Women and the Environment in India
The relationship between women and the environment in India is profound, complex, and increasingly critical as climate change intensifies and environmental degradation accelerates. Women, particularly in rural areas, depend directly on natural resources for survival—collecting water, gathering fuel, growing food, and managing household needs through environmental interactions. Simultaneously, women bear disproportionate burdens when environmental degradation occurs—walking further for water, spending more time finding fuel, facing food insecurity, and managing climate disasters’ impacts on families.
Yet despite this intimate connection to environmental wellbeing and heightened vulnerability to environmental crises, women remain marginalized in environmental decision-making, excluded from resource governance, and underrepresented in climate policy. Understanding the gendered dimensions of environmental issues, recognizing women’s environmental knowledge and activism, and ensuring women’s central participation in creating sustainable, just environmental futures are essential for both gender equality and ecological sustainability.
The Gendered Division of Environmental Labor
Understanding women’s relationship to environment requires examining how gender shapes environmental work, resource access, and climate vulnerability.
Women as Primary Resource Managers
In rural India, women perform most tasks involving natural resource collection and management.
Water Collection
- Water collection is predominantly women’s work—they walk to wells, ponds, rivers, or public taps multiple times daily, carrying heavy vessels.
- Studies indicate women spend 3-4 hours daily on water collection in water-scarce areas, time unavailable for education, income generation, or rest.
Fuel Collection
- Fuel collection similarly falls to women and girls.
- Gathering firewood, cow dung for fuel cakes, or agricultural residue requires hours of labor.
- As deforestation progresses and biomass becomes scarce, collection distances increase, intensifying women’s workload.
- The physical toll—carrying heavy loads over long distances—causes chronic health problems including back pain, joint damage, and reproductive health issues.
Food Production in Subsistence Agriculture
- Food production in subsistence agriculture involves significant female labor.
- Women plant, weed, harvest, process, and store crops.
- They maintain kitchen gardens providing vegetables and herbs.
- Post-harvest processing—cleaning grains, drying crops, grinding flour—is almost entirely women’s work.
- Women’s agricultural knowledge about seed varieties, planting schedules, pest management, and storage techniques is extensive but rarely formally acknowledged.
Livestock Care
- Livestock care—feeding animals, collecting fodder, cleaning sheds, milking, and managing animal health—is predominantly female responsibility.
- Women’s livestock knowledge, particularly about local breeds and traditional veterinary practices, represents valuable environmental knowledge.
This gendered division means women have intimate, daily interaction with environmental resources. They notice environmental changes first—water sources drying, forest degradation, soil quality declining, changing weather patterns affecting crops. Yet this experiential knowledge is often dismissed as anecdotal rather than recognized as valuable ecological monitoring.
Summary of Gendered Environmental Labor
| Environmental Activity | Women’s Role | Impact of Environmental Degradation |
|---|---|---|
| Water Collection | Walking to wells, ponds, rivers, or taps multiple times daily | Longer distances, more time spent, reduced time for education or income |
| Fuel Collection | Gathering firewood, dung cakes, agricultural residue | Increased workload, health issues due to heavy loads |
| Food Production | Planting, weeding, harvesting, processing, storing crops | Crop loss, food insecurity, greater household stress |
| Livestock Care | Feeding, fodder collection, milking, animal health management | Fodder scarcity, livestock health decline |
Unpaid and Undervalued Environmental Work
Women’s environmental labor is largely unpaid, unrecognized in economic accounting, and socially devalued. National accounts don’t capture water collection, fuel gathering, or subsistence food production as “productive work,” rendering women “economically inactive” despite working long hours providing essential household needs.
This invisibility has policy consequences.
- Development projects don’t account for women’s time costs when planning infrastructure.
- Environmental programs don’t compensate women for conservation labor.
- Economic analyses ignore how environmental degradation specifically burdens women through increased unpaid work.
The undervaluation reflects broader devaluation of women’s work and association of “nature” with femininity as inferior to culture/civilization associated with masculinity. Challenging this requires recognizing environmental work as valuable labor and women as crucial environmental managers, not merely passive victims of degradation.
Climate Change: Gendered Vulnerabilities And Impacts
Climate change affects everyone but not equally. Women, particularly poor rural women, face heightened vulnerabilities due to existing inequalities that climate change exacerbates.
Direct Impacts On Women’s Work
Water Availability And Burden
Changing rainfall patterns affect water availability, increasing distances women must travel for water collection. Droughts mean women spend more time finding water, sometimes walking hours to sources that previously took minutes to reach. Floods contaminate water sources, requiring women to travel further for clean water or spend time treating contaminated water.
| Climate Change Factor | Impact On Women |
|---|---|
| Droughts | Longer walking distances for water collection |
| Floods | Contaminated water sources, increased treatment time |
| Irregular Rainfall | Uncertain access to drinking water |
Heat And Physical Labor
Temperature increases make outdoor work more physically demanding. Women working in agriculture, collecting fuel, or managing livestock labor in extreme heat, facing health risks including dehydration, heat stroke, and exhaustion. Indoor cooking over biomass stoves in unventilated spaces becomes even more dangerous in high temperatures.
- Dehydration
- Heat stroke
- Exhaustion
- Respiratory risks from indoor smoke
Deforestation And Fuel Collection
Deforestation and forest degradation, driven partly by climate change, increases fuel collection time. Women must walk further into degraded forests for diminishing biomass. Time spent on fuel collection reduces time for education, income generation, or rest. Some families substitute agricultural residue that could fertilize soil, creating vicious cycles of environmental degradation and poverty.
Agricultural Impacts
Agricultural impacts—erratic monsoons, extreme weather, pest pattern changes, crop failures—affect women as farmers and food security managers. Women must adapt farming practices to changing conditions, often with limited resources or support. Failed harvests mean families go hungry, with women typically eating last and least, intensifying malnutrition.
Climate Disasters And Gender
Natural disasters—floods, droughts, cyclones—caused or intensified by climate change have gendered impacts. Women and children are more likely to die in disasters due to mobility restrictions, lack of swimming skills, caring responsibilities keeping them with children, and inadequate warning systems not reaching women.
Violence And Vulnerability During Disasters
- Sexual assault in evacuation shelters
- Domestic violence intensified by disaster stress
- Trafficking exploiting displacement
Disaster response often ignores women’s specific needs—menstrual hygiene products, maternal health services, child care support, or privacy in relief camps.
Post-Disaster Recovery
Post-disaster recovery burdens women disproportionately. They manage household survival amid destroyed infrastructure, care for injured family members, and maintain family cohesion despite resource scarcity. Yet relief distribution often targets male heads of households, assuming resources reach all family members when power dynamics within families may prevent equitable distribution.
Reconstruction programs typically employ men in rebuilding work, leaving women economically marginalized. Agricultural recovery assistance goes to male farmers while women’s agricultural contributions remain uncompensated. Women’s participation in disaster planning and recovery decision-making is minimal despite their crucial roles.
Climate Migration
Climate-induced environmental stress drives migration—men leaving degraded areas for urban employment. This male out-migration leaves women as “climate widows” managing farms and households alone, with increased workloads but without decision-making authority or asset ownership that remain with absent husbands.
- Performing both “men’s work” and “women’s work”
- Limited access to credit and agricultural inputs
- Restricted mobility to markets
- Reduced negotiation power
When entire families migrate, women face different vulnerabilities. Urban migration means loss of traditional support networks and environmental knowledge. Women may be confined to urban slums without resources or mobility while men seek employment. Urban environments create new risks—sanitation challenges, water scarcity, pollution exposure, and sexual violence in crowded settlements.
Resource Access And Control: Gendered Exclusions
Women’s dependence on natural resources contrasts sharply with their minimal control over resource access, ownership, or management decisions.
Land Rights
Despite their agricultural work, women rarely own land. Inheritance practices favor sons, and married women typically don’t claim shares in parental property. Land titles are in men’s names, excluding women from being recognized as farmers or resource owners.
Landlessness has cascading consequences:
- Cannot access agricultural credit requiring land collateral
- Excluded from government programs targeting landowners
- Lack economic security and fallback resources
- Agricultural knowledge remains undervalued
The Forest Rights Act (2006) provided opportunities for recognizing women’s forest rights by mandating joint land titles for married couples and representation in forest governance. However, implementation remains uneven, with many women still lacking individual or joint rights recognition.
Water Governance
Women are primary water collectors and users but rarely participate in water management decisions. Panchayat water committees, irrigation cooperatives, and water user associations are dominated by male members who make decisions about water allocation, infrastructure, and pricing without consulting primary users.
When women are included in water governance, their participation is often tokenistic—present but not actually influencing decisions. Meetings scheduled at times women cannot attend, conducted in ways that silence women, or dominated by higher-caste or wealthier men marginalize women’s voices and knowledge.
Privatization of water resources—through corporate control, private tankers, or bottled water—disproportionately affects poor women who cannot afford purchasing water. Treating water as commodity rather than common resource or human right intensifies gender and class inequalities.
Forest Access
Women depend on forests for fuel, fodder, food, and medicinal plants but face restrictions on forest access. Conservation policies sometimes exclude communities from forests, prohibiting resource collection that women depend on. While conservation is necessary, approaches that criminalize subsistence use without providing alternatives harm women.
The shift from traditional commons management to state forest departments centralized control, often excluding women from participation. Male forest officials interact primarily with male community members, designing management plans without women’s input despite women’s extensive forest knowledge and dependence.
Joint Forest Management programs intended to involve communities have mixed records on women’s participation. Women’s forest committees exist in some places but often lack real power. Men dominate decisions about forest use, commercial exploitation, and benefit distribution.
Environmental Degradation’s Gendered Costs
Health Impacts
Air pollution from indoor cooking smoke—women spending hours daily over biomass stoves in poorly ventilated kitchens—causes respiratory diseases, eye problems, and cardiovascular conditions. Women cooking with traditional stoves inhale smoke equivalent to burning 400 cigarettes per hour, leading to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and lung cancer.
Water contamination from industrial pollution, agricultural runoff, or arsenic affects women managing household water needs. They must find clean sources, treat water, or use contaminated water risking family health. Waterborne diseases increase care burdens as women nurse sick family members.
Chemical exposure in agriculture affects women workers. Pesticide spraying without protective equipment causes acute poisoning and long-term health effects. Women’s reproductive health is particularly vulnerable to chemical exposure, with impacts including menstrual disorders, pregnancy complications, and birth defects.
Economic Impacts
Resource scarcity means women must work harder for same outcomes—traveling further for water or fuel, working longer on degraded land for lower yields. This labor intensification leaves less time for income generation, education, or rest.
Crop failures from climate change or soil degradation affect household food security and income. Women manage food shortages through their own nutritional deprivation, reducing consumption to feed families. Chronic malnutrition results from repeated environmental shocks affecting harvests.
Loss of commons—forests, grazing lands, water bodies—from privatization or degradation eliminates resources women accessed freely. Forced to purchase what they previously gathered, women’s poverty intensifies while time once spent on productive activities goes to resource collection.
Women’s Environmental Activism And Movements
Despite marginalization, women have been at the forefront of environmental movements in India, challenging resource exploitation and demanding sustainability.
The Chipko Movement
The Chipko Movement (1970s) remains iconic women’s environmental activism. Rural women in Uttarakhand embraced trees to prevent logging, physically protecting forests from commercial exploitation. Their slogan “What do forests bear? Soil, water, and pure air” emphasized forests’ ecological functions over commercial timber value.
- Physically protecting forests from commercial exploitation
- Emphasizing ecological functions over timber value
- Prioritizing survival over profit-driven interests
Chipko was fundamentally about survival—women protecting resources essential for daily subsistence against commercial interests prioritizing profit. It demonstrated women’s environmental knowledge, organizational capacity, and willingness to resist powerful interests threatening their livelihoods.
While Chipko achieved some logging restrictions, its deeper significance lies in demonstrating subsistence users’ valid claims against commercial exploitation, women’s capacity for environmental leadership, and connections between environmental protection and social justice.
| Aspect | Significance |
|---|---|
| Environmental Protection | Resisted deforestation and commercial logging |
| Women’s Leadership | Demonstrated organizational capacity and grassroots activism |
| Social Justice | Linked environmental sustainability with livelihood rights |
Anti-Dam Movements
Women have been central to anti-dam movements like Narmada Bachao Andolan, resisting large dams displacing communities and destroying river ecosystems. Medha Patkar led NBA, and many grassroots women activists participated in protests, rehabilitation negotiations, and awareness campaigns.
- Participation in protests and demonstrations
- Engagement in rehabilitation negotiations
- Raising awareness about displacement and ecological loss
Women opposed dams partly because displacement disrupts communities, social networks, and environmental knowledge tied to specific places. Resettlement rarely adequately compensates losses of home, community, livelihood sources, and cultural connections to land.
| Impact Of Dams | Consequences For Women |
|---|---|
| Community Displacement | Loss of social networks and cultural ties |
| Livelihood Disruption | Reduced access to traditional resource sources |
| Environmental Damage | Destruction of river ecosystems |
Local Resource Conflicts
Countless local conflicts over resource access, privatization, pollution, or conservation feature women’s resistance—fisherwomen protesting coastal development, urban women opposing waste incinerators in neighborhoods, farmers’ wives resisting corporate seed monopolies, tribal women defending forest rights.
- Fisherwomen protesting coastal development
- Urban women opposing waste incinerators
- Farmers’ wives resisting corporate seed monopolies
- Tribal women defending forest rights
These struggles, often unreported in mainstream media, demonstrate women’s environmental consciousness and willingness to challenge power to protect resources, health, and livelihoods. They represent ongoing, everyday environmental activism by ordinary women confronting extraordinary threats.
Ecofeminism: Linking Gender And Environmental Justice
Ecofeminism articulates connections between women’s oppression and environmental degradation, arguing that patriarchal systems dominating women also dominate nature.
Theoretical Connections
Ecofeminists identify conceptual dualisms—culture/nature, reason/emotion, male/female, civilization/wilderness—structuring Western thought. These dualisms assign higher value to first terms (associated with masculinity) while devaluing second terms (associated with femininity and nature).
- Culture / Nature
- Reason / Emotion
- Male / Female
- Civilization / Wilderness
Domination of nature through resource extraction, pollution, and environmental destruction parallels women’s subordination through control, exploitation, and violence. Both rest on ideologies positioning certain beings (women, nature) as inferior, properly dominated by superior beings (men, civilization).
Women-nature connections are double-edged. Associating women with nature has justified women’s subordination as “natural” and closer to nature’s irrationality versus men’s cultural/rational superiority. Yet these connections also enable women to articulate environmentalism grounded in their experiences and to position themselves as having special environmental insights or stakes.
Critiques And Debates
Ecofeminism faces critiques. Essentializing women as inherently nurturing or naturally connected to nature reproduces stereotypes justifying women’s confinement to domestic/reproductive spheres while excluding them from public/political realms.
- Risk of reinforcing gender stereotypes
- Exclusion from public and political participation
- Oversimplification of women’s diverse experiences
Not all women are environmentalists; many women exploit nature just as men do when they have power and resources. Conversely, many men care about environment and practice sustainability. Gender doesn’t determine environmental attitudes or behaviors in simple ways.
Western-centric origins of some ecofeminist theory and its sometimes romanticizing of indigenous or Third World women’s relationships to nature without engaging their actual complex situations has been criticized. Effective ecofeminism must ground itself in specific contexts and real women’s experiences rather than abstract theorizing.
Despite critiques, ecofeminism’s core insights remain valuable—that gender and environmental justice are interconnected, that addressing either requires addressing both, and that sustainable futures require challenging domination in all forms.
Women’s Environmental Knowledge
Women possess extensive environmental knowledge often dismissed or ignored in formal environmental management and policy.
Indigenous and Local Knowledge
Women’s agricultural knowledge—seed varieties suited to local conditions, planting calendars based on weather patterns, natural pest management, soil fertility maintenance, post-harvest processing and storage—has sustained communities for generations. This knowledge, transmitted mother to daughter, is context-specific, adaptive, and ecologically sound.
- Seed Varieties: Suited to local conditions
- Planting Calendars: Based on weather patterns
- Natural Pest Management: Ecologically sound methods
- Soil Fertility Maintenance: Sustainable soil practices
- Post-Harvest Processing and Storage: Traditional preservation techniques
Medicinal plant knowledge is often held by women who gather, prepare, and use plants for family health care. Women know which plants treat specific ailments, how to prepare remedies, and where plants grow. This knowledge represents both healthcare resource and biodiversity conservation.
- Identification of plants for specific ailments
- Preparation of traditional remedies
- Knowledge of plant habitats
- Healthcare resource and biodiversity conservation
Water management knowledge—identifying clean sources, seasonal variations, traditional storage methods, water conservation practices—guides daily water use. Women’s observations about water quality changes, source depletion, or contamination provide environmental monitoring data.
| Area of Knowledge | Key Contributions |
|---|---|
| Clean Water Sources | Identifying safe and reliable sources |
| Seasonal Variations | Understanding fluctuations in availability |
| Traditional Storage Methods | Preserving water safely |
| Water Conservation Practices | Efficient daily usage and sustainability |
| Environmental Monitoring | Tracking quality changes and contamination |
This knowledge is increasingly threatened as globalization, formal education systems, and development paradigms devalue traditional knowledge in favor of scientific expertise. Younger women may not learn traditional practices, creating knowledge loss as older generations pass away.
Recognizing and Integrating Women’s Knowledge
Effective environmental management requires recognizing women’s knowledge as valid expertise, not merely “anecdotal” or “traditional” in dismissive senses. Women’s knowledge should inform:
Agricultural Policy and Research
Agricultural policy and research by involving women farmers in participatory research, recognizing their innovations, and supporting rather than displacing their practices with inappropriate technologies.
Water Management Planning
Water management planning through women’s participation in designing infrastructure, setting priorities, and monitoring implementation. Women’s knowledge about household water needs, seasonal patterns, and source quality should guide decisions.
Forest Management
Forest management by including women in forest planning, recognizing their forest dependence and knowledge, and designing conservation compatible with subsistence needs.
Climate Adaptation Strategies
Climate adaptation strategies developed with women’s input about local climate change observations, traditional adaptation practices, and specific vulnerabilities women face.
Policy and Institutional Frameworks
Several policies and institutional mechanisms address environmental and gender connections, though implementation gaps persist.
National Action Plan on Climate Change
India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change recognizes gender dimensions of climate impacts and includes gender as cross-cutting concern. However, specific gendered strategies and adequate resources for gender-responsive climate action remain limited.
Gender mainstreaming in climate policy requires moving beyond rhetorical recognition to concrete actions—gender-disaggregated data collection, women’s participation in decision-making, gender impact assessments of climate programs, and targeted support for women’s climate adaptation.
Forest Rights Act
The Forest Rights Act (2006) marked significant progress by recognizing community forest rights and mandating women’s participation. Joint land titles for married couples and women’s representation in forest committees create opportunities for women’s inclusion.
However, implementation challenges limit Act’s potential. Many communities haven’t received rights recognition. Women’s committee participation is often tokenistic. Legal recognition hasn’t translated to substantive power in forest governance.
Water Policy
The National Water Policy mentions gender perspectives and women’s participation in water management. However, male domination in water institutions persists. Women’s participation remains limited and often ineffective due to structural constraints.
Gender-responsive water policy requires ensuring women’s representation with real decision-making power, scheduling and conducting meetings accommodating women’s participation, building women’s capacity for effective engagement, and recognizing women’s water knowledge.
Environmental Impact Assessments
Environmental Impact Assessments for development projects rarely include gender analysis of how projects differently affect women and men. EIAs don’t typically assess impacts on women’s workloads, resource access, or health, leading to projects that intensify gender inequalities.
Integrating gender into EIA requires assessing project impacts on women’s unpaid work, resource collection, health, safety, and livelihoods, consulting women in affected communities, and designing mitigation measures addressing gender-specific impacts.
Pathways to Gender-Just Environmental Futures
Creating sustainable, equitable environmental futures requires comprehensive strategies centering women’s rights, participation, and knowledge.
Securing Resource Rights
Land Rights for Women
Land rights for women through inheritance law enforcement, joint land titles, and land redistribution programs prioritizing women would provide economic security and recognition as farmers. Secure land tenure enables women to make long-term land investments, access credit and programs, and exercise authority over land use.
| Measure | Impact on Women |
|---|---|
| Inheritance Law Enforcement | Ensures women legally inherit land |
| Joint Land Titles | Provides shared ownership and recognition |
| Land Redistribution Programs | Prioritizes women’s economic security |
| Secure Land Tenure | Enables long-term investment, credit access, and land authority |
Water Rights and Governance
Water rights recognizing women’s primary water use and management roles would ensure women’s participation in water governance, prioritize domestic and productive water needs women manage, and protect against privatization harming poor women.
- Recognize women’s water management roles
- Ensure participation in water governance
- Prioritize domestic and productive water needs
- Protect against privatization harming poor women
Forest Rights Implementation
Forest rights implementation ensuring women’s individual and collective forest rights, meaningful participation in forest governance, and recognition of women’s forest dependence and knowledge would benefit women while supporting sustainable forest management.
- Individual forest rights
- Collective forest rights
- Participation in forest governance
- Recognition of women’s forest knowledge
Climate Justice
Gender-Responsive Climate Policy
Gender-responsive climate policy requires women’s leadership in climate planning and implementation, resources for women-led adaptation, recognition of women’s climate vulnerabilities and adaptation knowledge, and accountability for gendered climate impacts.
Disaster Preparedness and Response
Disaster preparedness incorporating women’s knowledge about vulnerabilities, ensuring women’s participation in planning, designing response meeting women’s needs, and post-disaster support benefiting women would reduce gendered disaster impacts.
Climate Finance Priorities
Climate finance should prioritize projects benefiting women, support women’s adaptation initiatives, and flow to women-led organizations and grassroots groups rather than only large-scale infrastructure or male-dominated institutions.
Participatory Environmental Governance
Ensuring women’s meaningful participation in environmental decision-making at all levels requires moving beyond tokenism to substantive inclusion. This means:
- Quotas and Reservations: Guaranteeing women’s representation in environmental committees, water user associations, forest committees, and climate planning bodies.
- Capacity Building: Supporting women’s leadership development, technical training, and confidence to participate effectively in formal governance structures.
- Accessible Processes: Scheduling meetings accommodating women’s time, conducting meetings in languages and ways enabling women’s participation, and creating cultures where women’s contributions are valued.
- Support for Women-Led Organizations: Receiving resources and recognition to enable them to articulate priorities, implement programs, and influence policy rather than operating merely as beneficiaries of programs designed by others.
Technology and Infrastructure
Appropriate Technology
Appropriate technology reducing women’s environmental work burdens while being sustainable—efficient cookstoves reducing fuel needs and smoke exposure, accessible water sources reducing collection distances, renewable energy systems, labor-saving agricultural tools suitable for women’s use.
Infrastructure Investment
Infrastructure investment prioritizing women’s needs—water supply near homes, electricity enabling electric cooking, sanitation facilities, all-weather roads reducing isolation—would reduce environmental work while improving wellbeing.
Technology and infrastructure must be designed with women’s input, appropriate to local contexts, affordable for poor communities, and environmentally sustainable rather than simply transferring environmental costs or creating new dependencies.
Education and Awareness
Environmental Education
Environmental education including gender dimensions teaches all people about environmental-gender connections, challenges stereotypes about women’s environmental roles, and prepares both girls and boys for environmental stewardship.
Rights Awareness and Legal Literacy
Awareness about rights ensures women know their environmental rights—to water, forests, land, participation—and can assert them. Legal literacy about Forest Rights Act, property laws, and environmental regulations empowers women to claim entitlements.
Conclusion: Interdependent Futures
Women’s rights and environmental sustainability are not separate issues but deeply interconnected. Environmental degradation disproportionately harms women while women’s marginalization undermines environmental sustainability. Conversely, women’s empowerment and environmental conservation mutually reinforce—empowered women can better participate in environmental management while sustainable environments reduce women’s burdens.
Creating gender-just environmental futures requires recognizing women as environmental actors—not merely victims of degradation but knowledgeable managers, innovative problem-solvers, and committed activists. It requires valuing women’s environmental work, securing their resource rights, ensuring their participation in environmental governance, and supporting their leadership in creating sustainable futures.
The environmental challenges India faces—climate change, water scarcity, deforestation, pollution, biodiversity loss—cannot be addressed without confronting gender inequalities that determine who bears environmental burdens, who accesses resources, and who decides environmental policies. Gender-blind environmentalism that ignores power relations reproduces injustices while claiming sustainability.
Similarly, gender equality cannot be achieved while ignoring environmental dimensions. Women’s rights to health, livelihood, safety, and participation are inseparable from environmental conditions enabling or constraining these rights. Feminism that doesn’t engage environmental justice leaves women vulnerable to climate change and resource scarcity’s mounting impacts.
The path forward requires integrated approaches recognizing that environmental sustainability, gender equality, social justice, and economic equity are interconnected imperatives. It requires challenging systems that dominate both women and nature, creating alternatives based on care, sustainability, and justice. It requires centering those most affected—poor rural women bearing environmental degradation’s heaviest burdens—in creating solutions.
Women across India are already doing this work—protecting forests, demanding clean water, adapting to climate change, organizing against pollution, and building sustainable livelihoods. Supporting, amplifying, and learning from their efforts while removing barriers to their leadership can create environmental futures that are not only sustainable but just, not only green but equitable, benefiting all while protecting the planet that sustains us all.
