For the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), just transition begins not just with carbon, but with resilience – the daily struggle of poor women to withstand the heatwaves, floods and crop failures already battering their lives. Climate shocks that are stripping poor women not only of income, but of dignity.
Representing 3.2 million informal workers across 18 states – street vendors, waste pickers, construction labourers, home-based producers and small farmers – SEWA has spent more than five decades fighting for rights and recognition.
“This is what ‘just transition’ must mean for us,” says Mansi Shah, senior coordinator at SEWA. “It is not only about future green jobs or phasing out polluting industries. For women workers on the frontlines, it is about surviving heatwaves, floods and crop failures today – and doing so with dignity.”
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SEWA’s own surveys underline the urgency. More than 90% of women workers report livelihood losses from climate shocks, while 74% say their children’s education has been disrupted. Over 80% of households face water insecurity, 62% food insecurity, and nearly 40% report mental health impacts.
“When people talk about adaptation or resilience, it sounds abstract,” Shah says. “For our members, it means the difference between feeding your children and selling your dignity.”
“On one side, hungry children. On the other, her respect”
One member – a smallholder farmer – told SEWA organisers what happened when a prolonged heatwave dried her fields and wiped out any possible work as an agricultural labourer. With children to feed and no savings, she went to a local moneylender.
The terms were brutal: extortionate interest and demands for sexual favours.
“She had to choose between her children’s hunger and her own respect,” Shah says. “That is the kind of choice no woman should ever face. But climate change is forcing it every day.”
By chance, the woman had been enrolled in SEWA’s pilot parametric heat insurance scheme – designed to trigger automatic payouts when temperatures cross preset thresholds, providing fast, predictable relief when heat destroys livelihoods. On the very day she faced the moneylender, the insurance activated and 1,800 rupees (about $20) landed in her account – enough to buy food for two weeks, enough to walk away.
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Women-led solutions prove just transition works
For Meenaben, a SEWA smallholder in Kutch district, the blow came from unseasonal rain and hail. Her 1.5-acre rain-fed millet crop, almost ready for harvest – and crucial fodder for her cattle – was shredded overnight.
“Government relief can take months to reach a village,” Shah explains. “So women like Meenaben are pushed toward debt – often predatory – just to survive the gap.”
SEWA’s answer is speed and self-help. Through its Livelihood Recovery & Resilience Fund (LRRF) – a blended pool seeded by one day’s wage per member per month, matched by philanthropy – women can access rapid loans within 14 days of a climate shock, long before state compensation arrives. The fund kept Meenaben’s household afloat, paid for inputs for the next sowing, and avoided a spiral into debt.
“We can’t wait for others to save us,” says Shah. “So SEWA women build their own safety nets – and get back to work.”
From Gujarat to the Global South
After piloting its member-owned LRRF a decade ago, SEWA shared its results at a global women leaders’ meeting in 2023 with Secretary Hillary Clinton, Ambassador Melanne Verveer and women’s organisations from Africa and Latin America. The message was clear: women workers across the Global South face the same shocks and the same finance gap.
On the strength of that model, SEWA partnered with the Clinton Global Initiative to launch the Global Climate Resilience Facility (GCRF) in February 2024. Its framework is complete and fundraising is underway. Once capitalised, it will support frontline women’s organisations to run LRRF-style funds, expand parametric insurance, and scale women-led adaptation and clean-energy solutions across the Global South.
From rural daughter to solar entrepreneur
If these stories show the cost of climate shocks, Payalben Munjpura’s shows what investment unlocks.
Payalben grew up in a village of 250 households in Surendranagar district. Her father was an electrician. Like most rural daughters, she was expected to stay indoors – until SEWA persuaded her parents to let her train as a solar PV technician.
She completed a three-month course and certification, then formed a team of four. Drawing on her father’s skills, she brought him into the enterprise, saving costs and rooting the work in local expertise. Together, they now install rooftop solar systems in nearby villages through India’s new PM Surya Ghar scheme, which offers households subsidies covering up to 60% of installation costs.
Her income has transformed the family: she helped reclaim their mortgaged farm, paid for her younger brother’s education, and rebuilt their home.
“Women are always seen as energy users,” Shah says. “Payalben shows they can be owners, managers and distributors. If skills are brought to their doorstep, women will turn the climate crisis into opportunity.”
The women-led solutions already in motion
SEWA’s members are not waiting for policy promises – they are already building resilience from the ground up. Through its Building Cleaner Skies campaign, SEWA links local experience with a broader strategy of women-led adaptation.
Its Climate School turns climate science into simple visual lessons, training grassroots leaders as climate educators. Its Green Villages initiatives bring clean cooking, biogas, drip irrigation and rooftop solar – all managed by women handling finance, vendors and repairs.
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The movement also nurtures young women climate entrepreneurs who deliver adaptation technologies and green livelihoods. And when shocks hit, SEWA’s insurance and finance schemes move faster than the state, trigger quick payouts and provide loans within 14 days.
“These are not abstract pilots,” says Shah. “They are working now, in villages across Gujarat. The problem is not solutions. The problem is finance.”
Lessons for COP30
A just transition must also confront the realities of climate impacts. For informal women workers, it is not about distant promises of green jobs, but about surviving the effects of warming now – and building social protection systems that can secure their livelihoods.
SEWA’s experience shows that women-led action works. From grassroots insurance schemes to rooftop solar enterprises, women are already designing and scaling climate solutions that protect both their income and dignity.
To take these efforts further, finance for just transition policies must be deployed – and made accessible to women on the frontlines. The Belém Action Mechanism (BAM) for a Global Just Transition – proposed by civil society as a key deliverable for COP30 – could help bridge that gap by aligning governments, international institutions and community movements, creating clearer pathways for funding and technical support to reach grassroots initiatives directly.
But whatever happens in Belém this November, for millions of women like SEWA’s members, the transition has already begun.
The post For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity appeared first on Climate Home News.
For Indian women workers, a just transition means surviving climate impacts with dignity
In the thick of the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in 2024, the UN climate talks were rattled by what can only be described as a major PR disaster. The BBC, Reuters and The Guardian all carried headlines, attributed to leading climate policy experts, that the COPs were “no longer fit for purpose”.
The articles outlined a series of reforms called for in an open letter signed by 22 eminent scientists and politicians, including a former UN secretary-general and previous UN climate chief, with a further 150 lending their support. The headlines shook confidence in the COP process, just as governments were wrestling over a new climate finance goal.
The Club of Rome – which handled the media relations for the letter – hurried to say that its “constructive, supportive ideas” had been “misinterpreted”. Negotiators kept calm(ish) and carried on, in the end landing the finance goal after some high-stakes drama on the final day.
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To my surprise, when I went back this week to read the letter again, I could not find the offending line about the COPs not being fit for purpose. The Club of Rome has yet to respond to my query about its disappearance.
Whatever happened to the wording, that sentiment has been widely shared. COPs have ballooned in size while the importance of their outcomes seems to have diminished since the 2015 Paris Agreement (with the exception of the 2023 COP in Dubai where countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems).
The same on the surface
Two years on from those painful headlines in Baku, has anything changed for the better? You might be forgiven for thinking not. Official decisions are still made by consensus rather than the majority voting some have called for to stop blockers.
Tens of thousands of officials, activists and business execs still scurry around the halls to an ever-growing list of side events, roundtables and dialogues, while deals still come down to rows, all-nighters and jargon-filled texts adopted to rounds of applause.
But it would not be true to say that COPs have completely failed to respond to the very real need to translate the words of the Paris Agreement into action in the outside world.
Global warming is projected to be around 1.3C lower this century than it would have been if the world had not committed to tackle the climate crisis under that accord. Developing countries have a valued space at COPs in which their voices have equal weight in decision-making, unlike in many other international fora. And most importantly, perhaps, there has been a subtle shift, tipping the balance away from negotiating towards doing.
Brazil branded last year’s summit in Belém as the “COP of Implementation”, corralling the sprawling Action Agenda into six axes. This was a bid to impose some structure on the mushrooming efforts between governments, UN agencies, cities, businesses and civil society to set targets and spur faster results on their pet issues, from methane emissions to health and adaptation in conflict zones. COP30 alone saw the launch of 120 “plans to accelerate solutions”.
COP30 roadmaps off the cuff
Meanwhile, as the formal negotiations drew to a close, it was clear that consensus decision-making was evolving into something a little more improvised.
With only around half of all countries on board with the idea of a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago announced his team would put one together over the coming year, along with another on how to meet a global goal to halt deforestation by 2030. Those roadmaps will be launched next week, presented and discussed at COP31, though it’s still unclear whether or how they’ll be incorporated into the formal negotiating agenda.
Some leading policy-makers don’t think that matters too much. Speaking to journalists before the Antalya summit, COP30 CEO Ana Toni and Dutch climate minister Stientje van Veldhoven said “coalitions of the willing” can move ahead without needing consensus from the COPs. This, they said, was evident this year at the first global conference on TAFF, co-chaired by van Veldhoven and attended by 60 countries.
“Consensus or no-consensus in the general COP doesn’t make a difference for the choices I have to make in my country to get my country to phase out fossil fuels,” said the Dutch minister. The Netherlands recently became one of the first to publish a national TAFF plan.
COP31 banks on flagship voluntary initiatives
This thinking has permeated the management and expected outcomes of this year’s COP too. Earlier this year, Türkiye, supported by international energy agencies, floated the idea of a voluntary goal to boost electrification to 35% of the world’s final energy consumption by 2035 – and this is now being touted as one of the main results to be expected from Antalya.
Türkiye is also championing a pledge on AI and climate, while co-host Australia is pushing to ease access to climate finance for least developed countries and small island states.
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None of these needs consensus. But with a political cover decision already in the works, as trailed by the COP presidents, they – and perhaps the fossil fuel roadmap – may find a home in the official text if language acceptable to most can be found, giving them them additional weight.
UNFCCC reform process in the shadows
Formal reform is underway too, if quietly. UN climate chief Simon Stiell is leading a review informed by ongoing consultations with a group of 15 well-respected climate policy experts, three of whom signed the open letter in 2024.
Among them is leading Swedish climate and sustainability scientist Johan Rockström who has strong ideas about how to make COPs function better, including a switch to majority voting. He told the same press briefing nothing stands in the way of this, because the rules of procedure for making decisions at COPs have never been formally agreed.
Still, to get away from the default setting of consensus would require agreement on a new system that may be impossible to achieve given the rise in bullying tactics by fossil fuel heavyweights.
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The deliberations with the high-level policy gurus, as reflected in a summary of June’s session in Bonn, largely echo what’s already happening organically, calling for stronger partnerships and accountability both in and between the Action Agenda and negotiations. It doesn’t mention voting.
A general overview of the reform exercise says that “improving and optimizing the [UN climate] process over the medium to long term… will be critical to fostering trust, enhancing collaboration, and catalyzing increased ambition”.
In the short term, don’t hold your breath for anything concrete on reform at COP31 but watch for signs in what ends up dominating the headlines from Türkiye.
The post Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines appeared first on Climate Home News.
Editor’s Desk: COP reform is happening quietly, behind the headlines
With the COP31 climate summit in Turkey looming, all eyes are on China to see what the country will push for in the negotiations.
At COP30 last year, China helped to secure a “dialogue” on climate-related “unilateral trade measures”, as well as a two-year “work programme” concerning climate finance.
The nation also championed south-south cooperation throughout the conference and co-led a summit on methane, alongside Brazil and the UK.
In a recent press conference, China’s environment vice-minister Li Gao noted the need to “uphold multilateralism” and send a “clear political signal” that the global community is united around climate action.