28-05-2025How does the climate crisis affect women and marginalised groups? What do they need in terms of accessible, gender-responsive climate finance? And how can we connect these needs to the global conversations on gender equality and climate finance, particularly in the lead-up to this year’s UN climate summit in Brazil? During a session at our office, we explored these questions with insights from
Pratap Maharjan (Programme Manager from Mercy Corps Nepal) and
Barbara Rosen Jacobson (Senior Advocacy Advisor at Mercy Corps).
Mira, a woman from Western Nepal, knows the climate crisis not as a distant threat, but as a daily struggle. Extreme rainfall triggered a landslide, forcing her to migrate and settle near a riverbank. Over the past five years, she has lost more than half her farmland. With her income source gone, her husband had to migrate in search of work, leaving Mira with the full burden of farming, caregiving, and maintaining family and community ties, and her primary source of income has been severely affected. This forced her husband to migrate in search of a job in a neighbouring city, leaving her solely responsible for agricultural work, care-giving, and managing family and community ties.
Mira’s story, shared byPratapduring the lunch lecture at the office of WO=MEN, is not unique; many women across Nepal experience similar struggles. And yet, these women often remain excluded from decision-making processes, leadership roles, and access to land and resources. Yet, Pratap emphasised that women like Mira are not just victims, but powerful drivers of change. Their central roles in their communities and vital local knowledge make them essential in the fight against the climate crisis. That is why they must have a seat at the decision-making table — not just because they are affected, but because they are crucial to creating effective solutions - which require funding. This is where climate finance becomes critical - and where the system still falls short.
What women in Nepal need from climate finance
At the lunch lecture, we asked: What do women like Mira need from climate finance? Additionally, we dived into the questions mentioned above. We learned from Pratap that the intersection of climate finance and gender in Nepal remains top-down, with limited opportunities for meaningful participation by women. Gender inclusion is often tokenistic, and funding remains largely inaccessible to women. Furthermore, there is little attention to loss and damage from a gender perspective—particularly the non-economic losses women face, such as the loss of culture, displacement, and threats to their safety.
Mercy Corps, through the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance Programme in Nepal, is working to change this in multiple ways. Activities include raising awareness at the community level, equipping local women and youth to engage in policy processes, and working with local governments to ensure their resilience strategies are inclusive. Mercy Corps Nepal, along with its partners, also advocates with political leaders at the local and national level to allocate more resources to resilience and adaptation, and track the investments that are made by these officials to verify that finance indeed reaches local communities.
Gaps in international gender-responsive climate finance
But Nepal’s story connects to a much bigger picture. Barbarazoomed out to explore the global climate finance system: how it works, who it reaches, and who it leaves behind. Climate finance is not charity, but a matter of responsibility. Those who have contributed least to climate change, including many women in vulnerable contexts, are also the most impacted. Yet climate finance flows remain highly unequal and often fail to consider gender.
Barbara explained that there are three main areas of climate finance: 1) mitigation: greenhouse gas reduction, 2) adaptation: adjusting to climate impacts and 3) loss & damage: responding to climate-related impacts. Between 2019 and 2022, only 2.9% of all climate finance had gender equality as a principal objective, and 30.7% had gender equality as an important but not principal goal, reported by
Oxfam (2023). This means that nearly two-thirds of climate finance either overlooks gender or fails to report on it.
Climate finance comes from various sources, including bilateral agreements, multilateral funds, development banks, and the private sector. A growing number of actors are highlighting the potential of private climate finance; however, this raises new concerns. Private finance is often not locally-led or gender-responsive, and there is very little transparency and reporting on their activities Furthermore, only 21% of international climate finance is provided as grants - money that does not have to be repaid. The rest of climate finance can lead to increasing debt, disproportionately affecting women and girls around the world, as government funds are diverted away from essential services to repay loans. In addition, significant amounts of climate finance can remain stuck at the national government level, and accessing climate funds remains extremely difficult for local actors.
When local voices are ignored, the consequences can be severe;
meaningful consultation with women and girls is essential for climate action. For example, the Wayúu Indigenous people—a matrilineal community in La Guajira, Colombia—
were forced from their ancestral lands after a wind farm was installed without their consent, illustrating the risks of ignoring those most affected.
Getting it right: Making climate finance work for women and girls
The stories from Nepal - and from across the world - show that climate finance can only be effective if it truly reflects the lived experiences of those on the frontlines. Women like Mira are leaders, knowledge-holders, and critical actors in building resilience. Yet they are often sidelined in climate finance systems that are top-down, opaque, and disconnected from local realities. Therefore, climate finance must be:
- Inclusive, participatory, and locally led, ensuring meaningful leadership and consultation of women and marginalised groups in all their diversity, so their needs and priorities shape the solutions.
- Non-extractive, prioritising grants over loans to avoid worsening debt and reducing governments’ ability to provide public goods for women and girls.
- Transparent and accountable, especially if private sector investment grows, so that all actors are held responsible for the social and gender impacts of the finance they provide.
As the world prepares for the next UN climate summit in Brazil, these principles must be front and center if climate finance is to be
fair, sustainable and effective. This needs to be integrated into international climate finance negotiations by parties and negotiators, as well as adopted by multilateral development banks (MDBs) and (private) donors.
