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.

Ms. Tiffany Straza, International Policy and Conventions Lead at UNEP-WCMC, introduced the panel and framed the moment. She highlighted the strong political mandate for gender-responsive KM-GBF implementation and the particular relevance of the TSC Mechanism as a vehicle for cooperation — not just with countries, but between TSC centres themselves and with the Global Coordination Entity. She acknowledged the difficult context in which the work is taking place — where organisations are being asked to do more with less — and noted that a whole-of-society approach and genuine cooperation are among the most effective responses. She reminded participants that the Mentimeter was available for those in the room and online to share their perspectives throughout the session.

In a video message from Guatemala, Ms. Marina Lopez Sincal, the country’s Gender Focal Point, shared her government’s vision for a national biodiversity and gender information system capable of disaggregating data by sex, age, linguistic community, and people of origin. She described the core challenge as one of interoperability: without a coordinated system bringing environmental institutions together, efforts risk duplication, mechanisms remain isolated, and the evidence needed to demonstrate women’s, Indigenous Peoples’, and local communities’ contributions to conservation never fully materializes.

Ms. Marina was clear that this is not a peripheral initiative for Guatemala, but a strategic and foundational commitment one meant to ensure that decision-making no longer leaves behind the very people most engaged in biodiversity management. She closed with a call for stronger inter-institutional articulation, so that national systems genuinely reflect the collective vision the KM-GBF sets out.