From COP plenaries to Climate Weeks in London and New York, and from international summits to bank boardrooms, billions are pledged each year for climate action. The rhetoric is bold, focusing on green transitions, resilient futures, and net-zero ambitions.
Yet a critical gap persists: only a fraction of climate finance reaches women-led solutions or initiatives that prioritize justice for women—the very efforts that anchor climate resilience in communities most at risk.
This disconnect exposes a fundamental flaw in the global approach: we cannot achieve climate justice without justice for women.
No climate response can succeed while ignoring women’s rights. Policies that fail to center women only entrench disparities and advancing women’s rights is indispensable to effectively confronting climate change. Imagine a business-as-usual scenario by 2030 where current funding patterns remain unchanged: climate disasters disproportionately impact women, further reducing their access to education and healthcare, increasing incidents of gender-based violence, and cementing economic inequities.
Without targeted interventions, the gap between urgent climate needs and resources available to women will widen, trapping millions more in cycles of poverty and vulnerability, and ultimately undermining global climate goals.
This disparity is acute across continents: women, especially in the Global South, bear the greatest burdens of environmental disruption while often being excluded from decisions.
From Papua’s degraded forests and Pakistan’s parched neighbourhoods to Malawi’s flood-prone villages and the Sahel’s scorched fields, climate change both deepens old inequalities and exposes new ones in our social and economic systems.
To understand climate justice, we must observe how these intersecting burdens fall so starkly along gendered lines.
Climate Change as a Multiplier of Gendered Injustice:
A 2022 report on Gender, Climate and Security makes this clear: climate impacts do not unfold evenly. In Papua and West Papua, Indonesia, Indigenous women have suffered devastating losses from land degradation linked to extractive industries—damage now intensified by rising temperatures and erratic rainfall. Their livelihoods, anchored in forest and soil, are collapsing under pressures they neither created nor control.
In urban Pakistan, water scarcity introduces another layer of vulnerability. As droughts and supply disruptions worsen, women spend up to 200% more time fetching water, often walking longer distances and facing increased risks, including domestic violence when household resources run dry.
Meanwhile, in Malawi, an estimated 1.5 million girls are at risk of becoming child brides because families struggling with crop failure and flooding can no longer afford to feed and shelter them.
These examples show that climate change is not only an ecological crisis but a gendered emergency, multiplying inequities across race, class, geography, and ability. Women are not a monolith—solutions must reflect the realities of Indigenous, rural, urban, and women with disabilities, among others.
For example, an Indigenous woman farmer, a refugee mother in an urban slum, and a middle-class professional all experience climate stress differently. In Ghana, after the October 2023 Akosombo Dam spillage, one woman from a displaced community shared, “When the water came, it took everything—our homes, our crops. But as women, we have no choice but to begin again.”
Recognising these layered realities is essential to advancing climate justice and women’s empowerment.
A Finance Architecture That Leaves Women Behind:
Despite mounting evidence, gender remains peripheral to the global flow of climate finance. TheUNDP Gender and Climate Finance Study found that women comprise less than one-third of global environmental decision-makers and that, in 2015, female representation in the governing bodies of major climate funds averaged only 22 percent, revealing that decision-making power within the climate finance system remains deeply gender-skewed.
Funding remains concentrated in large, Northern-based institutions, with little directed to gender-responsive initiatives. Research shows that just 0.01 percent of global climate financesupports projects that address both climate change and women’s rights, underscoring how far gender considerations are from the centre of climate finance.
Afforestation, carbon offsetting, and renewable-energy transitions have sometimes displaced Indigenous women from ancestral lands or reinforced male control over natural resources. Too often, institutions treat “gender mainstreaming” as a box to tick rather than a power shift to enable. The result is performative parity, not transformative justice.
The gap between commitment and reality goes beyond technical flaws to reflect a core barrier in climate action: ignoring structural gender inequality sustains the root causes of both the climate crisis and social injustice.
True climate justice requires confronting and dismantling these gendered power imbalances, making women’s equality an essential, non-negotiable foundation for effective climate solutions.
Women as Architects of Resilience:
Women are not waiting to be saved; they are leading some of the most effective responses to the climate crisis. In Kenya, the late Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement turned tree planting into a revolution of ecological renewal and women’s empowerment, illustrating how local ecological actions can yield income gains and community stability.
In Colombia, Afro-descendant women organise collective land defence, merging racial justice with environmental stewardship to strengthen community resilience and protect biodiversity.
Across South Asia and Southern Africa, women’s cooperatives are pioneering drought-resistant farming, water-harvesting systems, and community finance models that bolster climate adaptation from the ground up, showing how innovative approaches directly enhance food security and economic independence.
In Dar es Salaam, Laurel Kivuyo’s Climate Hub Tanzania turns discarded paper, charcoal dust, and cow dung into clean-energy briquettes that light homes and spare forests, training women and young people to turn climate anxiety into enterprise.
Their work demonstrates that advancing women’s leadership is inseparable from achieving climate justice.
When women lead, responses are resilient and just. Successful initiatives rely on targeted financial support, access to decision-making, and community-driven strategies that match local needs. Policies such as gender-responsive budgeting and leadership training turn anecdotes into sustainable models.
From Rhetoric to Structural Change:
The climate crisis cannot be separated from the economic, racial, and patriarchal systems that sustain it.
To imagine solving one without confronting the others is to perpetuate harm. Therefore, a just energy transition must challenge inequity at its roots, ensuring women have secure land tenure, access to finance, reproductive autonomy, and a seat at the decision-making table.
Intersectionality must guide this transformation, as climate impacts are never experienced equally. Justice for women in climate action must be intersectional, accounting for how race, class, ability, and geography compound vulnerability.
A flood in Lagos does not displace a female street vendor and a male homeowner in the same way. A heatwave in Paris and one in Dhaka may share the same temperature but not the same toll. Achieving genuine, lasting climate justice relies on centring women’s justice in every response.
The Role of Philanthropy:
Philanthropy sits at a powerful intersection in the fight for climate justice. With the freedom to take risks, fund innovation, and centre marginalised voices, it has the potential to bridge the gap between promises and reality.
Yet too often, climate philanthropy mirrors the imbalances of broader finance systems, concentrated in the Global North, routed through large intermediaries, and seldom accessible to the grassroots movements led by women.
The Global Greengrants Fund reports that only 0.2 percent of all foundation funding focuses explicitly on women and the environment. This disparity reflects a trust and accessibility dilemma, not a shortage of capable female leaders.
A gender-just approach to climate philanthropy goes beyond the number of grants awarded to women; it requires reimagining who holds the pen, who defines priorities, and whose knowledge guides funding. To be transformative, philanthropy must be participatory, decolonial, and rooted in the lived realities of women on the climate front lines.
Concrete practices include allocating at least 20 percent of core funding to women-led initiatives and committing to long-term, flexible financing that sustains leadership beyond short project cycles. Funders can also establish rotating grant committees to ensure diverse representation and embed community feedback in evaluations to maintain accountability.
Setting clear governance commitments, such as ensuring that at least half of all decision-making panels are frontline-led, grounds accountability in equity. Through these actions, philanthropy can ground its commitments in structures that truly serve those most affected.
Models such as the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) show that when funding decisions are localised and co-created, outcomes are more equitable and lasting. Feminist grantmaking frameworks such as participatory budgeting, storytelling-based monitoring, and shared accountability shift power from donors to doers.
Philanthropy’s real test is not how much it gives but how deeply it transforms. It must move from generosity to justice, from giving to redistributing power.
Counting Women In:
Momentum is growing, but symbolic recognition achieves little. Unless women—especially those from marginalised and frontline communities—drive climate priorities and have real control over resources, climate justice will remain incomplete. Achieving climate justice demands centring women’s rights at its core.
The same hierarchies that caused the planet’s destruction cannot heal it. Climate justice begins with power sharing. Policies that ignore women’s justice are not only unjust but also ineffective, underscoring the main argument: lasting climate solutions must have justice for women at their core. Progress will be measured not by the billions spent but by who those billions reach.
We must define success through people-centered indicators that capture transformation, not just transactions. Governments and climate institutions should measure progress by how policies change lives—how many women gain land rights, how many shape local adaptation plans, and how much funding reaches grassroots women’s groups.
Increasing women’s presence in decision-making and tracking policies that address gender–climate intersections can create a more accurate picture of impact. These metrics offer a justice-oriented lens, ensuring that what counts in climate policy truly reflects who counts.
Only by putting women at the heart of climate solutions can we hope to build a just and sustainable world for all.
The transformation is possible: when women are empowered and resourced, communities thrive, adaptation is more effective, and climate solutions become lasting and just.
The future we need is within reach—if we center justice for women at every step.
This piece was Researched & Written by Dorcas Hanson-Amanor. She is the Founder of Girls Can Lead Africa.
