Climate change has proven to have disproportionate impacts on the world’s most vulnerable. Women, girls, and gender-diverse groups—especially those living in poverty—face devastating threats to their livelihoods.
Though often at the forefront of climate advocacy and solution-building, women’s and girls’ specific experiences are not always addressed when policy is created. Much of the problem stems from a lack of climate-environment data on women and girls to accurately measure their individual needs and contributions. Gender data is a challenge to environmentalists—it can be difficult to collect, it requires dedicated financing, and for many years, there was no clear space that brought people and resources together to address it.
Seeing these problems, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and International Union for Conservation of Nature, with the help of gender data activists like Data2X, developed the Gender and Environment Data Alliance (GEDA). As a commitment made during the Generation Equality Forum in 2021, the coalition has set out to build an evidence base required to support gender-equitable climate action.
GEDA helps governments, funders, practitioners and activists better respond to the gendered realities of their climate contexts and realize collective agendas for environmental and climate justice. Creating this coalition space was the first time that practitioners, advocates, and experts were brought together to shed light on the gendered impacts of climate change and resource activities supporting gender-environment data—with dedicated staff time, networks, a planned fellowship program, and grants to launch this critical work.
Today, GEDA serves as a hub for a broad range of organizations working on the intersection of gender and the environment through a data lens. As a membership-based coalition, they contribute technical support and coordinated advocacy, ultimately helping to create and implement climate plans and policies that meet the needs of women and girls in all their diversity. Members of the Alliance are active from the grassroots to the national level, working closely with all levels of government to improve gender-responsive policy and programming related to the climate crisis.
“GEDA intends to help build the evidence base required to support gender-just climate action at all levels, to realize collective agendas for environmental and climate justice…environmental justice and gender justice can’t be separated from each other.”
– Katie Tobin, Women’s Environment and Development Organization
In the years to come, GEDA’s goal is to continue uniting a broad bench of activists in the gender, climate, and data spaces. Over the next five years, they aim to bring their advocacy to a higher level by becoming a forum for collecting, curating, and communicating data, knowledge, and information—ultimately informing and influencing future gender-just climate action for generations to come.