Women are on deck – it’s time they steered

Susana Malcorra is president and founder of GWL Voices and former foreign minister of Argentina. Mary Robinson is a GWL Voices member, former UN human rights commissioner and former Irish president.

Earth has just had the hottest August since records began. Wildfires tore through Europe, North America and Asia, killing dozens, forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes, and burning more than a million acres of land.

Susana Malcorra is president and founder of GWL Voices and former foreign minister of Argentina. Mary Robinson is a GWL Voices member, former UN human rights commissioner and former Irish president.

Earth has just had the hottest August since records began. Wildfires tore through Europe, North America and Asia, killing dozens, forcing hundreds of thousands from their homes, and burning more than a million acres of land.

In Nepal, flash floods triggered by a glacial lake outburst killed more than a thousand people and left thousands missing – a disaster Nepal’s foreign minister said reflected the disproportionate share of climate consequences borne by countries like his. Just recently, the UN Environment Programme confirmed what scientists have long warned: the world is now on track to breach 1.5C of warming, likely within the next few years.

As the climate crisis intensifies, one question is central: who is at the helm?

GWL Voices’ report, published this summer, shows that women are very much on deck in climate and environmental governance, but they are not steering the ship.

Of all climate COP Presidents since the annual conferences began over thirty years ago, three-quarters have been men. This matters because COP Presidents are among the most visible and influential roles in global climate governance. The climate COPs, however, are not the worst offenders. Another of the UN’s three environmental “sister conventions,” the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), has had a woman preside over its COP only three out of 17 times since 1997.

Structural inequality cascades down

Women’s underrepresentation is not a harmless coincidence. It’s a pattern that cascades down to other critical roles, including country delegates, heads of delegations, national focal points, and COP bureau members.

It is a structural inequality that limits the diversity of perspectives, priorities and decisions brought to bear on the environmental emergencies we face, and it is unfolding against a backdrop UN Women itself describes as one of “escalating conflicts, attacks on women’s rights, and environmental degradation.”

GWL Voices’ Spotlight on Women in Global Climate and Environmental Leadership shows that progress beyond the COPs is slow and sparse. While the Green Climate Fund has approached gender parity in its top leadership role over time, the IPCC, which is the body charged with compiling and communicating climate science to the world, has never appointed a woman to its top position of Chair in nearly four decades.

Gender focal points mainly women

Parity in environmental governance at the multilateral level remains extremely rare. There is, however, one role where women are, for once, not under- but substantially over-represented: when the task at hand is gender equality itself. Ninety percent of countries’ gender focal points under the biodiversity and climate conventions are women.

Relegating women to so-called “women’s issues” within climate and environmental governance is a particularly stark example of horizontal segregation, a pattern that repeats well beyond the multilateral level.

According to the Women in Politics Map 2026, prepared by UN Women and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the largest share of women cabinet ministers worldwide sit in Women and Gender Equality ministries (90%) and family and children affairs (73%), while they remain sidelined in strategic areas including economic affairs (18%), foreign affairs (29%) and energy (12%).

‘Hectic’ in high heels? Women still face gender hurdles at UN climate talks

The danger of this segregation is that women’s rights come to be seen as women’s responsibility alone, which does nothing to advance equality, since the problem affects us all and requires everyone’s active engagement to solve.

Conversations about gender and climate too often focus on women’s vulnerability to climate impacts. That angle reflects a real problem, but it hides a second one: access to decision-making. Women are not simply “victims” of the climate and nature crisis, they are among its most experienced responders, its most consistent advocates, and, when given the chance, its most effective leaders.

Studies show women leaders’ impact

What if women had an equal seat at the decision-making table? Would environmental governance be more effective? The evidence says it would. Research by Norgaard and York (2005), Mavisakalyan and Tarverdi (2018), and Fredriksson and Wang (2011) finds that women leaders are more likely to support environmental protection, ratify environmental treaties, and adopt stricter climate policies.

Following last year’s COP30 – where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted a landmark, nine-year plan to mainstream gender equality across climate governance and implementation – GWL Voices called for the same principles: gender parity across all climate bodies, Indigenous women’s voices embedded in policy design, gender-responsive climate finance with transparent tracking, and real accountability for women-led initiatives. Its 2026 report is the evidence for why implementation of the Belém Gender Action Plan cannot wait any longer.

Why women’s leadership is central to unlocking the global phaseout of fossil fuels

As the world convenes for Climate Week NYC, weeks before the UN chooses its next Secretary-General, and less than two months before COP31, we raise our voices for this message to reach those who hold power.

Let’s start seeing the climate crisis as a governance crisis, one with an outrageous blindspot for women’s leadership, ingenuity and readiness to decide. We invite every government, institution or boardroom, and every person to read the spotlight report in full, identify the pattern in the ranks of their own organisations, and use whatever power they hold to break it.

Because when it comes to the climate crisis, women’s hands are already on deck; it’s time we let them steer.