Exploring the Gender-Environment Nexus: Interconnected Challenges

The environment does not impact everyone equally. A drought, a flood, or a fuel shortage filters through society in ways shaped by who fetches the water, who cooks the meals, and who owns the land. This is the heart of the gender-environment nexus: the recognition that ecological change and gender inequality are tightly bound, and that any serious response to one demands engagement with the other. Understanding this connection is essential for designing fair, effective, and lasting solutions to today’s environmental crises.

What does the gender-environment nexus mean? 🔗

The gender-environment nexus refers to the two-way relationship between gendered social roles and environmental conditions. On one side, environmental degradation, pollution, and climate change affect women and men differently because they hold different responsibilities, resources, and rights. On the other side, gender norms shape how communities use, manage, and protect natural resources. Treating environmental problems as gender-neutral overlooks half the picture.

Globally, the United Nations recognises that climate change has a greater impact on populations most reliant on natural resources and least equipped to respond to natural hazards, with women in poverty bearing higher risks and burdens. In rural areas, women typically perform most tasks involving collection of water, fuelwood, and fodder, which ties their daily labour directly to the health of forests, rivers, and soil. When the environment deteriorates, their work expands while their access to resources shrinks.

Why women face disproportionate environmental risk 🔗

Several overlapping factors place women at the sharp end of environmental change. Restricted land ownership, limited mobility, lower literacy in some regions, lower wages, and exclusion from village councils all combine to reduce adaptive capacity. When a heatwave hits, when a well dries up, or when a forest is auctioned to a contractor, these structural disadvantages decide who copes and who suffers.

Climate-sensitive livelihoods 🔗

A large share of women in rural India work in agriculture, dairy, and forest-based occupations, all of which are highly weather-dependent. Erratic monsoons, shrinking groundwater, and rising temperatures translate into longer working hours and lower returns. Research on climate and gender notes that culturally prescribed gender roles confine many women to labour-intensive, climate-sensitive work such as agriculture, water collection, and fuel and fodder gathering, tying their livelihoods directly to changing environmental conditions.

Health and reproductive burdens 🔗

Exposure to indoor air pollution from biomass cooking, heat stress during pregnancy, water-borne infections, and limited access to sanitation during disasters fall harder on women and girls. A systematic review of climate and women’s health in low- and middle-income countries observed that gendered roles combined with socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors exacerbate women’s vulnerabilities, increasing the burden of mental health issues, water insecurity, sanitation challenges, and caregiving responsibilities. Adolescent girls often drop out of school when water has to be fetched from farther away, compounding the long-term effects.

Intersectional vulnerability 🔗

Gender does not act alone. Caste, class, tribal identity, disability, and location interact with it to produce sharply different experiences. A Dalit woman in a drought-prone district faces a layered disadvantage that a single-axis lens cannot capture. Climate-induced displacement and male outmigration further reshape household responsibilities, leaving women to manage farms and families with shrinking support systems.

From victims to agents of change 🔗

It would be a mistake to read women only as victims of environmental harm. Across India and the wider world, women have led some of the most influential ecological movements and continue to drive sustainable practices at the household, community, and political levels.

Lessons from the Chipko movement 🔗

The Chipko movement of the 1970s, where village women in the Garhwal Himalayas embraced trees to stop commercial felling, remains a defining moment in environmental history. The protest was not symbolic alone; it was rooted in the daily reality that the loss of forests meant longer journeys for fuel and fodder. Scholars note that the movement illustrates how environmental degradation is not gender-neutral, affecting women more severely due to their roles in subsistence economies and making their ecological knowledge, activism, and leadership central to sustainable environmental management. Chipko inspired the Appiko movement in Karnataka and shaped national conversations on forest rights.

Everyday environmental knowledge 🔗

Beyond mass movements, women hold practical, place-based knowledge about seeds, water sources, medicinal plants, and weather patterns. The Baiga and other tribal women in central India have organised to defend community forests under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which mandates women’s participation in village forest committees. Self-help groups have also become important platforms for water harvesting, solid waste management, and clean energy adoption.

Measurable gains from women’s leadership 🔗

Evidence increasingly shows that when women lead, environmental outcomes improve. One review on women in environmental governance reports that female leaders in India helped reduce agricultural burning by 13 percent, lowering particulate matter by 40 percent, as they prioritised children’s health over economic concerns. Studies of household behaviour from the UN Environment Programme also note that women are more inclined to alter daily habits for environmental protection and family well-being, influencing decisions on energy use, packaging reuse, waste separation, and food choices.

Gender-responsive environmental policy 🔗

A gender-responsive policy is one that recognises gendered differences in vulnerability and capability and designs interventions accordingly. It moves beyond simply counting women in attendance to actively shaping budgets, data systems, and decision rules so that environmental action reduces, rather than reinforces, inequality.

Where Indian policy stands 🔗

India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) and the corresponding State Action Plans acknowledge gender as a cross-cutting concern, and the Forest Rights Act has expanded women’s role in community forest governance. However, an analysis published by legal commentators observes that specific gendered strategies and adequate resources for gender-responsive climate action remain limited, and gender mainstreaming requires moving beyond rhetorical recognition to concrete actions such as gender-disaggregated data collection, women’s participation in decision-making, gender impact assessments, and targeted support for women’s climate adaptation. A content review of state action plans similarly found uneven treatment of gender across India’s climate documents.

What gender-responsive design looks like 🔗

Good design begins with sex-disaggregated data so that policymakers know who is affected, where, and how. It continues with gender impact assessments before launching new programmes, dedicated budgets for women’s adaptation work, and procurement preferences for women-led cooperatives in renewable energy and waste management. Schemes such as the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, which provides LPG connections to women in poor households, illustrate how targeting women can simultaneously address indoor air pollution, deforestation, and time poverty, though questions of refill affordability remain.

The role of unpaid care work 🔗

One often-overlooked element is the rising burden of unpaid care during environmental shocks. After floods or heatwaves, the work of nursing the sick, securing safe water, and managing household disruption falls largely on women. UN Women’s recent assessments warn that climate solutions must recognise the unique risks women and girls face and prevent existing gender inequalities from being carried over into the design of new policies. Policies that ignore unpaid care simply transfer the cost of adaptation onto women’s time.

Integrating women’s perspectives at every level 🔗

Genuine inclusion requires structural change at three levels: local, national, and global. At each level, the goal is the same: ensure that women are not just consulted but shape the agenda.

Local governance and grassroots leadership 🔗

In India, the 73rd Constitutional Amendment reserved one-third of seats in Panchayati Raj Institutions for women, later raised to 50 percent in many states. This has produced a generation of elected women who shape decisions on village water sources, sanitation, school construction, and forest committees. Studies of panchayats led by women have linked their leadership to better delivery of public goods and stricter enforcement of environmental norms, particularly around drinking water and waste management.

National frameworks 🔗

At the national level, integration means treating environment ministries and gender ministries as partners rather than parallel silos. It involves mandatory gender audits of large infrastructure and energy projects, training environmental officers in gender analysis, and including women’s organisations in formal consultations on river basin plans, urban master plans, and disaster management.

Global commitments 🔗

At the international level, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the Beijing Declaration, the Sustainable Development Goals, and the Paris Agreement all anchor gender-responsive environmental action. UN Women’s recent scorecard emphasises that closing the gap between how climate change affects women and what governments commit to do depends on supporting women’s meaningful participation in planning, monitoring, and decision-making at every level, and investing in more and better data. India’s negotiating positions at COP meetings increasingly engage with the Lima Work Programme on Gender and its Gender Action Plan, though delegations themselves still tend to be male-dominated.

Toward an integrated agenda 🔗

The gender-environment nexus reminds us that ecological justice and gender justice are not competing claims to be balanced; they are mutually reinforcing goals. Cleaner cooking fuel reduces emissions and frees women’s time. Secure land rights for women improve forest cover and food security. Inclusive village committees produce better water management. Policy that treats women as central decision-makers, not afterthoughts, tends to be more effective, more equitable, and more durable. The reverse is also true: ignoring gender produces environmental policies that look impressive on paper and fail in practice.

Building this integrated agenda requires sustained investment in data, voice, and accountability. It also requires shifting the imagination of who counts as an environmental expert, from the technocrat in the capital to the farmer who has watched the rains shift for thirty years.

What do you think? If you were redesigning a single environmental scheme in your state to be genuinely gender-responsive, which one would you choose and what would you change first? And how can young people in colleges and universities contribute to making women’s environmental knowledge count in formal policy?

References

1. https://unfccc.int/gender
2. https://appliedworldwide.com/gender-and-climate-change-in-india-gender-and-development-perspective/
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11905046/
4. https://sjii.es/index.php/journal/article/download/461/513
5. https://iisppr.org.in/gendering-the-green-agenda-the-role-of-women-in-environmental-governance-at-local-and-global-levels/
6. https://www.unep.org/topics/gender/gender-and-climate-action
7. https://www.legalserviceindia.com/Legal-Articles/women-and-environmental-justice-in-india-climate-change-resource-access-and-gendered-sustainability/
8. https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/the-climate-change-gender-action-plan-whats-at-stake-at-cop30
9. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/op-ed/2026/03/women-climate-change-and-the-search-for-accountability