A seat at the table: women’s role in the fight against climate change
Women are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change, yet rarely enjoy equal representation in climate decision-making, leading to policies that do not adequately address their needs. On International Women’s Day this year, some governments and organisations recognised this predicament and renewed a push for change
It is a fact that climate change is a greater threat to women and girls than to men and boys.
To give just a few examples, women and children account for the majority of fatalities in climate-related disasters due to social norms and biological vulnerabilities; they make up the majority of climate refugees – and women have fewer financial resources than men making recovery from disasters more challenging; and they depend more on natural resources.
The UN estimates that by 2050, under a worst-case scenario, climate change could push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty globally – 16 million more than the total number of men and boys – and see 236 million more face food insecurity.
Women and girls also encounter greater exposure to gender-based violence at times when families face stress and uncertainty, such as in the aftermath of climate disasters, and such events have also been shown to cause spikes in human trafficking and child marriage.
Despite this predicament, women are not adequately represented in climate decision-making. As climate scientist Jessica Taylor noted in an article on Climate Cosmos, decision-making bodies are frequently dominated by men, leading to a lack of consideration for women’s perspectives and priorities and policies that do not address their unique challenges.
“Ensuring that women have a voice in climate decision-making is essential for creating equitable and effective solutions,” she wrote. “Empowering women to participate in these discussions can lead to more comprehensive and inclusive strategies for addressing climate change.”
Read more: UN introduces feminist climate justice framework for policymaking
Women’s voices not heard on global stage
UN Climate Change has for years highlighted that women and girls are effective and powerful leaders and changemakers for climate adaptation and mitigation.
To mark International Women’s Day (IWD) in 2022, it called on governments around the world to examine the opportunities – and constraints – to empower women and girls to be equal players in climate-related decision-making and said that without gender equality, a sustainable future “remains beyond our reach”.
Many governments around the world recognise that this is a problem, and yet progress towards greater representation of women in climate decision-making – indeed in decision-making in general – is slow. To give an example, only eight out of 78 world leaders at COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, last November, were women, and the event’s organising committee initially had an all-male 28-member line-up (the Azerbaijan government added 12 women to the committee following backlash).
The gender imbalance at COP29 did not go unnoticed. She Changes Climate is a global movement advocating for inclusion and diversity at all levels of decision-making to address the climate crisis. In one of their statements from the conference, they wrote: “Of the 78 heads of state who attended COP29, only eight were women – a shocking statistic that underscores the persistent gender imbalance in global leadership.
“In national delegations, the participation of women has stagnated at around 20% for years. This is not just an oversight; it is a systemic failure. Gender must be at the core of climate finance planning and national accountability, not an afterthought or token discussion. We call for binding commitments to ensure gender parity in national delegations, with countries held accountable for meeting these targets.”
Changing the status quo will be of great importance as countries work towards meeting their commitments under the Paris Agreement – as poorer nations most reliant on fossil fuels adapt, and as countries most at risk of climate impacts are supported to recover from disasters.
Indeed, one study on gender and climate change found that female representation in national parliaments across 91 countries correlated with more stringent climate change policies and lower carbon emissions.
And yet, particularly in countries most vulnerable to climate change – many of which have traditionally more conservative cultures – female representation in parliaments and national delegations remains low.
“It is deeply frustrating that the women and girls whose lives are so disproportionately affected are not being heard on the global stage,” Helen Pankhurst, senior advisor on gender equality at CARE International UK (and great-granddaughter of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst), told Euronews last week. “Climate and gender justice go hand in hand; you can’t have one without the other.”
Empowering women to lead on climate issues – and Pakistan’s example
The UN has introduced formal tools that aim to help change this. In late 2023, it published a framework for enabling women’s contribution towards climate justice and how it can be applied to policy in practice.
“Without action to halt climate change, the world’s women and girls now face wholesale reversal of their human rights… [changing this] requires not tinkering around the edges but the transformation of every part of the world’s economies and societies,” it said.
The report defines feminist climate justice, outlines a framework for it drawing on American philosopher Nancy Fraser’s ‘theory of justice’, and provides practical guidance for policymakers. The framework covers ways to recognise women’s rights, labour, and knowledge; redistribute economic resources; represent women’s voices and agency; and repair inequalities and historical injustices.
It also addresses accountability, presenting how this might be achieved, in part through an accountability tool called the gender equality and climate policy scorecard.
Another organisation working to change the status quo is Women Leading on Climate (WLOC), a global coalition of women leaders in government, business and civil society whose aim is to “drive ambitious climate action through quiet diplomacy, collaborative dialogues, and elevating the collective voices of women leading the fight for a sustainable and just future”.
WLOC was established at COP26, in Scotland, in 2021, by founder and co-chair Catherine McKenna, Canada’s former minister of environment and climate change, who was one of the lead negotiators of the Paris Agreement.
“Women are pushing for more ambitious climate action in negotiating rooms, in boardrooms, in our communities and in the streets,” McKenna said last year. “In this critical time for climate action, we need to raise our voices even more. We’ve seen the power of women. When we come together, we go further, faster.”
As well as hosting the launch of the WLOC, COP26 also saw the drafting of the Glasgow Women’s Leadership Statement on Gender Equality and Climate Change in co-operation with UN Women, committing leaders at all levels of government and civic society to support women to lead on addressing climate change at community, national and international levels.
One of the countries that is working towards women’s empowerment on climate issues domestically – perhaps partly because its coordinator to the prime minister for climate change, Romina Khurshid Alam, is a woman herself – is Pakistan.
Women have not traditionally been well represented in government, politics or in the bureaucracy in Pakistan – there is currently one female minister in the federal cabinet, women accounted for one fifth of members of parliament in 2023, and as at 2022, women made up just shy of 5% of the total civil service workforce. (Though the country has had a female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, who was the first to serve a Muslim country and who held office twice until 1996).
Despite low representation of women in leadership positions, Pakistan says it recognises that inclusion of women is vital as it faces up to the hard reality of climate change. Major floods in recent years have resulted in nearly 2,000 deaths and major humanitarian crises in the country, which consistently ranks as one of the most vulnerable to climate change.
On IWD last week, Romina Khurshid Alam underscored the critical link between gender equality and environmental sustainability: “The role of women in climate action cannot be ignored. From grassroots activists to policymakers, women are at the forefront of efforts to build a greener and more resilient future.”
She said the government was committed to ensuring women’s voices are included in climate governance, highlighting gender-responsive policies and initiatives such as the Women’s Empowerment in Climate Change Adaptation Programme.
“Our government recognises the importance of women’s participation in climate resilience and is working to provide them with access to climate finance, resources, and leadership opportunities,” she said.
She also stressed the importance of global collaboration in addressing climate challenges, called for barriers to women’s participation in climate action to be eliminated, and urged policymakers, organisations, and communities to support women-led climate initiatives.
“As we celebrate International Women’s Day, let us commit to empowering women in climate action. Their leadership is vital for a just, sustainable, and resilient future for all.”
With the Global South the worst affected by the impacts of climate change, the governments of other Asian nations, as well as African and Latin American countries, will need to bolster mechanisms for women’s perspectives to be heard and their ideas harnessed.
Read more: UN calls on countries to include women’s reproductive health in climate plans
The role of civil and public services
Political leaders will have to be motivated to enable such mechanisms to be implemented, but change doesn’t come only from those in elected positions – with an army of civil servants working behind the scenes to develop and implement policy, and with top officials responsible for providing advice to their political leaders, they too play a key part in action on climate change.
Looking at a few examples of G20 countries – comprising the world’s richest economies, these nations have a major role to play in climate change mitigation and recovery efforts – there is a mixed picture, with women accounting for around half of top officials in departments responsible for climate change in some countries, while in others there are none in the top two tiers.
In the UK, the top seven civil servants in the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero – comprising the permanent secretary, second permanent secretary, and five directors general – are all men, while the deputy minister and associate deputy minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada are both men (as are the political heads of both countries’ departments).
Australia fares better. Of the seven deputy secretaries in the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, five are women. And its neighbour New Zealand (though not in the G20) counts five women among the eight top officials in the Ministry for the Environment.
(In the Women Leaders Index, last published by Global Government Forum in 2022, Canada, Australia and the UK all ranked in the top four G20 countries by proportion of women in their senior civil service overall).
Women at the forefront of grassroots campaigning
There are exceptions and ambitions, but around the world, overwhelmingly, women have not had the opportunity to lead the change from the top. Evidence suggests, however, that they are playing a significant part in making a real and sustained difference on the ground.
CARE International UK’s Helen Pankhurst said in the Euronews interview that women “[lead] the charge when it comes to grassroots campaigning and inspiring change… pulling together their communities and showing leadership in coming up with solutions, demonstrating resilience and delivering hope for a better future”.
Women are leading agriculture cooperatives, encouraging their communities to plant drought-resistant crops; they are promoting water conservation; indigenous women are working to protect forests; and they have created early warning systems that save the lives and livelihoods of women who don’t have access to traditional media, for example.
And in Uganda, one movement – Girls for Climate Action – is training more women and girls in climate policy and advocacy to lead these types of initiatives.
It has so far trained around 300 women and girls and aims to train 700 more. These young women go on to advocate for change at the national level, lead a range of projects aimed at safeguarding ecosystems and natural resources, and take seats on local environmental committees that have traditionally been dominated by men.
The organisation has also created a number of demonstration hubs throughout the country where young women and girls prototype, create and launch local solutions to climate challenges, and in turn create green jobs for themselves and the community.
In her IWD statement, Pakistan’s Alam highlighted the contributions of women in climate movements worldwide, citing young activists demanding climate justice and female scientists developing sustainable solutions as playing key roles in shaping climate policies.
And Pankhurst has drawn drawn attention to women leading not only in grassroots campaigning but in civil society too, “fighting back against policies which are doing irreparable harm. There is a groundswell of women standing up and saying things must change; they’re just not in seats of political power”.
Indeed, statistics from Women Leading on Climate show that women are 2.5 times more likely to ask their governments to be bolder, 60% more likely to use their voices for good, and twice as likely to engage civically.
One example of civil engagement in practice is the Club of Climate Seniors, a group of more than 2,000 elderly Swiss women, who brought the first-ever climate case to the European Court of Human Rights. It won its case in April last year, after the court agreed that the Swiss government’s failure to reach the country’s emissions targets constituted a direct threat to their right to life.
Whether they make change at the political level, in bureaucracies, or in their communities, it is widely recognised by climate experts that women can play a pivotal role as the world strives for environmental sustainability.
At present, there aren’t many who get the platform to shape national policies aimed at fighting climate change and reducing its impacts. But, on the eve of IWD this year, UN Climate Change heralded a new decade of advance towards gender equality in the face of climate change. Let’s hope that in 10 years’ time – ideally much sooner – many more women have a seat at the table and the opportunity to drive progress towards the twin goals of gender equality and bold climate action.
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About Mia Hunt
Mia is a journalist and editor with a background in covering commercial property, having been market reports and supplements editor at trade title Property Week and deputy editor of Shopping Centre magazine, now known as Retail Destination. She has also undertaken freelance work for several publications including the preview magazine of international trade show, MAPIC, and TES Global (formerly the Times Educational Supplement) and has produced a white paper on energy efficiency in business for E.ON. Between 2014 and 2016, she was a member of the Revo Customer Experience Committee and an ACE Awards judge. Mia graduated from Kingston University with a first-class degree in journalism and was part of the team that produced The River newspaper, which won Publication of the Year at the Guardian Student Media Awards in 2010.
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