When climate disasters strike, women are less likely to survive and more likely to be injured. When chronic climate risks unfold, they are among the first to be impacted. And when responses are shaped, whether through national policy or corporate strategy, they are too often overlooked.
While there is extensive data on climate risks for women, and gender equity features heavily in corporate commitments and events, are decision-makers truly doing enough to ensure meaningful equity in climate action? And is there a deeper understanding of the tangible benefits that gender inclusivity brings to climate planning?
In Sri Lanka, communities are already facing rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and worsening food insecurity. In a country where almost 90% of the farmers are smallholders, women make up 33-34% of the rural agricultural sector. However, there is limited gender-specific data on the scale and nature of climate impacts on these women, as well as gaps in gender-targeted policies in adaptation plans.
Women’s labour force participation in Sri Lanka is significantly lower than men’s, with only 34.1% of women engaged in the workforce, with most employed women concentrated in low-skilled, gender-segregated sectors like agriculture, garments, education, and healthcare.
Given that over 80% of the population lacks adaptive capacity to disasters that are on the rise, women bear the brunt due to their economic and social vulnerability. Certain groups of women are affected to varying degrees due to lower levels of education, health and employment, unequal access to both natural and financial resources, exclusionary policies, and unequal division of labour and unpaid care work burdens.
While there is continued activism and increasing recognition of the gender and climate adaptation nexus globally, we don’t see it reflected enough in the national policies and workplaces. It is imperative to move beyond treating gender equity and climate change as siloed issues and instead recognise them as interconnected socio-economic crises. Until national adaptation policies and the private sector reflect this reality, we will fail to address the challenges of half the population.
Gender-responsive national adaptation plans for equitable adaptation
Sri Lanka’s National Adaptation Plan (NAP) was released in 2016, and implemented over a period of 10 years until 2025. This NAP is a macro-level policy that addresses the need for climate adaptation, identifies priority areas and sectors for Sri Lanka, and outlines planning and implementation strategies at the national level.
While the NAP identifies some marginalised groups – such as estate and coastal communities – as target beneficiaries, it gives limited attention to gender-based vulnerabilities that are exacerbated by climate change. This is particularly striking given its stated goal of being “gender-sensitive”.
To ensure a truly gender-responsive NAP, three key aspects must be addressed. First, it is crucial to recognise women’s roles and capacities within priority sectors. In most of these sectors, women are not just beneficiaries but active agents of adaptation – leading efforts in activities, resource management and community resilience. It is essential to accurately identify their needs, contributions, and vulnerabilities, and to design inclusive strategies that reflect the differentiated impacts of climate change.
Second, adaptation planning tends to prioritise top-down, planned interventions led by government and development actors, often overlooking grassroots, autonomous adaptation efforts. This limits the scope for locally driven solutions such as livelihood diversification or investment in context-specific tools that are crucial for long-term resilience.
Meaningful participation
A gender-responsive NAP must strengthen mechanisms that enable women’s meaningful participation and influence in climate decision-making, particularly at the local level, ensuring their voices shape policy and implementation.
Third, traditional financial tools such as loans, savings, and insurance are often inaccessible to women, exacerbated by the fact that in most developing countries only 37% of women are likely to have access to bank accounts and credit services.
Despite the significant climate risks faced by women and girls, only 2.3% of global climate finance intends to principally support gender equality. As a result, their ability to prepare for, cope with, and recover from climate shocks is limited. There is a pressing need for gender-equitable access to climate finance, including innovative financial mechanisms that reduce post-disaster harm and long-term climate risks.
Livelihood diversification strategies must be designed with local gender dynamics in mind, ensuring that women are not excluded from new opportunities.
Without these measures, Sri Lanka’s adaptation efforts risk deepening gender inequalities instead of addressing them. Sri Lanka is now working on its Green Climate Fund (GCF) National Adaptation Plan (NAP) and has already launched a Readiness Support Project to strengthen its capacity for climate change adaptation.
This NAP, due to be released later this year, is set to focus on provincial-level government engagement and implementation strategies, and has actively included gender considerations. However, limited availability of gender baseline data poses considerable challenges for policymakers.
For successful implementation of gender-equity in policies, there is a pressing need to gather gender-disaggregated data that is context specific and can be fed to line ministries and provinces.
Women’s leadership for stronger corporate climate governance
Climate governance is not only the business of governments. In an increasingly climate-risked economy, companies need to adopt strong climate governance frameworks with clear C-suite responsibilities outlined. However, in the private sector, climate and gender are looked at in silos, particularly in emerging markets and developing economies. Gender issues must be looked at in tandem with climate-related issues – both for equity and for impact.
Within the private sector, there needs to be a shift from seeing women as beneficiaries to recognising them as decision-makers, implementers, and innovators. Research shows that women may be more likely to consider ESG issues as a corporate responsibility than men. According to the IFC’s 2024 Gender-Responsive Climate Governance report, women’s leadership in the private sector is not only symbolic – it delivers measurable results. Companies with at least 30% female board representation outperform their peers on climate policy and transparency. In one study examining 2,000 companies across 24 industrialised economies from 2009 to 2019, a 1% increase in the proportion of female managers was associated with a 0.5% decrease in CO2 emissions. This is one of many findings that highlight the tangible climate and sustainability benefits of increasing women’s representation in corporate leadership.
Female representation
However, in Sri Lanka, despite having over 35% women in the workforce, women board directors in CSE-listed boards has dropped from 10.1% in 2023 to 8.7% in 2024.
Organisations need to have higher female representation, not only in their workforce, but also in top management and boards. Given that men and women experience the climate crisis differently, women are naturally in a better position to advice on adaptive strategies, whether as company leadership or as engaged stakeholders.
As with national policies, corporates also need to start including gender-disaggregated data in their climate risk assessments, within their companies as well as in their value chain assessments. However, a recent study shows only 10% of top CSE-listed companies have adopted rigorous environmental disclosure frameworks, and the challenge of assessing climate risks at a gender-aggregated level is far more complex.
Addressing gender equity in climate action is not only about fairness and morality – it’s about designing more effective and inclusive solutions. As Sri Lanka develops its next NAP and as companies strengthen their climate strategies, there is a clear opportunity to embed gender considerations more meaningfully.
This means investing in better gender-disaggregated data, improving women representation at all levels, and ensuring that women are not only seen as vulnerable groups but also as key actors in adaptation and resilience. A more gender-responsive approach, in policy and in the private sector, will lead to more targeted, relevant, and lasting climate outcomes.
The writer is a Researcher at the Centre for a Smart Future (CSF). CSF is an interdisciplinary policy think tank focussing on an inclusive and sustainable economic recovery for Sri Lanka. Visit www.csf-asia.org/knowledge-insights for more.
