Gender, power and the climate test at cop30

Gender, power and the climate test at cop30 | Photo: Artem Kovalev

Climate change has never been gender-neutral. Across disasters, droughts and energy transitions, women and girls face higher exposure, fewer resources and weaker decision-making power, even as they drive resilience in farms, households and local markets. New evidence puts numbers to this imbalance: rural female-headed households lose about 8% more income to heat stress than male-headed ones, with billions in annual losses across poorer countries. Projections suggest up to 158 million more women and girls could be pushed into poverty by 2050 if warming stays on its current path. These facts make the moment in Belém, Brazil, 10–21 November 2025, unusually consequential, because negotiators are shaping a new gender action plan to guide the coming decade.

The gender agenda under the global climate convention sits within an institutional framework known as the enhanced Lima work programme on gender, recently extended for ten years, with instructions to adopt a fresh action plan at COP30. The plan is expected to build on five priority areas, from knowledge and coherence to participation, implementation and accountability. Week one in Belém delivered a bracket-heavy draft, underscoring how contested the details remain.

Who counts as “gender” is not a semantic sideshow. Some Parties want the plan to refer only to women and girls, while others argue for language that includes gender-diverse people and “all in their diversity”. The outcome will influence who benefits from programmes, who can be counted in datasets and who is eligible for leadership quotas. The stakes are visible in the mobilisation around a new Global Statement urging inclusive participation, data and finance, now endorsed by the EU and partners.

Finance and accountability

Money, inevitably, is the fulcrum. While donors report that around 43% of adaptation funding in 2021 also had a gender-equality objective, 40% of adaptation finance was not screened for gender at all. Where gender is included, only a sliver is truly gender-responsive in design, with assessments suggesting just 2–4% of tracked public adaptation flows meet that bar. Meanwhile, climate finance remains geographically skewed, with 54% of adaptation money going to only ten countries. Without ring-fenced resources and comparable metrics, progress will remain patchy.

Accountability is the other missing rail. The new plan needs clear indicators and disclosure standards that governments and funds cannot sidestep: for example, the share of climate finance reaching women-led organisations, the percentage of projects with sex-disaggregated results frameworks, and the proportion of women in climate-relevant leadership roles. Calls from civil society and research groups emphasise building national capacity to collect and use such data, especially in adaptation where local outcomes matter most.

From policy to practice

The hardest questions are practical. Energy access is a case in point: women remain under-represented in energy decision-making and poorly served by data systems, hampering solutions from clean cooking to off-grid solar. A credible plan would back sex-disaggregated energy data, invest in women’s enterprises along clean-energy value chains, and tie finance to measurable social outcomes.

Agriculture tells a similar story. When heatwaves or floods strike, women often face steeper income losses and fewer safety nets, yet they are pivotal to resilient farming and food systems. Local women’s groups, when funded, improve targeting and uptake of climate services. The gap is that very little finance reaches them directly.

What is on the table in Belém

·       Institutional framework: keep the extended programme and adopt a refreshed GAP aligned to the five established priority areas, with a mandate to mainstream gender across all negotiating tracks.

·       Ambition signals: agencies and many governments call the moment “transformative”, urging that gender move from add-on to core design principle, with robust participation, finance and data.

·       Contentious points: definition of gender, resourcing versus integration, and teeth for monitoring. The live text reportedly remains crowded with brackets around inclusion language and accountability hooks.

The investigative questions that matter

1.     Hidden definition battle: which delegations are pressing for narrow terminology and why, and how would that shape eligibility for programmes and datasets going forward? Track edits in successive drafts and compare with national positions.

2.     Money talks, or does not: follow the finance. What share of bilateral and multilateral flows carries a principal gender objective, and how much reaches women-led implementers on the ground? DAC markers show increases in integration but stagnation in principal targeting.

3.     From policy to village: choose a low- or middle-income country and test whether its NDC and adaptation plans budget for gender outcomes, include sex-disaggregated indicators and name responsible agencies. Compare planned actions with realities in rural cooperatives or informal settlements.

4.     Data blind spots: energy, agriculture and disaster risk systems still lack consistent sex-disaggregated data. Where governments collect it, programmes improve. Where they do not, leakage and tokenism persist.

5.     Power and participation: count who sits at the negotiating tables, fund boards and national steering committees, and whether women delegates hold agenda-shaping roles rather than observer badges. Cross-check with the draft plan’s participation targets.

What would success look like

A credible gender-responsive outcome in Belém would do three simple, hard things. First, set clear definitions that protect inclusion while giving administrators workable guidance. Second, commit ring-fenced climate finance for gender outcomes, with a minimum share of adaptation funds required to demonstrate principal gender objectives and to channel a set proportion to local women-led organisations. Third, mandate comparable indicators and open reporting, including sex-disaggregated results and independent verification, so citizens and auditors can follow the money and the outcomes.

Anything less leaves the plan vulnerable to the same problems that dogged earlier efforts, where participation was celebrated but budgets and metrics lagged behind. The climate crisis is testing whether institutions can match rhetoric with architecture, and whether power can be shared with those who turn policies into real-world resilience.

Further reading and resources

·       Climate convention gender work programme and review timeline. (unfccc.int)

·       Global Statement on gender equality and climate action at COP30. (Climate Action)

·       Evidence on gendered climate impacts and poverty risks. (unwomen.org)

·       Accountability and finance insights from civil society and research. (WEDO)

·       Energy data and gender, practical pathways from SEforALL. (Sustainable Energy for All | SEforALL)

If the negotiators in Belém can anchor gender-responsive design, climate finance with teeth and measurable accountability, the plan agreed this month could help turn today’s uneven burdens into tomorrow’s shared resilience. If not, the world will keep asking women and girls to carry more of the load with fewer of the tools.