The climate crisis is the most pressing issue of our times as global temperatures rise to critical levels, impeding progress on gender equality. Women, girls, and gender-diverse people are mobilizing to demand that their voices be heard in decision-making on climate policy.
UN Women has embarked on an ambitious programme of work that will make the case that public action based on a framework of feminist climate justice holds the key to addressing these challenges.
The programme of work will include the development of a conceptual framework on feminist climate justice, innovative data analysis on the impacts of climate change on women’s rights and gender equality, and robust evidence on how cross-sectoral policies can be leveraged to mitigate these impacts and ensure a gender-just transition to environmental sustainability. It will also map the approaches needed to finance these policies and identify the routes to translating social mobilization into transformative, accountable, and sustainable change.
Another important component of this programme will be the development of a global policy scorecard on gender and climate that compiles and analyses government action on mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction and management from a gender perspective. As well as feeding into the evidence base for the report, the scorecard will be made available as a standalone policy tool for use by advocates to hold policymakers to account for progress on their gender equality commitments.
The vision for feminist climate justice is of a world in which everyone can enjoy the full range of human rights, free from discrimination, and flourish on a planet that is healthy and sustainable. With this conceptual framework, UN Women aims to open space for discussion of feminist alternatives to the status quo and to inform the next edition of its flagship report, “Progress of the world’s women”, on gender equality in the age of climate crisis.
The ninth edition of this Report will be published in 2026 and will provide a comprehensive analysis of two of the most pressing challenges facing the world today: the rapidly accelerating heating of the planet and the stalled progress for the world’s women and girls.