Why Climate Finance Fails Women And How Locally Led Initiatives Can Fix It

By 2050, up to 158.3 million additional women and girls could be pushed into extreme poverty by climate change. That number comes from a 2025 UN Women projection. Like most large numbers, it is easy to read and easier to forget. Statistics at that scale produce a form of cognitive mercy, where the mind takes a step back, and the enormity of the situation stays in its safe numerical lane.

Imagine you work a sugarcane harvest in Beed, Maharashtra. The season is brutal, and drought has thinned the crop. The contractor controls your wages, and the debt from last year has still not been cleared. So you do what thousands of women in Beed have done: you have your uterus removed.

“Women are paying the cost of the climate crisis with their wombs, forced into hysterectomies just to maintain their livelihoods in the face of drought and debt. Current finance and loss and damage mechanisms fall short because they are designed for macro-level economic indicators that remain blind to the visceral, non-economic losses that break women’s lives,” says Ritu Bharadwaj, Director, Climate Resilience, Finance and Loss & Damage, ALL ACT, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

How does a crisis this well-documented continue to be this badly funded? It’s not as if the gendered impacts of climate change are some obscure findings buried in academic literature; they are very much visible and measurable. And yet, the funds meant to address them reach only a fraction of those who need them. 

The Threat Multiplier

In policy language, climate change is described as a “threat multiplier”: it magnifies whatever disadvantage you already have. Indian women, therefore, are pre-burdened when they face the effects of a climate event. They’re concentrated in unpaid agricultural labour, lack formal land titles, are under-represented in local governance, and get limited access to healthcare and credit. Climate change only exacerbates these conditions.

This exacerbation is material and measurable. Women in India spend around 150 million workdays each year collecting water, a burden that grows as droughts increase and water sources recede. Food insecurity hits women’s bodies first, since more than half of pregnant women aged 15–49 in India are anaemic, a figure that worsens with every climate-induced crop failure. Similarly, higher mortality rates for women in floods and cyclones are not some instance of biological weakness but structural exclusion from the mobility and resources that aid in survival.

In Rajasthan and Gujarat, women manage livestock and walk longer distances for water as groundwater levels fall and rainfall becomes more unpredictable. When heatwaves arrive — longer now, more frequent—their working hours shrink, their crops thin. Moreover, the mental health toll of all this is almost entirely absent in policy conversations.

Professor Jyoti Parikh, Executive Director of IRADe and former member of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on Climate Change, notes this: “The role of women in our society makes them home-bound. The poor need to battle heat stress. They need cool, insulated roofs and ventilation, and provisions to reduce water stress in summer. Working women need heat-protected bus stands, frequent public transport, and water provision. Women street vendors need shaded, cooler areas. Apart from heat, there are extreme events like floods, cyclones, land slides. Special provisions to protect them and their children have to be integrated in response measures.”

Each of these is a specific, solvable problem, but they seldom feature prominently in India’s climate responses. The knowledge may already exist, but the will to act on it at scale does not.

The Language and the Money

The term “gender-responsive” is used in most major climate finance frameworks today. It appears in national climate plans and conference outcomes and is, at this point, nearly ubiquitous. What is not ubiquitous, however, is gender-responsive allocation, the actual directing of money toward women, toward women-led initiatives, toward the communities where women are doing the most adaptation work with the least support.

Only around 10% of the capital required to address climate change’s gendered impacts reaches women. This gap between language and reality may appear as a communication problem. It’s not; it’s a power problem. Decision-making bodies that allocate and administer climate funds remain male-dominated, and funding criteria favour the kinds of projects (infrastructural, measurable in macroeconomic terms) that women-led, community-based initiatives rarely fit. Moreover, there is no tracking of gender-disaggregated outcomes, so the failure stays unseen in the data reported upward.

Anjal Prakash, Clinical Associate Professor (Research) and Research Director at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy, ISB, says: “Although progress is visible with more policies addressing gender equity, the gap remains significant due to historical biases and uneven implementation. True gender sensitivity requires further systemic integration and resource allocation.” 

Acknowledgement, in other words, is not the same as action. The institutions may have learned to speak the language of inclusivity, but the money hasn’t yet followed the words. 

Last to Fall, First to Pay

When formal systems fail, like when the fund doesn’t arrive or the scheme doesn’t reach its destination, the household absorbs the cost. Furthermore, within the household, the women absorb it first. Climate shocks crumple livelihoods and squeeze resources, and the subsequent redistribution inadvertently acts against women and girls. They eat less, are pulled from school, shoulder more burdens, and are married earlier to reduce the number of mouths a family must feed.

When climate events strike informal, low-wage, and precarious sectors, whether in agriculture or daily labour, the jobs go away while social protection fails to compensate. Women, over-represented in these sectors, fall hardest and furthest.

Govind Kelkar, Executive Director and Professor at the GenDev Centre for Research and Innovation, Gurgaon, points this out: “While policy for energy access may include gender considerations, at the macro level, the outcomes at the micro level are often diminished by socio-economic norms. Our research shows that in both India and Nepal, organizations of rural women as active agents, such as self-help groups in agriculture and allied enterprises, lead to greater use by women of productive resources, including clean energy and appliances based on modern energy services, such as LPG and solar energy.”

Without Being Asked

The people financing climate action are methodically excluding the people already doing it. In Jhirandiya, Alwar, forty women excavated and restored a traditional johad, an earthen rainwater pond, by hand, reviving groundwater levels that had fallen for years. In the Sundarbans, indigenous women’s groups raise mangrove seedlings and plant them along cyclone-battered shorelines. This helps buffer storm surges while simultaneously helping run vermicomposting enterprises to stabilise income. In Gajapati and Rayagada, Odisha, Saura and Dongria Kondh Adivasi womenmanage 40 community seed banks, preserving indigenous varieties of millet, pulses, and tubers that can withstand erratic rainfall patterns that commercial seeds can’t, while running backyard nutrition gardens with the same seeds to ensure diverse diets. In Raisar, also in Odisha, women invisible in land records are deciding how to transition to organic practices and how to anchor biodiversity conservation in daily farming decisions.

In drought-prone Bundelkhand, one of India’s most climate-stressed regions, women supported by ActionAid and local partners have built climate-resilient livelihood systems from the ground up using local knowledge: poultry, goat rearing, multilayer farming, seed production, and water-harvesting structures. This work has since led to the establishment of the Basant Women Farmers Producer Company, an all-women FPO that runs processing units, agri-resource centres, and markets for climate-resilient produce. In Bihar, Jeevika Women Cells in Badil Bigha own and operate a 15 kW solar mini-grid, managing billing and maintenance decisions, and in Harpur, women-led SHGs installed solar pumps to enable year-round irrigation beyond a single rain-fed crop. In Parwada, Uttarakhand, Bhagoti Devi led the Van Panchayat to regenerate 280 hectares of degraded forest through strict rotational harvesting and community monitoring.

All of this is seldom funded or recognised as climate work.

Evidence consistently shows that when women are given access to finance and decision-making, outcomes improve across resource governance, household welfare, and community resilience. Even though the knowledge is there, what’s missing is the institutional recognition that would help it scale.

Prof. Kelkar frames this thus: “The term gender-just transition, an area that is presently under-explored, is the nexus between rights and the environment, the right to work with dignity, and the right to social security for women and men. This underlies how the company’s policies and initiatives should enhance workers’ and managers’ capabilities while limiting harms that can adversely affect both workers’ rights and the environment.”

A gender-just transition, thus, would be structurally different, built on the foundation that the people doing the most adaptation work deserve the dignity and resources that work requires.

Building Rights for the Right People

Two changes are needed simultaneously. The first is structural: different allocation criteria, access pathways, monitoring systems, and decision-making tables. Dr. Prakash notes this, “Direct access to funds for local women-led initiatives must be prioritised, ensuring resources reach those most impacted. Incorporating gender-disaggregated data is crucial for informed decision-making. Integrating gender considerations into funding criteria and evaluation processes can promote equity. Fostering partnerships between financial institutions and grassroots women’s organisations will enhance the inclusivity and effectiveness of climate finance solutions.”

Each addresses a specific point of failure in the current system, whether it’s the pooling of funds in institutions, the invisibility of outcomes, exclusion from design, or inaccessibility for grassroots actors.

The second is philosophical: accepting that climate finance goes beyond being an economic instrument and is also a rights instrument. As Ms Bharadwaj says, we need a shift “from top-down institutional grants to locally led, flexible financing that provides a protective shield for women’s health, dignity, and bodily autonomy.”

These two demands, architectural and philosophical, reinforce each other. Neither can you build a rights-protective system on an exclusionary architecture, nor can you reform the architecture without accepting that rights are what it’s for.

Default Settings

There is a version of the green economy that looks just like the old one. Different energy sources, but with the same hierarchies and the same unanswered questions of whose lives matter to the system. The language may change, but the system doesn’t. Gender-responsive becomes a reporting category, and locally-led becomes a talking point. Transitions happen all the time without being just. Whether this one will be different is still, just barely, an open question. 

Those answers are being written right now, and unlike the climate itself, this particular crisis of will is entirely within our control.