COP29 and the intersection of climate, gender equality, and education

As climate change evolves into a global crisis, the effects of extreme events such as droughts and floods are not equally distributed. Age, gender, and geographical location impact vulnerability to the negative outcomes associated with climate crises. An estimated 1 billion children live in countries at extreme high risk of negative impacts of climate change, and each year 40 million children have their education disrupted by climate induced extreme weather events. Morevoer, the gendered impacts of climate change frequently threaten girls’ ability to go to school, stay in school and to succeed in their studies. However, while climate change poses risks to education, education can also enhance young people’s ability to adapt to the intensifying impacts of the climate crisis and the overall resilience of their families, communities, and even their countries.

This blog gathers the experiences of members of the Echidna Global Scholars Alumni Network working at the nexus of climate, education, and gender equality in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kenya, Pakistan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. As world leaders gather this week at COP29, the insights shared here not only build our understanding of the impacts of climate change threats on education access and delivery, but also allow us to identify and amplify context-specific solutions to climate change – and gender inequality – both in and through education. 

In the Global South, where agriculture is a primary livelihood, significant strides have been made to address environmental challenges brought on by climate change. Women, who produce up to 80% of the food in developing countries, play a crucial role in environmental conservation and development. However, patriarchal land ownership rights often exclude women – and their knowledge and skills – from decisionmaking processes.

Traditional and indigenous authority structures typically position women as laborers and men as landowners, resulting in women disproportionately bearing the negative costs of environmental degradation without receiving reciprocal benefits. Women are frequently pressured by men to produce more food, leading to unsustainable agricultural practices that contribute to environmental degradation. This exacerbates women’s challenges, as declining land fertility and dwindling water sources increase their labor burden and force them to work harder and travel further to secure food and water.

This cycle of environmental degradation and increased labor burden on women has broader socioeconomic impacts. Environmental laws, policies, and interventions that fail to consider gender dynamics accentuate women’s poverty, increase their workload and, in so doing, contribute to environmental degradation and lack of motivation and involvement of women.

Promoting gender equality is critical to environmental conservation. This can be achieved by ensuring women have equal access to land and resources and involving them in decisionmaking processes and education related to land use while considering their indigenous knowledge.

In 2016, I found myself leading a large-scale adolescent girls education initiative during a drought so severe that several countries in the Southern African region, including my home, Zimbabwe, declared states of disaster. That same year, as an Echidna Global Scholar I pursued research aimed at understanding the relationship between climate change and adolescent girls’ education in rural contexts. Back then, it was difficult for many to fathom the notion of including education and climate change in the same sentence, let alone inferring that the two are somewhat interlinked. 

Over the years, I have worked to advance the education-climate change movement through research, scholarship, piloting and thought leadership, including the conceptualization and implementation of the Building Climate-Resilient Schools Pilot Project. I have continued to engage with key global influencing moments, in addition to penning and contributing to several blogs, a policy paper, academic journals, a thematic brief, as well as a youth friendly toolkit on the topic of education and climate change. 

Fast forward eight years later to 2024. Extreme climate and weather events are longer, more frequent, and more intense. What used to be climate change is now a climate emergency. The education sector is now more alive to the impact of climate extremes on learners, educators, and school infrastructure. We know more now about the intersection between education and climate change than we did back in 2016. However, there remain gaps in evidence on the education-climate change nexus to inform policy, programming, and financing. This is all the more reason to increase investment at the intersection of education and climate change, including through collaborative research partnerships, with the ultimate goal of building resilient education systems.

Educating for climate action through a gender transformative lens is more critical today than ever before. As I presented earlier this year, gender-transformative climate literacy is a promising pathway for achieving Bhutan’s ambitious climate goals while sustaining her carbon negative status at best or carbon neutral at worst. 

More recently, Bhutan’s Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MoESD) stated that the revised curriculum of the updated National Education Policy 2024 will design standards for mindfulness and well-being approaches, promote STEM for a green economy, and implement a comprehensive approach to climate change education at all educational levels. This appears to be a moment of the stars aligning, but hopefully this is only the beginning. 

Much work needs to be done to build the ecosystem needed for effective gender-transformative climate education. In focus group discussions held in August with over 300 students (grades 6 to 12) in Bhutan and their teachers, while they demonstrated high levels of environmental knowledge, eagerness to learn, and aspirations to be climate friendly, we also identified important gaps. Neither students nor teachers had a clear understanding of the gendered impacts of climate change. They also found it difficult to connect climate education or knowledge to climate action and were unclear on what role they specifically could play. 

As world leaders gather at COP29 it is critical that they not only recognize the intersections of climate, education, and gender, but also allocate needed financing, empower and trust in the competency and leadership of actors and institutions in the global south, and be our allies and sponsors. Lastly, led by UNESCO, I am hopeful that the Greening Education Partnership will come out with big wins on centering education in the climate narrative.

In a country like Pakistan where nearly 40% of the population lives with multidimensional poverty and the gender gap is the second highest in the world, increasing climate change-induced floods, irregular precipitation, heat waves, smog and drought are making women and girls’ access to their basic human rights even more difficult. Yet, as we have found in a few recently conducted studies, the relationship between climate change-induced calamities and education, particularly girls’ education, remains under studied in Pakistan.

Although the government takes precautionary measures by closing schools before monsoon rain floods, heat waves, and smog, learning losses associated with these measures remain neglected due to the lack of well thought out policy or planning. With donor support, the government has opened Temporary Learning Centers to continue education during floods, but many children, especially girls, who migrate outside of the flood-affected areas or support their families in recovering from flood-related damage cannot benefit from these centers. The existing cultural barriers to girls’ movement and security issues are further exacerbated due to standing flood water resulting in extended time out of school. Female teachers face mental well-being issues while balancing their role at school and home with flood damages, but this too remains unattended. The increasing smog-related health issues and drought also increase girls’ family responsibilities, keeping them out of school.

It is encouraging to see donors entering this area of investment. Yet more focused funding and concrete steps are needed to translate global scientific knowledge into local solutions that are practical and sustainable. As co-lead of the Climate Change Education Sub-Working Group under UNICEF’s Education Sector Working Group, my organization ILFABET is working on raising awareness with local government and civil society organizations. However, lack of adequate resources may hinder or slow the effectiveness of these types of actions on the ground. 

Adolescent girls are in danger due to the consequences of climate change. What is happening to them? Girls’ education is being affected by weather-related disasters, disrupting the education of approximately 37.5 million students each year. Adolescent girls are at greater risk of experiencing detrimental climate impacts such as poor academic performance and dropping out of school. Lack of water and sanitation services also affect adolescent girls’ reproductive health, with potential negative impacts on their psychosocial health and well-being.

Climate change is not gender neutral; rather it amplifies already existing gender inequalities with the most marginalized communities experiencing the greatest impacts. Adolescent girls are valuable human capital whose loss must be prevented now rather than later. “If current trends continue, by 2025 climate change could prevent more than 12 million girls from completing their education each year,” says Uraidah Hassani, an analyst in the World Bank’s Human Development Global Practice.

Adolescent girls must lead, make decisions, take action, and advance solutions to combat climate challenges. As world leaders gather at COP29, our call to action is to ensure that adolescent girls are able to participate in decisionmaking and political processes that affect them. This requires tackling the inequalities that girls face in attaining education and employment through improved access to basic education. Education systems and curricula need to challenge gender stereotypes and promote girls’ rights and gender equality. This will ensure what the empirical evidence already emphasizes, that for every additional year of schooling a girl receives, her country’s resilience to climate disasters improves.

Pakistan falls among the top ten climate vulnerable nations in the world, and South Punjab─comprising rural, under-resourced, educationally underperforming, and socially patriarchal districts─is the hardest hit region in the country, facing continuous cycles of heat waves, floods, and smog. The general population, particularly women and girls, is excluded from mitigation and adaptation plans and is expected to follow government directives for frequent school and highway closures, power outages, and flood evacuation warnings.

My organization, Aappa Aziz Trust, is collaborating with local organizations in Multan district to create citizen-led activities to combat climate change. We have begun working with adolescent girls and schoolchildren, who use theatrical performances and poetry to share knowledge and awareness about climate change in their schools, communities, and homes. They link abstract concepts with disruptions in their daily routines and invite others to pledge action.

The positive experience of this initiative encourages us to expand our work to include youth, women, and farmers. We aim to establish a proof of concept for the local government to initiate action forums that empower citizens, especially children, girls, and women, as active participants in climate change response strategies.

I hope that world leaders at COP29 will recognize climate response as a social movement owned, shaped, and led at the grassroots level. Women and girls, being the most vulnerable and with highest stakes, expect to lead social action and sit at the decisionmaking tables. This is not a matter of choice; it is an imperative for justice, equality, and dignified survival.

There’s a crucial gap in understanding how climate change and gender inequality intersect, especially in their impact on education. Global statistics show the scale of these issues: nearly 1,000 children under five die daily from inadequate water and sanitation, and by 2040, one in four children will live in areas with extreme water stress.

In Bangladesh, there remains a significant gap in recognizing the interconnectedness of climate change and gender inequality, particularly in policy-making spaces. Climate change disproportionately impacts women and girls, particularly those from vulnerable rural and ethnic communities. As climate change affects economic opportunities, migration patterns, and health needs, girls are often the first to drop out of school to support their families with care work, childbearing, and household responsibilities, increasing their risk of sexual and gender-based violence.

My NGO, Education & Cultural Society, is addressing these issues through our Environmental STEM ventures and action-based research with the Learning and Action Alliance for Girls’ Agency (LAAGA) in Bangladesh’s flood-prone Feni region. We also advocate for policies that address these interconnected issues and follow relevant Gender-Climate-Change training modules, including the Children’s Climate Risk Index and the Cyclone Preparedness Programme. 

Heading into COP29, policymakers must prioritize gender-specific climate resilience funding, education-centered adaptation policies, and community-driven solutions. These measures are essential for preventing dropout, enhancing economic stability, and building resilient communities. We hope to see commitments that bridge climate adaptation, gender equity, and education that empower women and girls as key actors in climate resilience.