The international climate summit in Azerbaijan was never going to be an easy place to complete five years of hard-fought negotiations to strengthen gender equality in the sphere of climate action.
Embracing gender equality requires us to first recognise the distinct challenges that women in all their diversity face in the climate crisis; their historic exclusion from climate policymaking, project planning, and business; and the benefits of their inclusion.
But after strong pushback from some governments, we left the COP29 summit in Baku in November with a long road towards advancing transformative gender-just climate action.
We can at least be thankful that countries agreed on a 10-year extension of an initiative to advance gender balance and rights under the Paris Agreement and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This gives us space, as we progress through 2025, to plan long-term, impactful measures.
Anchors of progress
The COP29 decision underscores the need for meaningful and equal participation of women in shaping climate policies and actions.
It also emphasises the importance of gender- and age-disaggregated data to inform more effective gender-responsive climate strategies.
This data helps us understand the unique ways in which climate change affects women, men, and gender-diverse groups. It highlights the disparities in access to resources and exposure to risks, and demonstrates the critical roles women and marginalised groups play in environmental conservation and sustainability. It can therefore form the foundation for more equitable policies to address the needs of different genders, and promote their inclusion.
The COP29 decision also prioritises the need for gender-responsive finance, particularly for grassroots women’s organisations, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities.
This is fundamental, considering UN Women reports that in 2022, only 3 per cent of all official development assistance on climate had gender equality-related objectives. Ensuring gender equality therefore requires more inclusive and accessible ways of delivering climate finance to support grassroots groups that are helping women cope with and respond to climate change.
But even these building blocks of progress were hard-fought in Baku, and disappointing considering the gulf of work that lies ahead.
Missing words and the pushback
In the shadows of an Azerbaijan presidency that started by appointing an organising committee of 28 men in January, COP29 was a stark reminder of how far we have to go to achieve gender equality in leadership.
The optics at COP29 were bad from the start. After fractious preparatory negotiations over the year, some 90% of the 78 world leaders in attendance were men. Then came the pushback on gender rights, by states with deeply rooted patriarchal and petro-dominant influences.
Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and Egypt opposed references to gender, human rights, and diversity. They rejected efforts to expand the concept of gender equality beyond the binary of men and women, and to protect human rights. Their coordinated resistance, even to a largely voluntary decision, underscored the growing global movement against rights and gender diversity.
As a result, crucial words were omitted from the decision.
The absence of the word ‘diversity’, for instance, limits the agreement’s ability to channel support to women in different parts of the world facing different challenges.
What I face, as an educated, young woman living in Nigeria, is different from the challenges faced by my friend Kandie, an Indigenous woman living with disability in Kenya, or what my colleague, Frances, living in the United States faces.
The failure of international climate talks to recognise LGBTQ+ people means that an extremely diverse community is excluded, even though they face heightened risks such as legal and societal discrimination, and more cases of homelessness and poverty. For example, in Tonga, where climate change is fuelling intensifying cyclones, emergency shelters are often run by religious institutions that are hostile to certain gender identities.
Reference to gender-based violence was also dropped from earlier drafts of the COP decision, even though we know that the knock-on impacts of climate change, such as famine and unemployment, raise the risk of violence against women and girls.
The feminist fight ahead
Now we have 10 years to right the injustices faced by women and girls, and LGBTQ+ and gender-diverse people, as a result of the climate crisis.
This requires funding. The new commitment for wealthy countries to mobilise $300 billion per year of public and private finance by 2035 is too low and too late. It needs to be increased, and targeted towards the most at-risk groups, such as local and Indigenous communities.
We need representation in climate negotiations, starting by bringing more women and people from frontline communities into the meeting rooms.
We also need to fight back against the well-funded anti-gender movement. Women and girls around the world are being stripped of their rights, and it will only worsen under a second Trump presidency.
And finally, we need to embrace our strength in diversity and keep showing up together. The climate justice movement needs to work hand-in-hand with other social movements to defend our collective rights.
Zainab Yunusa is a feminist activist and gender and development practitioner committed to advancing women’s and girls’ rights and tackling the injustice of climate change. She is based in Nigeria.
