The Eighth GEF Assembly — the highest governing body of the Global Environment Facility — brought together representatives from 186 member countries to review policies and set strategic direction for global environmental finance.

Alongside partners, women's rights organizations, feminist advocates, Indigenous women, and grassroots collectives, WEDO participated in the Assembly as part of the GEF Women Caucus. The Caucus is a collective force working to ensure that gender equality, human rights, and the leadership of women and marginalized communities are central to the GEF's next phase of investments in climate, biodiversity, land, and sustainable development.

Over the past decade, feminist and gender advocates have engaged Parties to the UNFCCC, CBD, and UNCCD to adopt increasingly ambitious gender commitments that recognize women not only as beneficiaries but also as rights-holders, knowledge-holders, leaders, and implementers of environmental action.

Although the UNFCCC, CBD, and UNCCD have adopted important gender commitments, implementation remains constrained by inadequate and inconsistent funding. The gap between commitment and resources is not a technical oversight — it is a political choice, and one that can be made differently.

At a side event on Financing Gender Action Plans, I delivered a keynote making the case for exactly that. The GEF, as the financial mechanism for multiple multilateral environmental agreements, is uniquely positioned to do more than fund individual projects. It can build coherence across convention processes, align Gender Action Plan implementation at the country level, and support integrated approaches that advance climate, biodiversity, and land objectives simultaneously. This makes it a critical bridge between global commitments and coordinated action on the ground.

As I noted, specifically, we must move from gender integration to actually funding gender, and from fragmented, convention-by-convention implementation to coherent, cross-cutting actions that are critical to delivering effective, inclusive, and sustainable environmental outcomes.