This publication presents the collective priorities of the GEF Women and Gender Caucus for GEF-9 and all GEF-related Funds, calling for environmental finance systems that are equitable, rights-based, transparent, and transformative. It argues that environmental effectiveness cannot be separated from justice, governance, and meaningful access to resources.

The publication advances five key priority areas:

• Transforming structural inequalities through environmental finance
  
  • Scaling predictable and grant-based public funding
  • Addressing inequalities linked to land tenure, governance, and resource access
  • Strengthening women’s land and resource rights
• Ensuring direct and equitable access to finance
  
  • Creating simplified and dedicated financing windows for women-led and community-led organisations
  • Supporting readiness, proposal development, and compliance processes
  • Monitoring whether funding effectively reaches grassroots actors and local communities
• Democratising environmental finance governance
  
  • Strengthening transparency, representation, and accountability within GEF governance systems
  • Recognising the role of the Women and Gender Caucus within GEF processes
  • Promoting more inclusive decision-making and consultation mechanisms
• Embedding gender justice across GEF policy and programming
  
  • Aligning GEF policies with recent CBD and UNFCCC gender commitments
  • Supporting dedicated programming and budget lines for gender-responsive implementation
  • Strengthening gender expertise, budgeting, monitoring, and indicators across GEF systems
• Strengthening transparency, accountability, and long-term evaluation
  
  • Improving public reporting on financial flows and impacts
  • Applying gender-responsive monitoring and evaluation frameworks
  • Measuring long-term environmental, institutional, and community-level transformation beyond short project cycles

The publication ultimately calls for a shift toward environmental finance systems that redistribute power, strengthen locally led action, and support lasting social and environmental transformation.

This submission by the CBD Women’s Caucus presents four proposals to strengthen coherence across the Rio Conventions and advance more coordinated implementation between biodiversity, climate, and land governance processes. Grounded in human rights and equity, the publication highlights practical pathways for addressing structural inequalities while supporting effective implementation of global environmental commitments.

The publication proposes:

• Alignment of Gender Action Plans across the Rio Conventions
  
  • Strengthening coordination between existing gender mandates and implementation frameworks
  • Promoting shared indicators, monitoring, and accountability mechanisms
  • Enhancing collaboration between gender constituencies and focal points across conventions
• Scaling responsive and accessible finance
  
  • Increasing direct access to funding for women-led and community-based organisations
  • Integrating social and gender criteria into environmental finance mechanisms
  • Supporting long-term, flexible, and transformative funding approaches
• Securing women’s land and resources rights
  
  • Recognising collective and customary tenure systems
  • Strengthening participation in governance and decision-making processes
  • Addressing barriers to equitable access, ownership, and control over natural resources
• Protection of women environmental human rights defenders
  
  • Strengthening safeguards, participation rights, and access to justice
  • Recognising the specific risks faced by defenders across environmental sectors
  • Promoting safer and enabling environments for advocacy and leadership

The submission ultimately calls for stronger collaboration across conventions to ensure that implementation efforts are mutually reinforcing, rights-based, and transformative.

This briefing, developed by the CBD Women’s Caucus and the UNFCCC Women and Gender Constituency, explores synergies between the CBD Gender Plan of Action (2023–2030) and the UNFCCC Belem Gender Action Plan (2026-2034) to support more coherent, coordinated, and gender-responsive implementation at national and local levels.

While developed under different Conventions, both Gender Plans provide complementary frameworks to advance gender equality across biodiversity and climate agendas. This publication highlights how aligning their objectives, mechanisms, and implementation pathways can strengthen efficiency, coherence, and impact in practice.

It offers a comparative overview of both frameworks and identifies concrete entry points for coordination across national planning processes, institutional arrangements, data systems, and financing. Drawing on the experience of both constituencies, the briefing also examines shared challenges, including fragmented implementation, limited resourcing, and the persistent under-recognition of women’s organisations as key actors in implementation.

The publication provides practical insights and recommendations to support governments, practitioners, and women’s organisations in advancing gender justice and strengthening implementation across climate and biodiversity agendas.

This policy brief presents preliminary findings from the CASCADE Gender Knowledge Exchange Project, developed in collaboration with the CBD Women’s Caucus, the University of Oxford, and University College London. It examines the scientific and technical needs required to strengthen gender-responsive implementation of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF), with a particular focus on Target 23 and the Gender Plan of Action (2023–2030). The analysis draws on a global survey of Gender and Biodiversity Focal Points and CBD National Focal Points across regions.

The findings highlight strong global commitment to gender-responsive biodiversity action, alongside persistent structural and institutional barriers. These include limited recognition and resourcing of gender focal points, fragmented coordination across institutions, gaps in gender data and monitoring systems, and restricted access to decision-making processes. While many countries have begun integrating gender considerations into NBSAPs, this often remains at a technical level and does not yet address underlying inequalities or ensure transformative outcomes.

This publication aims to inform ongoing CBD processes, including SBSTTA and the mid-term review of the Gender Plan of Action, by identifying priority areas for action. It calls for strengthened investment in gender-responsive data systems, capacity building, meaningful participation, and policy integration, while emphasising the need for sustained financial and institutional support to enable effective and equitable implementation of the KM-GBF.

This policy brief presents findings from a collaborative effort led by the CBD Women’s Caucus and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) to better understand how women-led and community-based organisations generate and use biodiversity data with a gender perspective. It highlights the critical role that women and girls in all their diversity, including from Indigenous Peoples, and from local and Afro-descendant communities, play in producing knowledge that informs conservation, sustainable use and rights-based approaches.

Drawing on diverse experiences and practices, the brief explores how gender-responsive biodiversity data is currently collected, managed and applied across contexts. It identifies key strengths, including the centrality of lived experience, traditional knowledge and community-rooted evidence, while also examining persistent barriers such as limited funding, weak data systems, restricted access to decision-making spaces and insufficient recognition of this work.

This findings report, developed by the CBD Women’s Caucus in partnership with IIED, presents an exploratory, network-based mapping of capacities, practices and needs related to gender-responsive biodiversity data among women-led and community-based organisations. It examines engagement across the biodiversity data value chain — from data collection and management to analysis and use — based on 70 survey responses from 33 countries.

The findings show that women-led and community-based organisations are already generating vital, community-rooted biodiversity data. Organisations are particularly active in data communication and use, while also contributing significantly to data collection and analysis. However, important gaps remain, particularly in data management, where lower levels of engagement may affect the long-term accessibility and usability of evidence. The report also highlights the central role of qualitative and narrative-based approaches — such as interviews, storytelling and focus groups — in capturing lived experiences and advancing gender-responsive knowledge systems.

Despite strong engagement and ethical intent, organisations face persistent structural barriers, including limited funding, access to technology and technical capacities. Critically, the report finds that the main constraint to policy impact is not the lack of data, but its limited recognition and uptake in decision-making processes. At the same time, the findings point to significant opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and for strengthening a whole-of-society approach to biodiversity monitoring and reporting, building on the existing contributions of women-led organisations to advance more gender-just biodiversity governance.