Shedding light on gender and female empowerment within current NDCs revisions at COP30
Credits: Robin Erino
Written by Amanda Legórburu, Researcher at EmpoderaClima.
Defining NDCs and their relevance in the international field
During COP21, 195 parties signed the Paris Agreement intending to hold off “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”. To pursue this, they introduced Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), where all parties to the Convention must create climate action plans that include mitigation and adaptation efforts, involve multiple actors and sectors of the economy, and offer unique opportunities to integrate gender. NDCs function as a country’s main mechanism for national climate policies and planning within the country’s own budget, so they must include, shape, and account for those most impacted.
Every five years, NDCs are updated so that countries can revise their plans and entertain higher levels of ambition. The NDC updates need to follow the progression principle, where new goals must be more ambitious than the previous ones. In order to become a pathway towards enhanced greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, these revisions must provide a key opportunity for countries to build a gender-responsive approach. During the first round of NDCs in 2015, only 45 countries integrated gender into their plans. According to the UNFCCC, 85% of the second-generation NDCs referenced gender compared to just 29% in the first round, while 90% of them ended up integrating gender dimensions.
A key finding of the “Gender and National Climate Planning” study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in 2021 was the suggestion that countries have moved to integrate gender into their plans due to these countries’ own commitment to gender equality, enhanced by the inclusion of the Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender (LWPG) and its Gender Action Plan (GAP) in the Paris Agreement at COP25 in 2019. Another common assessment of NDCs is the significant implementation gap between the ambitious goals of the Paris Agreement and the actual policy commitments countries submit. As the year to submit third-generation NDCs approaches an end, it is essential that countries enhance their plans to “set gender-responsive targets and policies that go beyond recognition to real, actionable commitments.”
The way in which countries define women in their NDCs sheds light on how gender and women's empowerment are understood on a national level, which can shape national priorities through a gendered lens and contribute to reducing gender inequality. This often begins with recognizing that, due to the different roles and responsibilities society endows women and men, there exist gender differences in the impact of climate change and its responses, vulnerabilities, and capacities to adapt. The Marshall Islands is a key example of this, where they recognize and position women as agents of change, echoed also within their own country policy through its National Gender Mainstreaming Policy and the Gender Equality Act (2019).
Marginalized people who live in hazard-prone areas are much more vulnerable to climate effects, and often the institutions tasked to protect them are insufficiently equipped or unwilling to focus their support on the most vulnerable. Women and girls, in particular those in poverty, face higher risks and greater burdens. In the 2022 Pakistan floods, which had around 3.3 million affected and 1,700 fatal victims from which a third were children, it is estimated that 80% of those displaced were women.
According to the World Bank, gender equality is a core contributor to better development outcomes, such as poverty reduction and sustainability. Thus, women not only are at the vanguard of climate advocacy and leadership, but they also determine household energy use and introduce renewable energy in homes and communities. Women also remain underrepresented in environmental leadership, holding only 26.8% of government minister positions in the EU, which is still the highest it’s ever been. One way to address the power imbalance is to reach out to women’s rights organizations and gender expert groups, while also providing spaces for female leadership in the creation and revision of NDCs.
Credits: Kafeel Ahmed
Considering a new perspective on gender in climate action plans
Out of the 165 submitted NDCs in 2016, only 40% mentioned gender. While this might be a low percentage, it does show some awareness of gender and women-specific considerations relevant to climate impact and action. Also, the guidance for NDCs development originally did not include a perspective of gender, it was due to the aforementioned LWPG that discussions on gender started taking place within climate policy. Almost a decade later, 78% of the revised NDCs explicitly include women in their national plans.
However, the number of NDCs that explicitly track progress on gender-just plans, commit to gender responsive climate budgeting, and include gender in finance strategies is extremely low. For NDCs to become crucial tools that advance gender equality within climate efforts, policymakers must harness the knowledge, strengths and contributions of all people. They must understand the gender biased impact of climate change and empower everyone to manage and respond to climate risks.
After the inclusion of gender-responsive action guidelines and mainstream gender equality considerations in the NDCs Work Program, the Partnership facilitated country access to the full range of members’ gender expertise and technical resources. This way, they could set gender-specific actions and goals, while also considering the intersectionality of said national plans. Gender does not exist in a vacuum, and the issues pertaining gendered-consideration often intersect with other marginalized groups, from elders to people in poverty, from Indigenous Peoples and those with disabilities to the LGBTQIA+ community. While there has been an increase in gender equality discussions within the NDCs, 46% reference youth, only 19% of them reference Indigenous Peoples, and a meager 4% include references to LGBTQIA+ groups. Having gender-just NDCs should not only signify the empowerment of women, but should also feature all the identities and communities that they share.
Credits: Kamran Guliyev
The path towards gender-just NCDs and gender justice in climate plans
Transitioning towards a renewable, low-emissions economy must also work as a transformative vehicle towards social justice. NDCs should enable a just transition from fossil fuels that challenge gender barriers—including all human rights as well as Indigenous sovereignty—and invest in social protections while also keeping up the industries that communities rely on, such as health and education. If not, then existing economic inequalities will only be carried over to a “greener” economy. To ensure this, NDCs have to consider a holistic approach and include measures across all sectors of their governance, making sure there is coherence between them and multi-stakeholder processes and documents.
Some of the main key barriers analysed since the implementation of NDCs for gender mainstreaming include a lack of disaggregated data, inadequate technical capacity, insufficient financing for gender-responsive climate action, a lack of coordination across sectoral institutions, limited knowledge sharing, and insufficient political will.
Parties to the Convention must commit to work on the revision of NDCs through a gendered-lens following four recommended areas: Governance, Planning, and Implementation and Enhanced Climate Policy Instruments. To consider Governance, countries should design capacity development strategies that benefit everyone equally while also prioritizing gender referencing that considers affected groups not only as victims but also as agents of change. Planning, instead, refers to the effective participation of vulnerable groups as stakeholders. Finally, Implementation touches on inclusive mechanisms to monitor NDCs in each country, engaging with gender-specific institutional arrangements within government and involving gender experts in the development of M&E frameworks. Through these, they must consider both Gender-Responsive and Gender-Transformative Actions, such as the ones explained in the “Technical Guide On Integrating Gender Into Nationally Determined Contributions And Long-Term Low-Emission Development Strategies.”
According to the WEDO Insights brief “Towards gender-just Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)”, “communities need greater emissions cuts, more substantive climate finance, and a substantive increase in resources to enable a gender-just transition. As the key national climate action plans, NDCs should comprehensively consider mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, finance, and just transition measures, at the scope and scale necessary.”
In short, NDCs should follow several guidelines for them to be more inclusive of gender considerations. There are relevant official tool guides that include the UNDP (2024) “Planning for a Net-Zero Future” and the IUCN’s guide on developing gender-responsive NDC Action Plans. These include ideas such as committing to gender-disaggregated data, setting sectoral gender goals, strengthening gender-responsive climate finance, promoting social protection for communities impacted, and, as mentioned before, engaging with women-led organizations during the decision-making process. It is a lack of gender consideration that has caused setbacks, so NDCs must go further to meet the agreed goals of the Paris Agreement.
Credits: Rohit Dey
How have countries been contributing to their own revised gender-just climate policies?
As COP30 is set to start, it is important to consider the country-specific NDCs revisions and how ambitious they have grown over the past five years. As of October 2025, 111 countries have introduced their revised NDCs. According to the UNFCCC, there is now a bigger shift from gender-sensitive to gender-transformative approaches. While early on guidelines emphasized participation and inclusion, they now seek to confront structural barriers, redistribute power, and promote intersectional justice, much more adapted to each country’s capacity.
The last round of revisions proved that gender policy within NDCs is still a point of contention, as only 51 countries actively engage in integrating gender and climate, 44 are initiating this process, and 101 have yet to make any public efforts on the matter. From the first group, countries that stand out for their gender-inclusive NDCs overall are the Marshall Islands and Nepal, as well as Moldova, Norway, Chile and Jamaica. With the third-generation of NDCs, more countries have included an increased amount of gender considerations while also having overall coherence and feasibility of their plan implementations. Other than the countries aforementioned, Colombia, Kenya, and Vanuatu have made strides in gender integration.
Something particular is that, aside from Norway, all top-ranked countries in regard to both gender inclusiveness and overall effectiveness are developing countries. While developed countries tend to focus their NDCs on mitigation, they continue to sideline gender inclusion in their policies. On the other hand, the climate commitments made by the Global South strive towards gender equality, but this is often conditioned on financing, technology or capacity building that they might have trouble allocating.
As countries revise their NDCs, it is critical that policy-makers take into consideration both their country’s capacity as well as gender-just policies across the entire action plans. For this, countries should ensure processes for engagement through the NDCs that are inclusive, equitable, and help deliver a gender-just transition at national level.
At COP29, many governments urged to strengthen gender mainstreaming with the LWPG, which they extended for another decade. At COP30 in Belém, decisions regarding the new GAP will be amongst the many discussions regarding NDCs, with the potential to advance gender mainstreaming in climate policy. It is to be expected that many of the revised NDCs will take a layered approach towards this by integrating gender-responsive targets into mitigation and adaptation, accounting for just-transition strategies. Notwithstanding, there is still a lack of ambition by developed countries towards this trend; and developing countries need more support from grant-based climate finances from developed countries, in accordance with the obligations from the Paris Agreement, to truly enhance the effectiveness of NDCs.
It is now more critical than ever that effective and transparent frameworks are included within NDCs and that both governments and civil society monitor them closely to progress towards their set goals. Thus, as countries implement their action plans, they should also embed gender considerations across all stages of the revision process, as well as everything that comes after, to ensure a gender-just transition towards a more sustainable society that leaves no one behind.
