Alexandria Gordon is manager of policy and development at the Women’s Environment & Development Organization) and Demet Intepe, PhD, is a climate adaptation and resilience expert with Practical Action.
If the world genuinely intends to help people adapt to climate change, including women cannot be treated as optional. It must be the starting point for every plan and policy.
Across the Global South, climate impacts are already reshaping daily life. Floods, droughts and heatwaves are destroying homes, crops and livelihoods.
Evidence consistently shows that when women and girls participate fully in adaptation efforts, entire societies benefit. Putting gender at the centre makes adaptation stronger, more equitable, and more sustainable.
COP30 was expected to cement this understanding. Touted as “the COP of Adaptation,” it fell far short. Once again, decisions were made without meaningful consideration for the people already facing the harshest climate impacts. Communities trying to protect their homes, harvests and livelihoods are still denied the resources and action they urgently need.
“Coordinated backlash”: Activists say COP30 gender spat reflects wider threat
The UN Environment Programme’s annual Adaptation Gap Report outlines the scale of investment required to address escalating climate risks. What remains missing is political will – the willingness to respond to communities already facing loss, and to acknowledge that adaptation fails without women because it ignores half the knowledge and leadership societies depend on.
Women are central to decisions about land, food, water, care and community organising on farms, in markets, in local government, cooperatives or social movements. When their rights, voices and priorities are excluded, policies address only part of the risk, funding bypasses those best placed to use it, and solutions fail to reflect how communities actually adapt.
Women leading adaptation on the ground
Purnima Rani Biswas in Bangladesh rebuilt her livelihood after Cyclone Amphan devastated her village in 2020. When floodwaters finally receded, she and her community received training to restore their fields and strengthen resilience. Purnima began growing crops on elevated dykes above future flood levels.
Her success inspired neighbours, proving that farming on shifting, flood‑prone land is possible. Recovery has been slow, but the community now believes adaptation is achievable.
Saraswati Sonar, chair of her local Community Disaster Management Committee in Nepal, plays a crucial role in keeping her community safe. She regularly contacts government hotlines for weather updates and alerts elderly people, pregnant women, and families with young children when evacuation is necessary. Her leadership ensures timely, life‑saving action.
These examples show that women are not passive victims of climate change - they are active agents of resilience.
What gender‑responsive adaptation really means
Language shapes action. Terms like “gender‑sensitive” often become symbolic rather than transformative. “Gender‑responsive,” however, demands concrete action. It means:
- Integrating gender as a priority across planning, budgeting, implementation, and monitoring
- Recognising unequal access to land, income, technology, mobility and decision‑making, and how these shape people’s ability to adapt
- Acknowledging who grows food, collects water, rebuilds homes, and who is left behind during crises.
Gender-responsive adaptation is not about elevating women above others. It is about making climate policy effective. Without women, climate action fails – and risks deepening existing inequalities rather than reducing vulnerability.
Yet at COP30, some governments resisted the term “gender-responsive,” preferring weaker language that allows them to avoid meaningful commitments to equity and justice.
What COP30 achieved and where it fell short
Despite major shortcomings, COP30 delivered a few important steps for gender and adaptation. A new Gender Action Plan was adopted, intended to help mainstream gender across national plans and global policies. Its impact will depend on whether governments implement it meaningfully.
Under the Global Goal on Adaptation, countries adopted 59 indicators to track progress, including a gender-specific indicator. This is a significant step forward: for the first time, global reporting will show whether national adaptation policies are genuinely gender-responsive.
Tripling adaptation finance is just the start – delivery is what matters
However, progress was uneven. National Adaptation Plans moved in the wrong direction, with gender commitments weakened and made conditional “only when applicable”, rather than central. This risks sidelining gender entirely unless civil society holds governments to account.
Adaptation finance was COP30’s biggest failure. The decision to “triple adaptation finance by 2035” remains vague and falls short of meeting adaptation needs. The Adaptation Fund, a leader in integrating gender into climate finance, received pledges of only around $135 million – less than half its $300 million target. Without predictable, grant-based finance, even the strongest plans cannot reach the communities that need them most.
What needs to happen next
Real adaptation happens in homes, fields, forests and coastal villages, not in negotiation rooms. Communities living through climate impacts already know what works. Community‑led, gender‑just approaches consistently reduce climate risk and build resilience.
To turn the Gender Action Plan’s commitments into action, governments must:
- Make gender-responsive adaptation non‑negotiable
- Invest in locally led solutions that prioritise community leadership and women’s intergenerational knowledge
- Ensure finance reaches frontline communities without creating new debt
- Use the GGA indicators to strengthen transparency and accountability
Organisations such as the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and Practical Action already work with communities using rights-based, gender-just approaches that reflect local needs and priorities. It is crucial for organisations that work directly with most impacted communities to be part of conversations on adaptation, including countries’ policy development.
From commitments to action
For COP decisions to matter, they must translate into action on the ground. Adaptation can no longer remain the slow lane of climate action, and gender can no longer be sidelined. Every global decision and national action must now be intentionally gender-responsive.
Why adaptation fails without women is no mystery. The question is who will act on what we already know?
The post Women must be a starting point, not an afterthought, for adaptation appeared first on Climate Home News.
Women must be a starting point, not an afterthought, for adaptation
SYDNEY, Thursday 30 October 2026 — In response to reports that the Albanese government is set to introduce draft legislation this year that would seek to ban data centres in Australia’s suburbs, Joe Rafalowicz, Head of Climate and Energy at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said:
“These reports are a testament to the growing community opposition to these completely inappropriate AI factories that have sprung up across our suburbs, and Big Tech corporations should take heed — the data centre build-out must not happen without the endorsement of the Australian people.
“But the government can’t simply ship this problem out to regional Australia without addressing the fundamental issues with this extractive new industry.
“We’re already seeing a trend of AI data centre proposals moving to the regions, in areas that are more water-scarce, more environmentally sensitive, and next to sources of fracked and coal seam gas to support their massive BYO gas-fired power plans — a pattern we’ve seen play out in the United States.
“From the Beetaloo Basin in the NT to the Western Downs in Qld, we’re seeing a wave of AI data centre proposals that would see new gas fast-tracked to support their massive energy demand, and threaten to completely derail Australia’s energy transition.
“Just as suburban Australians are asking, “what for?”, regional communities like Berry Springs and Dalby do not want dirty data centres setting up shop with absolutely no benefit to their communities. Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on AI data centre developments until strict and enforceable safeguards are in place to protect our climate and our communities.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org
AI data centre ban in suburbs would not address fundamental issues: Greenpeace
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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Early speakers’ list suggests few powerful leaders will attend COP31
Just 77 heads of state or government are scheduled to address the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, a third less than the COP28 peak -
Africa wants adaptation finance on COP31 agenda, raising risk of a fight
The African Group wants dedicated space on tripling adaptation finance, the Green Climate Fund and trade, setting up a possible clash
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.
COP31 presidency announces AI pledge as UN climate chief says Big Tech ‘on thin ice’
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.
Comment: The UN climate process was built for negotiation – now it must support implementation
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.