Care responsibilities: Women spend about 2.5 times more hours per day on domestic and care work than men. During extreme weather events like droughts and floods, women tend to work more to secure household livelihoods, leaving less time for training, education, and income generation.

From recognition to implementation 🔗

Nationally Determined Contributions 🔗

The Paris Agreement in 2015 marked another milestone, with countries submitting Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) outlining their climate commitments. In the first round of NDCs, starting in 2015, gender equality was only vaguely addressed, without specific actions and policies being put forward by most countries.

This gap highlighted challenges many countries faced in integrating gender considerations into their climate policies. One of the main problems was the lack of gender-disaggregated data, which limited understanding of how climate impacts vary between women and men.

Progress has been made in subsequent NDC revisions. The UNDP Climate Promise developed a multi-pronged approach focusing on strengthening gender-responsive climate action in effective governance, inclusive planning, and integrated policy frameworks. This approach led to significant improvement in the quality of NDCs from 2015 to 2020-2021.

Women as agents of change 🔗

A critical shift in the dialogue has been recognising women not merely as victims of climate change but as powerful agents of change. Women have historically developed knowledge and skills related to water harvesting and storage, food preservation and rationing, and natural resource management.

In rural areas particularly, women possess time-tested knowledge about agricultural practices, climate patterns, and sustainable resource management. By further empowering women, countries can supercharge conservation and help communities adapt to the climate crisis.

Current challenges and the road ahead 🔗

Despite decades of progress in policy frameworks, implementation remains uneven. At the global level, none of the 18 indicators under SDG 5 have met or almost met the targets. At current rates of progress, it is estimated that it will take up to 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws.

Despite growing acknowledgement of the gendered impacts of climate change, efforts to mainstream gender within climate research and policy have been slow. Common challenges include policies that do not consider gender at all, or when gender equality is included, it often appears diluted or as a bureaucratic obligation rather than a genuine commitment.

The limited focus on gender in policy planning is partly due to lack of data capturing women’s lived realities. Improving the availability of gender-disaggregated data would help policymakers formulate climate policies that better respond to women’s specific needs and constraints.

Key recommendations for effective integration 🔗

Moving forward, several approaches can strengthen the gender-climate nexus:

Data collection: Systematic collection and analysis of sex-disaggregated data is essential for evidence-based policy making. Without understanding how climate impacts differ by gender, policies cannot be effectively targeted.

Inclusive decision-making: Women must be part of decision-making at national and local levels regarding resource allocation for climate initiatives. Their perspectives, priorities, and knowledge are essential for developing effective solutions.

Adequate resourcing: Gender-responsive climate action requires dedicated financial, human, and technical resources. Gender-sensitive investments in adaptation, mitigation, technology transfer, and capacity building are crucial.

Legal frameworks: Strengthening legal protections for women’s land rights, economic participation, and political representation creates the foundation for meaningful climate action.

The evolution from the 1992 Rio Summit to today’s climate discussions represents significant progress in recognising the gender dimensions of climate change. International frameworks now explicitly acknowledge that climate impacts are not gender-neutral and that effective responses require women’s participation and leadership. Yet the gap between policy rhetoric and on-the-ground implementation remains substantial.

What do you think? How can local communities better integrate women’s traditional knowledge into climate adaptation strategies? What role should governments play in ensuring climate finance reaches women-led initiatives?

References

1. https://www.unep.org/topics/gender/gender-and-climate-action
2. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2025/03/brochure-beijing30-action-agenda-for-all-women-and-girls
3. https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/why-do-we-need-to-accelerate-the-mainstreaming-of-gender-into-climate-action/
4. https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal5
5. https://www.undp.org/sustainable-development-goals/gender-equality
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9476407/
7. https://unfccc.int/gender
8. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/explainer/2025/11/climate-change-gender-action-plan
9. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar4/wg2/
10. https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change
11. https://climatepromise.undp.org/news-and-stories/what-does-gender-equality-have-do-climate-change
12. https://www.unep.org/topics/sustainable-development-goals/why-do-sustainable-development-goals-matter/goal-5