The Pivotal Role of Gender Equality in Climate Finance

By Tara E. Daniel , WEDO Senior Manager, Policy

As the climate crisis intensifies, climate finance—the funding required for mitigation, adaptation, and responding to loss and damage from climate impacts—is imperative. Yet climate finance will fail to address the magnitude of the crisis, and can even cause harm, when human rights and gender equality are not centered in its design and delivery.

WEDO advocates for gender-responsive climate finance as a step toward our vision: transforming the current climate finance architecture into a feminist one that fully funds and centers solutions that embed human rights and climate justice while divesting from harm and false solutions.

How Are Gender and Climate Finance Connected?

As the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has affirmed, climate finance is a critical tool in the global effort to limit temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Feminists recognize that gender equality cannot be achieved in a world ravaged by climate chaos. At WEDO, we advocate for feminist climate finance that calls for a reimagining of the global climate finance architecture, ensuring that resources flow not only to reduce emissions but also to advance human rights and social justice, particularly for the women, girls, and gender-diverse people disproportionately affected by the climate crisis.

Without a gender lens, climate projects can have unintended consequences, such as increasing women’s unpaid labor or excluding them from the training, mentorship, or employment opportunities that are crucial to a gender just energy transition. Gender just climate solutions, on the other hand, center the needs and priorities of local communities and challenge gender inequalities through participatory, inclusive processes, among other key elements. Examples include women-led solar energy cooperatives and community-owned micro-hydropower systems, where the communities set tariffs to ensure energy access and fund system maintenance and repair. These projects not only provide sustainable energy but also ensure that decision-making power rests with the communities themselves.

The push for feminist climate finance is not new. Years of feminist advocacy and technical analysis have influenced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the largest multilateral climate fund. At the climate negotiations, WEDO coordinates with the Women and Gender Constituency to engage in workshops, draft submissions, propose text, and advocate for gender-responsive language in the text and processes. WEDO also works with the GCF observer network of civil society organizations, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities to analyze policy proposals and examine the design and implementation of funded projects, anticipated to benefit 1 billion people in over 100 countries.

WEDO’s work has highlighted how women’s organizations can engage in these spaces, from navigating the limited opportunities that multilateral climate funds offer to championing a women’s rights perspective in the GCF. Our research has also analyzed how the climate finance projects of these multilateral climate funds could be designed, implemented, and monitored with stronger integration of gender equality. Through the Feminist Action Nexus for Economic and Climate Justice, WEDO is also examining macro-trends in global finance, including the connections between debt, tax systems, and the availability of climate finance. This work is crucial in understanding how systemic economic issues impact the flow of climate funds from the Global North to the Majority World.

Transforming Systems, Not Just Adding Gender to the Mix

Feminist climate finance is about more than just adding a gender dimension to existing finance or project structures. It advocates for a complete transformation of the climate finance architecture. The current system often excludes the very people who are most affected by climate change—grassroots women’s groups, Indigenous Peoples, and gender-diverse people working on the frontlines of climate action—who face steep barriers to accessing climate finance. The Women and Gender Constituency’s Gender Just Climate Solutions (GJCS) Awards highlights the climate leadership of these groups around the world.

Grant-based funding needs to flow directly to local groups, with flexible, core, and multi-year funding as the ideal to allow locally-led solutions to thrive. As we advocate for that reality, WEDO provides small-scale regranting that examines feminist funding practices and highlights effective but underfunded solutions through the GJCS Scale Fund. The GJCS Scale Fund also serves as a platform for advocating for more accessible, flexible, and sustained funding.

A significant element of feminist climate finance is calling out “false solutions” that fail to address the root causes of climate change such as extractive capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, and militarism. False solutions are initiatives like geoengineering, which manipulates the environment on a large scale with uncertain consequences and without Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. Other approaches are also antithetical to addressing the climate crisis, such as debt-based finance (delivered through loans), as they place an additional burden on countries already struggling with the impacts of climate change and years of wealth extraction from the Global North.

Conclusion

Delivering feminist climate finance is not only about allocating money to gender equality but also challenging us to change how we think about and approach both finance and climate solutions. By prioritizing gender equality, human rights, accountability, and transparency, feminist climate finance addresses the climate crisis in a way that benefits everyone, especially those most impacted and marginalized, and creates a healthier planet.

For more insights, check out WEDO's Feminist Climate Finance Brief for Canada, an example of our bilateral advocacy bringing together these multiple dimensions of feminist climate finance.

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