As Parties prepare to adopt a new Gender Action Plan at COP30 in Belém, WEDO outlines how a coherent, action-oriented GAP can connect feminist analysis to concrete implementation and measurable impact.
By Mwanahamisi Singano & Claudia Rubio Giraldo
Our world today is built on systems that extract from both people and the planet, where the powerful few accumulate wealth while those most affected by inequality pay the price. To change these unjust realities, some argue that we must dismantle entire systems of exploitation and start anew; others insist on strategic, deliberate interventions that shift power within existing systems until change becomes irreversible. For some of us, we believe we must do both. Transformation requires both resistance and reconstruction: dismantling what perpetuates harm and reshaping what can still serve justice.
This is why we continue to engage in unjust spaces such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We refuse to cede the space of multilateralism to power politics. Instead, we engage to seed solidarity, to forge cracks in the architecture of power, where new seeds can take root, nurtured by feminist leadership and growing toward systemic change
At COP30, Parties are mandated to adopt a new Gender Action Plan (GAP) under the Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender. The GAP is not revolutionary on its own; it will not dismantle the fossil fuel regime or uproot patriarchy overnight, but it remains a vital tool to make gender equality central — not peripheral — to climate action. When designed with coherence, accountability, and ambition, the GAP could move us from commitments to collective implementation and measurable impact for people and planet.
Recognizing the limits and the opportunity of the GAP
It is important to begin by acknowledging the constraints that come with a UNFCCC Gender Action Plan. The climate change convention remains a highly politicized space, dominated by technical negotiations, procedural hurdles, power imbalances between the Global North and South, and a significant lack of accountability. As in most multilateral and national policy processes, commitments to gender equality often exist in the margins, treated as optional tick boxes or symbolic rather than integral to drive transformation. Thus, GAP success within the UNFCCC relies on the political will of parties and the resources they are willing to mobilize for implementation at international and national levels.
A number of national governments have adopted gender and climate policies, yet these often remain disconnected from the lived experiences of women, girls, and gender-diverse communities who face intersecting inequalities in their daily lives. Without accountability, the GAP risks becoming another ‘good to have’ document without tangible impact.
And yet, despite these limitations, dismissing the importance of adopting a renewed GAP at COP30 would be a mistake. As noted earlier, feminist movements have long recognized that transformation happens through both confrontation and co-creation. The GAP offers a strategic entry point for feminist organizing and analysis within climate policy spaces, one that can shape national priorities, guide resource allocation, and build cross-sectoral coherence between gender equality and climate action.
If done right, a renewed GAP could catalyze change across five key areas:
1. Strengthening coherence across policies and institutions.
A renewed GAP must ensure that gender equality is embedded across all aspects of climate governance. This means connecting the work of constituted bodies, such as finance, technology, and adaptation, to align with gender-responsive implementation.
Activities must drive a whole-of-society approach that links national climate commitments, such as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), with national gender equality strategies, biodiversity frameworks, and broader development strategies and actions. Too often, these processes exist in silos, leading to duplication and fragmentation. A coherent GAP can create the connective tissue that helps governments and institutions work toward shared, measurable objectives for gender and climate justice. It can also strengthen collaboration across the Rio Conventions and other relevant mechanisms to ensure consistent and inclusive implementation.
2. Ensuring meaningful and equitable participation.
The GAP must move beyond symbolic inclusion and enable the real redistribution of power toward full, equal, and meaningful participation of women in all their diversities. Activities can encourage and interrogate enabling environments at national and subnational levels through legal reforms, quotas, and participatory mechanisms — critical to ensure that those most affected have the power to shape policies, lead climate action, and hold institutions accountable.
This also requires creating and resourcing enabling environments for feminist movements, women’s rights organizations, and Indigenous women’s groups to influence decisions and lead climate solutions.
3. Addressing emerging intersections.
The GAP can open space to drive dialogue and learning on emerging issues at the intersection of gender and climate change, including sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender-based violence, and the role of care in delivering a just transition. Activities can convene key stakeholders and communities of practice, document national policy uptake and approaches, surface simple indicators of progress and gaps that countries can adapt to their contexts, and strengthen the evidence base so policy development is more responsive to lived realities.
4. Enhancing coordination and learning, powered by data and accountability.
The GAP should serve as a platform for coordination, shared learning, and timely reporting. Countries need support to exchange lessons and build capacity across environment, gender, finance, and planning ministries.
Decisions are only as good as the data that informs them. The new GAP has a potential to prioritize capacity strengthening for the production, analysis, and use of gender-disaggregated data at national, local, regional, and global levels. To date, many governments still lack the tools, resources, or expertise to collect data that captures the differentiated impacts of climate change on diverse communities, particularly rural women, Indigenous Peoples, and gender-diverse persons. Importantly, in many countries, the gap between national gender machineries and statistical institutions remains wide, limiting collaboration, knowledge exchange, and the integration of gender perspectives in data processes. GAP activities could foster stronger linkages between key actors and institutions across different points in the data ecosystem to promote cross-pollination, shared expertise, and more coherent, gender-responsive data systems. Investing in data systems that are robust, comparable, and scalable will enable policymakers to design evidence-based interventions that respond to fast-changing needs of communities in the context of climate emergency.
5. Aligning financing with community needs.
A plan without resources is merely a wish. GAP implementation must be supported by dedicated, predictable, and accessible finance. This includes not only integrating gender criteria in climate finance mechanisms but also channeling funds directly to women’s rights organizations and community-led initiatives as part of direct access. At present, less than three percent of climate finance reaches women’s rights organizations. This is not a funding gap; it is a justice gap. For the GAP to be transformative, it must create clear channels to ensure climate finance is gender responsive in the short term, and it must plant seeds that grow to challenge the patriarchal and neoliberal logic that governs global climate finance and call for redistributive mechanisms that shift power and resources to those leading transformative work on the ground.
From global frameworks to national action
Lastly, but critically important, the real measure of the GAP’s success will not be in the elegance of its wording but in its implementation at the national level. This is where feminist systems change must take root. Governments must translate and integrate GAP into national gender and climate commitments and plans, co-designed with civil society and local communities. These plans should include:
- Clear indicators and measurable outcomes aligned with national climate goals and gender equality strategies.
- Institutional capacity building for ministries of environment, gender, finance, and planning to work collaboratively.
- Accountability mechanisms that track progress transparently and allow for public scrutiny.
The GAP, which will be adopted in Belém at COP30, must go beyond “gender mainstreaming” and instead aim to create conditions towards gender transformative climate action, shifting underlying power dynamics and social norms that sustain inequality. To that end, governments and negotiators need to show up in Belém with political courage, an innovative mindset, and an unwavering commitment to justice.
