In the first session of “Experiences from the Territories,” focused on participation in international processes, women human rights defenders shared their experiences of advocacy in multilateral processes (UNFCCC, CBD, UNCCD, CSW, CEDAW, among others). Among these was a presentation on the CBD Women’s Caucus by Berta Medrano, who shared with the participants the following topics: what the CBD Women’s Caucus is, its background and history, objectives, mission, vision, its members, governance, initiatives, alliances, and strategic focus areas: policy advocacy, capacity building, community building, knowledge production, awareness-raising, and dissemination. She also shared information on the Gender Plan of Action and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, with an emphasis on Targets 22 and 23. Continuing along these lines, the current advocacy and preparation work that the CBD Women’s Caucus is undertaking for COP17, to be held from October 19 to 30 in Yerevan, Armenia, was shared with them. This work focuses on the collective development of key messages, positions, and proposals across the diverse topics on the COP17 agenda. The presentation concluded by highlighting the experiences, lessons learned, and insights gained from the advocacy processes, and by inviting the participants to join our large CBD Women’s Caucus community.

One of the agenda items of the upcoming COP is focused on the implementation, mainstreaming, and measurement of progress of the adopted Global Action Plan on Biodiversity and Health.

This next stage is expected to focus on demonstrating how biodiversity conservation can simultaneously deliver benefits for health, food, water, and climate, while ensuring that these benefits are equitable and reach those most affected by biodiversity loss and environmental change.

In this context, women and gender require particular attention as the Global Action Plan on Biodiversity and Health invites women, children, and youth to contribute to its implementation by participating in regional workshops and dialogues, while the KMGBF and the Gender Plan of Action provide a stronger foundation for addressing gender equality and women’s rights.

Our shared ambition in the CBD Women’s Caucus is to move beyond viewing women primarily as participants or beneficiaries and instead recognize us as rights-holders, actors, decision-makers, and partners in biodiversity and health governance.

This is particularly important as the midterm review of the Gender Plan of Action is also on the agenda of COP17. We want this review to be critical, useful for policy and planning at all levels, and politically meaningful, particularly in the actual context where human rights, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and women’s rights are increasingly being disregarded and even erased from negotiation texts.

We therefore advocate for health and gender to be recognized as cross-cutting considerations and integral to decision-making, rather than treated as a standalone set of health- and gender-related actions.

In this way, the Gender Plan of Action can become a meaningful mechanism for embedding women’s rights, gender equality, health, and broader health equity across biodiversity policy and implementation.

As for now, the recommended decision  on Health and Biodiversity for COP17 to consider is heavily bracketed as agreement was not reached during SUBSTTA 27. Cooperation and partnerships -the main framework for discussions during CoHab3- should reflect on the national and regional positions that Parties will bring to COP negotiations. 

At a time when cooperation is weakening, governments are retreating from multilateralism, and global risks are growing in scale, speed, and interconnection, the CBD Women’s Caucus urged participants to build the needed partnerships to open the door to gender justice, equality, inclusivity and mutual respect.

Our delegation participated actively and substantively in all five roundtables over three days of intensive dialogue. We drew on our knowledge and experience, shared concrete examples, and presented the Caucus’s initiatives. We also identified the gaps and needs that must be addressed to ensure women’s perspectives are reflected in the global report.

Throughout, we stayed aligned with Caucus policy. We built on key messages from our own analysis and evaluation, which we had previously submitted officially as input to the global review.

Key messages reflected in the outcomes

Across the roundtables, the discussions reflected elements the Caucus championed, including:

• mainstreaming commitments under Targets 22 and 23 into national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs)
• using explicit language that names indigenous peoples and local communities, women and youth
• integrating rights-based and gender-responsive approaches across the board, along with the other considerations set out in Section C of the Framework
• developing an indicator system to assess social and gender dimensions, collecting both qualitative and quantitative disaggregated data
• ensuring direct, predictable and flexible access to resources for indigenous peoples and local communities, women and youth

We also repeatedly emphasized that women make an active, substantive and significant contribution to the Framework’s goals and 23 targets. That contribution must be acknowledged, made visible, reported on and integrated into global progress.

These messages are echoed in the Co-Chairs’ summary of the Dialogue (CBD/IMP/OM/2026/1/8). The summary calls for indigenous peoples and local communities, women and youth to have access to financial resources and capacity-building, so that they can engage effectively in implementation. It calls for stronger engagement of rights holders and stakeholders through the co-design and co-production of biodiversity actions, not just participation in planning and reporting. It also highlights the need to bring together diverse data and knowledge, including qualitative and quantitative data, traditional knowledge, and data from indigenous peoples and local communities, women, and youth.

The roundtable brought together Ms. Daniela Melgarejo (Mexico’s CBD Gender Focal Point), Ms. Bonu Sharifzoda (Tajikistan’s Gender Focal Point) and Ms. Novia Widyaningtyas (Indonesia’s CBD Gender Focal Point) for a direct conversation about moving from commitment to practice.

Ms. Widyaningtyas pointed to formally anchoring gender mainstreaming in Indonesia’s biodiversity strategy (IBSAP 2025–2045), building on constitutional guarantees of women’s environmental rights dating back to 1945 and reflected in the IBSAP’s Strategy 3.2 on mainstreaming gender equity and inclusive participation. Ms. Melgarejo described Mexico’s harder-won lesson: women’s participation is indispensable but not sufficient on its own; it has to come with real decision-making capacity, land access, and the removal of the structural barriers that keep participation from translating into influence. Ms. Sharifzoda credited Tajikistan’s progress to listening first: consultations with women, local communities, youth, scientists, and local authorities surfaced practical barriers that national-level analysis alone had missed women already active in gathering medicinal plants or wild fruit, for instance, but lacking equipment, technical knowledge, or access to finance and markets.

Their advice to countries earlier in the journey converged on the same point: participation without influence isn’t enough. Ms. Melgarejo urged building a gender perspective into policy design from the outset and working across sectors agriculture, rural development, Indigenous affairs, finance, since gender-responsive biodiversity action is not the environmental sector’s job alone. Ms. Sharifzoda’s advice was blunt: listen first, co-create solutions, then write the policy, not the other way around. Ms. Widyaningtyas stressed binding commitments paired with genuine coordination across Indonesia’s many sectors and regions, recommending that bottom-up learning documenting the country’s many local women’s champions be combined with top-down direction rather than relied on alone.

On financing and monitoring, Ms. Sharifzoda pointed to the need for predictable resources to turn Tajikistan’s national roadmap and updated NBSAP (to 2040) into local action, citing new projects linking women’s economic empowerment to conservation, from beekeeping and pollinator conservation to native-fruit-tree nurseries and sustainable harvesting. Ms. Melgarejo agreed that Mexico’s challenge isn’t a lack of policy; the country has made real progress there, but converting existing policy into financed, monitored, institutionally accountable action, with indicators able to show whether inequality is actually shrinking rather than simply reaching more women. Ms. Widyaningtyas named capacity building as Indonesia’s single biggest lever, one that has to reach government, civil society, academia and communities equally and sustainably rather than all at once alongside financing and locally suited monitoring indicators, so that top-down commitments and ground-level knowledge can finally speak the same language.