Net zero emissions development is the frame for global development, our futures depend on it. The world needs to be on a trajectory to net zero carbon emissions by mid-century to meet the 1.5oC temperature goal of the Paris Agreement, but is far off track.

Meanwhile, progressing gender equality is a human right and is more pressing than ever. The Covid-19 pandemic set back progress on gender equality – driving a deeper development gap between women and men.* While this setback has been largely recovered, headway on gender equality in economic participation and opportunity, education, health, survival, and political empowerment has barely edged forward, on global average, in the past two decades. 

For social justice, as well as for environmental and economic sustainability reasons, action on gender equality and climate change must both accelerate massively. The goals are synergistic. Pursuing them intentionally in tandem will achieve more than a narrow focus on either gender equality or climate change alone.

The Gender Equality in a Low Carbon World (GLOW) programme is an action research programme, 2021-24, which investigates opportunities for women’s economic empowerment in low-carbon transitions across 12 projects in 17 countries. Its projects target the land use sectors (agriculture, agroforestry and forestry), the blue economy and eco-tourism. Elements of the programme look at the application of biocircular economy principles to reuse organic wastes, reduce emissions and enhance livelihoods. This report summarises learning from GLOW on common challenges and promising solutions for advancing women’s empowerment in the transitions in these sectors.

GLOW projects identified and pursued four main routes for empowering women while driving mitigation and adaptation in the natural resource-based sectors. The routes are: 

  1.  Making women’s existing economic activities more productive and climate-smart: Introducing climate-resilient and low-carbon production methods to increase efficiency and improve the yield size and reliability of revenues from agriculture, forest, aquaculture and ecotourism activities in which women are already involved. Examples of climate-smart methods introduced to improve women workers’ productivity and reduce menial aspects of their work include regenerative agriculture methods that enrich the organic content of soils to boost yields; introducing solar-powered irrigation with a minimal carbon footprint to increase yields and reduce women’s workloads; and increasing water use efficiency, to maintain production even during times of water stress.
  2. Helping women enter male-dominated activities while also climate mainstreaming those activities and sectors: Identifying and progressing activities in existing sectors and value chains that are traditionally male-dominated (previously had a glass ceiling). This is about capacity development activities targeted at women entrants into various sectors. It is also about interventions aimed at power-holders including male family and community members, government and business leaders to cultivate their support for women’s entry into these jobs while simultaneously introducing climate-smart measures. An example is identifying specific entry points for women in different parts of the mango value chain in Malawi to increase their income. This category describes simultaneous gender mainstreaming and climate mainstreaming into development policies, programmes and business models; and many of the learnings arose in this category.
  3. Supporting women to consolidate business models for their existing low-carbon and climate-resilient economic activities: Helping women to strengthen the financial viability of and formalise (make more secure) the work they are already doing that is inherently low-carbon and climate-resilient. This involves assisting women to establish their own enterprises and identifying and growing markets for their goods and services. Examples include the formalisation of women-led non-timber forest product enterprises in Nepal and Bolivian women seeking to develop high-value, low-impact cultural, scientific tourism, and community-based eco-tourism businesses.
  4. Supporting women to access completely new low-carbon, climate-resilient jobs that employ emergent technologies and production systems: Ensuring women benefit from new technologies and production systems that are emerging. Many technologies are designed to reuse and recycle materials and to deliver high water, energy and production efficiency by creating closed-loop systems, such as hydroponics and aquaponics. This entry point is about identifying opportunities to make these new and inherently climate-smart production systems gender-equitable from the outset. The GLOW studies principally involved reusing and recycling organic materials in the biocircular economy. Some of these technologies have lesser barriers to entry for women than conventional production systems. For example, they tend to require smaller land footprints (such as black soldier fly farming) or relatively low start-up costs that would benefit women entrepreneurs, who face discrimination and structural disadvantages in accessing land and capital.

From these four main routes to low-carbon transition and women’s economic empowerment, we identified the following main findings and recommendations:

In the natural resource-based sectors where GLOW is focused, it is not easy, practical, nor desirable to separate the ‘low-carbon’ from the ‘climate-resilient’. The opportunity is to combine emissions avoidance with heightened resilience to climate shocks and stresses. Thus, the researchers extended their brief on climate change mitigation to look simultaneously at adaptation.

Climate action must be rights-based and locally appropriate. Gender norms are social constructs shaped by local cultural beliefs and practices (such as shaping opportunities for women based on their age, marital status, differing physical and intellectual abilities, and ethnic and caste affiliation). It is well established that climate change adaptation should be locally-led and locally-informed. GLOW research also highlights the importance from a gender perspective of tailoring climate change mitigation action to local contexts. Social norms shape women’s ability to adopt new practices, access new jobs, skills and information, and shape women’s mobility, all of which are relevant to mitigation action.

Climate initiatives can address and reduce discriminatory barriers for women, with positive spillover benefits into other areas of women’s lives.While tailoring to local circumstances is essential, local relevance must never be used as an excuse for discriminatory or harmful practices against women which breach their rights. Indeed, the opposite: climate initiatives can and should be intentionally designed to confront and change damaging gender biases for the better.

Women’s contributions matter. Women’s full, equitable, and meaningful involvement in decision-making, design, implementation, and evaluation of climate initiatives makes a material difference in the effectiveness and sustainability of initiatives.

Women’s access to emergent low-carbon, climate-resilient technologies drives innovation and learning. Women’s equitable participation in green jobs deploying emergent climate-smart technologies, such as black soldier fly farming and aquaponics, drives faster and more comprehensive institutional learning, than if women were excluded. 

Some groups of women are guardians of knowledge and practices that are inherently low-carbon, climate-resilient and ecologically sustainable. These women do not necessarily need upskilling but can benefit from opportunities to consolidate peer learning among themselves. This can enable them to secure reliable markets for their products and influence others in their sector regarding their sustainable practices. Intermediary organisations can have roles to play, as demonstrated by GLOW researchers who partnered with Indigenous and lower-caste women in rural Nepal to enhance the business prospects of their ecologically sustainable enterprises, co-document their inspiring stories and facilitate their participation in broader advocacy and trading platforms. In some contexts, existing women-led production practices may also significantly enhance ecosystem integrity and biodiversity, as observed anecdotally by GLOW researchers and especially in locations managed by Indigenous women. Biodiversity surveying and monitoring is a gap that could be better integrated in future studies.

There are many well-established measures of good ‘gender and development practice’ that apply equally to, or can be adapted for, low-carbon, climate-resilient development initiatives.These well-known good practices should not be overlooked because of a tunnel-vision focus on technological aspects of emissions reduction. These aspects are fundamental to achieving progress on climate action and gender equality, and ensuring that the synergies between gender and climate domains are achieved:

  • Address women’s under-representation in public policy-making and collective decision-making by increasing the representation of women and boosting their capabilities to fulfil these roles, including by:
    • Strengthening women’s climate literacy and capacity in the technical low-carbon, climate-resilient aspects of production, logistics, marketing and other value chain activities.    
    • Strengthening the capacity of women in management and decision-making roles through improved financial literacy and business skills.  
    • Strengthening women’s self-confidence and capacity for policy engagement with key stakeholders through co-producing documentary evidence and participating in deliberative public dialogues. 
  • Increase women’s uptake of decent, low-carbon, climate-resilient jobs, including by:
    • Mapping the gaps and potentials for women’s participation in a wide range of activities along low-carbon, climate-resilient value chains, identifying gender-specific barriers to entry at each stage and devising and funding gender-specific activities to address barriers and enable women’s participation.
    • Making alliances with power-holders to increase women’s influence and sphere of activity into low-carbon, climate-resilient work.
    • Encouraging gender champions, role models and mentors in low-carbon, climate-resilient education, skills training and work.
  • Increase women’s access to productive assets for low-carbon, climate-resilient economic transitions, including by:
    • Supporting collective actions by women to advocate for, secure and pool productive assets, including cash, land and inputs (such as greater purchasing power, fundraising power, access to information as a group than as individuals).
    • Exploring how emergent low-carbon, climate-resilient technologies and associated new production modes, such as hydroponics, may be particularly suitable for women workers and entrepreneurs, because these modes have inherently small land footprints and/or upfront capital requirements. This means the barriers to women’s entry may be less, under present, gender-unequal circumstances.  
  • Increase women’s access to markets for sustainably-produced goods and services, including by:
    • Leveraging the potential for information and communication technologies (ICT) including smartphones and digital platforms, to give women workers and entrepreneurs far greater access to weather and climate information (for climate-resilient production, processing, storage and distribution) and information about sustainable inputs and market conditions for trading.
  • Capitalise on many women’s high degree of initiative, but ensure that the most marginalised women are not left behind, including by:
    • Tailoring capacity development to specific groups of women based on their intended life trajectories and the sociocultural opportunities and constraints they are likely to face, for example, by empowering young, unmarried women with technical, life and business skills that will ‘travel well’ with them when they expect to marry and move location.
    • Designing and implementing social protection supports for the poorest and most heavily disadvantaged women who do not have the wherewithal to participate immediately in training and capacity development and/or whose healthcare needs are unmet. More extended periods of intervention involving partnerships among government agencies, community-based organisations and/or non-governmental organisations (NGOs) may be desirable or necessary (and may also become necessary in response to sudden climate shocks) to enable them to meet basic survival needs. The longer-term intention would be to support women to graduate from poverty into more stable livelihoods and higher living standards.
  • Strengthen enabling policies and their implementation, including by:
    • Strengthening the gender and social equity dimensions of climate policies and of relevant sectoral and economic policies (such as land restoration, environmental protection, fisheries and maritime policies), recognising that they may not integrate gender rights legislation sufficiently nor make appropriate provision for different social groups (such as by age, ability, as well as gender) to benefit from low-carbon, climate-resilient transitions.
    • Getting funding into the hands of women entrepreneurs to accelerate their leadership and effectiveness in transitions (together with the suite of capability-strengthening measures discussed earlier).
    • Fostering partnerships of women’s groups, women-led and women-dominated enterprises with intermediary organisations to pool data, advance gender-related advocacy and transparency, and accelerate women-friendly low-carbon business opportunities.
    • Strengthening the gender capacity of local government personnel: while gender sensitivity, awareness and commitment to action is important in all areas of government, the GLOW projects found particular gaps at the local level, suggesting that targeted gender training is needed for local officials who have much operational discretion that can be used for or against women’s and disadvantaged people’s benefit.
  • Address unpaid and heavily underpaid work as an intrinsic part of climate action, including by promoting low-carbon and climate-resilient technologies that reduce workers’ drudgery, whether in the care and subsistence realms or in smallholder agriculture, agroforestry and blue economy sectors more generally.

In each country, these recommendations apply to governments’ strategies and plans for ‘just transitions,’ which may include preferential investment for entirely new sectors and industries. The recommendations are also highly relevant to international dialogues and negotiations on just transitions in the UNFCCC and elsewhere.

Action across the above dimensions will deliver the climate and gender justice we want to see in the world. People currently left behind in economically vulnerable, climate-vulnerable, low-productivity and insecure jobs will have decent work and new leadership opportunities that raise their capabilities and well-being. Women will be equally co-leading and benefiting from transitions to a net-zero, climate-resilient future.

*We recognise that gender is a spectrum, encompassing people with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). This report and the research on which it is based has focused particularly on relations between women and men.