Gender equality is currently under threat.  

Governments are sidelining it in policy-making; international agreements and negotiated texts are backsliding on once accepted gender language; and donors are retreating from prioritising gender financing. Without bold and transformative action, the hard-won gains of women and marginalised groups risk being erased.

This difficult reality was on stark display during negotiations for a new Gender Action Plan, this month in Brazil.  

Thankfully, the final Belém Gender Action Plan (GAP) adopted at COP30 offers renewed momentum for embedding gender equality into climate policy and action, and for elevating women's opportunities and wellbeing. It also brings a new and welcome focus on the vital roles and contributions of Indigenous women and women in local community context.  

A practical checklist 

The Belém GAP offers a practical checklist for governments, non-state actors and funding agencies. It is especially well-timed: coming in this year when governments are due to submit their third national climate plans under the Paris Agreement, the Nationally Determined Contributions:

• Get the data and evidence right. It asks governments and other relevant organisations to collect multidimensional data to reveal people’s different vulnerabilities. It invites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which is currently embarking on its Seventh Assessment Report cycle - to contribute more evidence on how climate change affects women and girls, men and boys differently; and how women and girls can benefit from climate action. 
   
• Be coherent. It calls for greater coherence on gender and climate change across international, national and local levels of governance, and starting with the UNFCCC itself. Mentions of ‘local’ are notably more prominent in the Belém GAP than in the preceding gender action plan and its amendment. And, the Belém GAP strikes a better balance between recognising action needed within UNFCCC processes and outside, in countries and communities, and by more diverse actors.   
   
• Strengthen gender champions’ effectiveness. The Belém GAP recognises the increasingly mature role of the National Gender and Climate Change Focal Points: the individuals appointed within governments to shape gender-responsive policies and guide effective implementation, monitoring, reporting, and evaluation. The preceding plan had sought to ‘clarify’ the Focal Points’ roles; the Belém GAP seeks to ‘institutionalise and strengthen’ these roles and improve capacities. It notably mentions that men and boys benefit from gender equality, and calls for enhanced roles for men and boys as strategic allies in furthering the cause. 
   
• Ensure the ‘means’ to implement climate action are gender responsive. The Paris Agreement refers to three broad ‘means of implementation’ that underpin climate action, as: finance, capacity building [sic] and technology transfer. The Belém GAP spells out how all three pillars must be gender responsive. It also invites the multilateral climate funds to align with its provisions. 
   
• Break down barriers. Although the text is not bold enough to talk about structural forms of bias and discrimination against women and other groups, as such, it does talk about breaking down barriers to women’s leadership and full participation in decision-making. This is a strong outcome: especially considering the extent to which the Belém  GAP text was contested and many governments had sought to water it down. 
   
• Be forward looking. Refreshingly, the Belém GAP not only talks about the impacts of climate change on different groups in society. It implicitly recognises (between the lines!) that climate change will precipitate deep social and economic shifts: toward new technologies, forms of production, consumption and living, all of which could have deep consequences for gender equality. Significantly, the Belém GAP reinforces language from the previous plan, stating that new opportunities afforded by climate action must intentionally benefit women and girls. And it resoundingly dodges any implication of victimhood, stressing instead how women and girls act as agents of change – emphasising the need to engage men and boys as allies in this change. 
   
• Recognise Indigenous women and women in local communities. A key difference in the Belém GAP, compared to its predecessor, is the increasingly nuanced recognition of the vulnerabilities of and opportunities for different groups of women. Negotiations on this text were hotly contested. Previously, many countries and Observer organisations (including CDKN, in its UNFCCC submission in 2025 and 2024) called for the needs of women ‘in all their diversity’ to be recognised, and for the concept of ‘intersectionality’ to be included.  

Intersectionality is the idea that people experience barriers to climate resilience and action in different ways because of intersecting factors like poverty and social discrimination, or biases on the basis of gender, ethnicity, marital or migrant status, age, disability and other factors. In the end, this phrase was not adopted in the Belém GAP. However, the concepts are at least partly there, in different words.  

The Belém GAP pinpoints the particular needs for: 

• Generating more evidence on ‘Indigenous women and women in local communities’; 

• Communicating climate risks and climate action opportunities to ‘women and girls in vulnerable situations’; 

• Fostering full, meaningful and equal participation and leadership of all women and girls, ‘particularly Indigenous women and women from local communities’, and ‘taking into account multidimensional factors’; 

• Establishing adequate protections for women ‘environmental defenders’ and acknowledging the important role of ‘grassroots organisations’ in this regard; 

• Honour gender-responsive climate solutions that ‘strengthen…, protect… and preserv[e]… Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, traditional knowledge and local knowledge systems’; 

• Bolstering the participation of women in UNFCCC processes, especially ‘grassroots’ women and those from underrepresented countries such as least developed countries and small island developing states, including by funding them, and eliminating barriers to their effective participation.   

By urging the full participation and leadership of marginalised groups, and assigning clear responsibilities across international, regional, national, and local actors, the Belém GAP has the potential to drive more equitable and transformative outcomes for the most climate-affected people worldwide. The task of realising its great potential now lies with all of us.