Climate Justice For All Women and Girls

The Issue

Women and girls bear the brunt of the climate crisis, being exposed to displacement, heightened food insecurity, poverty and gender-based violence. UN Women projections indicate that by 2050, climate change may push up to 158.3 million more women and girls into poverty - 16 million more than the total number of men and boys.

Climate change amplifies existing gender inequalities and threatens women’s and girls’ rights, livelihoods, health and wellbeing in the Europe and Central Asia region. Key elements of the climate-gender nexus in ECA are: an increasing care burden on women through climate impacts (i.e. in Tajikistan, where women bear the primary burden for water collection in a majority of households), gender gaps in green jobs (i.e. in Bosnia and Herzegovina, only 10.4% of specialized environmental roles are held by women), continued under-representation of women in climate policy making, and limitations in data availability on these gender imbalances.

Our Solution

• A gender-responsive approach is crucial for effective climate action. UN Women serves those furthest behind and most marginalized first, anchored firmly in a human-rights based approach:
• Promoting gender equality and women’s voice, agency, leadership and participation in climate and environmental action, including across intergovernmental negotiations, by harnessing their unique expertise.
• Increasing funding and support for women’s climate and environmental action, particularly to women’s civil society, grassroots organizations, and including in conflict and fragile-affected settings.
• Investing in gender-responsive programming to address and mitigate the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on women and girls and enhance their capacity to secure climate, environmental and disaster resilient livelihoods.
• Expanding the evidence-base on the connections between climate change and gender inequality, including by implementing surveys and utilizing non-traditional data sources.
• Advocating for gender-responsive just transitions and supporting the development of policies and programmes to improve women’s access to decent green jobs.
• Promoting integrated policy frameworks and programming for women’s agency in climate security and environmental peacebuilding to address interlinked climate change impacts, security risks and gender inequality.
• Developing and implementing targeted strategies to address the distinct vulnerabilities, concerns and priorities of women environmental human rights defenders, ensuring their effective protection.

Why is UN Women best placed to tackle the issue?

Building on its longstanding work on climate change and environmental degradation across its triple mandate, UN Women is articulating an integrated and strategic approach to the gender, climate and environment nexus. UN Women is able to secure the co-benefits of gender equality and climate justice for sustainable development with women’s and girls’ rights, resilience, and leadership at the center, by building on the organization’s expertise on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. UN Women is deploying its convening power and wide networks, works with partners in the UN system, among governments and civil society, which can support joint initiatives with the requisite expertise.