Commentary 25/06/09 Where are women’s rights in the Jesuit call for climate justice?

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Conspicuously absent is a gender equality and women’s rights analysis

The Society of Jesus, through its policy statement, 'Jesuits for Climate Justice: SB62 and COP 30 Campaign,' aims to intensify its advocacy for climate justice at COP 30. (Photo: jcapsj.org)

By Jean D’Cunha

Published: June 09, 2025 12:10 PM GMT

Updated: June 09, 2025 12:55 PM GMT

The current trajectory of climate action places us on the brink of a planetary crisis. Inspired by the Papal encyclical Laudato Si' that urges sustainable development rooted in integral ecology, justice and equality especially for the vulnerable and systemic transformation, the Global Jesuit community has launched its policy statement, “Jesuits for Climate Justice: SB62 and COP 30 Campaign,” for advocacy at the Global Climate Conference of Parties (COP 30) preparatory session (June, Bonn) and at COP 30 (November, Brazil) this year.

The statement advocates for canceling the debt of underdeveloped countries and strengthening the climate loss and damage fund (LDF). It calls for a UN public grants mechanism, especially for adaptation and loss and damage (L&D) financing, rather than loans from the private sector and multilateral banks that exacerbate debts. It demands accelerated agreements and targets for a just energy transition to reduce emissions, and target-setting for an agroecological Global Food Sovereignty System

Conspicuously absent is a gender equality and women’s rights analysis, save a cursory reference to women’s food and nutrition insecurity. The paper overlooks Laudato Si’spowerful emphasis on centering women in integral ecology, albeit with the need to counteract biological essentialism, as well as the impact of climate change on the poor. 

Quoting Francis on facing "one complex crisis that is both social and environmental," it fails to show its disproportionate effects on women and girls, undermining integral ecology.

Debt crises and related austerity measures disproportionately impact women and girls, worsening existing gender inequalities. Critical social services (education, healthcare, social protection) are often the first hit in public spending cuts to manage debt. This places a heftier burden on women who bear the main responsibility for unpaid care work in households and communities, often alongside paid/unpaid public work.

As public services contract, women and girls spend more time fetching food, fuel and water, caring for children and fragile household members, providing home-based schooling, and foregoing violence-related services. This compromises their education, paid employment, safety and health. 

Women dominate public sector jobs where austerity-related wage freezes or layoffs erode their economic security, trapping them in a web of restricted opportunities and multi-dimensional poverty. This sharpens their climate vulnerability with disproportionate climate impacts, particularly on the most excluded versus men and better-placed women.

Turning to the LDF, many poor countries lack ‘normal time’ data disaggregated by sex and other variables on critical political and socio-economic indicators (women’s work sectors, asset ownership, time spent on care work, etc). Climate risk assessments and management, post-disaster L&D assessments, and related databases are thus often gender blind.

Furthermore, L&D is generally measured in terms of GDP, a market-centric approach that excludes household and subsistence work typically performed by women. Additionally, impacts such as the loss of human lives, cultural heritage, ecosystem services, indigenous knowledge, community networks, health, or costs related to male migration are difficult to measure, as they do not typically have monetary values. However, these are issues that significantly affect and impact women more than men. Uncounted non-economic L&D excludes women’s concerns from L&D policy and finance, eroding their adaptive and recovery capacities.

Calls for clean, renewable energy (RE) overlook the specific displacement impacts on women caused by large RE projects that neither pre-consult with local women (and men) nor implement mitigation measures. The loss of housing, decreases in women’s privacy, exposure to physical and sexual safety risks, job loss, and increased care burdens from disrupted education for children and caring for vulnerable family members significantly affect women.

The traditional energy sector’s mammoth technical infrastructure, centralized production, distribution and decision-making excludes women. However, RE offers huge promise if it is intentional about upholding women’s rights. For example, it can create more jobs for women, given its multi-disciplinarity, longer and more diverse supply chains, and potential for decentralization. 

The Ignatian call for an agroecologically-based Global Food Sovereignty system — over current systems that contribute to climate change, biodiversity loss, food and nutrition poverty — misses women’s centrality to food systems.

Women are 43 percent of the global agricultural workforce, and produce nearly half of the world's food. As small-scale low emissions subsistence farmers, small livestock raisers, managers of natural resources, conservers of ecological systems, consumers of less emissions-intensive goods and services, they emit less greenhouse gases than men.

However, gender and other inequalities position them at the lower rungs of agricultural value chains, marginalizing them from resources (economic: land, credit, and income; socio-political: time, care, extension, and health services, decision-making, and safety). This increases vulnerability to climate crises that disproportionately impact women relative to men. Their poor access to social protection and finance delays their recovery more than for men, worst affecting the most excluded women (landless laborers, poor female-headed households, indigenous and migrant women, etc).

But women cope, are front-line responders in climate crises and active change agents. They lead movements against deforestation, unsustainable infrastructure projects, restore forests, adopt agroecological practices leading to their improved productivity, living standards and household and community decision-making. Their local knowledge, technical, social and leadership skills inform climate-resilience building. They tend to place social and environmental issues and concerns of those in their care (e.g., children) besides their own, on policy agendas, more than men.

The Jesuit discourse and action on climate change consequently need to call for:

1. Disaggregated national/sub-national data by sex and other variables on ‘normal time’ status indicators for women, especially in agriculture
2. Gender-responsive methodologies to generate non-economic L&D data, including on impacts of heavier care work, with tools for policy application
3. Consultations with diverse groups of women on their climate priorities in agriculture, documentation of these and women’s promising agroecological interventions.
4. Embedding these evidence-based priorities, including non-economic L&D into the design, implementation, monitoring and eval‎uation of climate, agricultural, water, energy policies/programs and the L&D fund, with gender responsive targets, indicators, budgets, with women core to decision-making. Key priorities include ownership/access to land and other assets, access to climate-smart information, agroecological technologies, inputs, infrastructure, extension services, green entrepreneurship support, and climate finance.
5. Consultations by RE projects with women in communities at risk and executing mitigation strategies acceptable to them.
6. Gender-responsive RE/decentralized RE policies and programs that increase women’s decent work, at all levels, support women’s RE entrepreneurship, women as RE prosumers, consumers and traders, with similar approaches in the circular economy
7.  Gender-responsive climate financing (e.g., L&D adaptation), with women’s representation on these mechanisms, gender benchmarks for climate finance with monitoring and corrective mechanisms, increased accessible, multi-year funds for local women’s organizations.

* Dr Jean D’Cunha is a gender expert with a continuing body of work on women’s labor migration and the links between gender, climate change, conflict and migration. She worked with UN Women in senior management and technical positions worldwide and retired as Senior Global Advisor on International Migration and Decent Work.The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.