About Us

WEDO was born in 1990, when U.S. Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Nobel Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai, Dr. Vandana Shiva, Thais Corral, and many others recognized that the hard-won women’s rights policy commitments that emerged from the year’s major UN conferences required unwavering and ongoing global advocacy. And so began our mission to create true, lasting, and transformational social justice worldwide. 

That year, we mobilized 50 women leaders from 31 countries to form the International Policy Action Committee.

Today, we work at the intersection of gender and the environment with the knowledge that there are no single-issue challenges — the issues we address are complex and intertwined. We play a central role in bringing leaders together from the gender equality and environmental justice policy and advocacy ecosystem to strategize, build power through alliances, and share data, tools, and resources.

We believe in a philosophy of care — care for all people, environments, and the planet. All of our work is focused on shaping a future where care forms the foundation of our societies and gender- and environmental-justice is a daily lived reality.

Our members and more than 1,500 women from 83 countries gathered at the Women's World Congress for a Healthy Planet in Miami, Florida, to provide testimonies on how the environment and development crises impact women. Out of this meeting, a consensual agenda called Women's Action Agenda 21 was born.

We organized the women's caucus at the UN conference on Population and Development in Cairo — the final outcome of which expanded the frontiers of action for women's development further than any previous UN document.

We won a new pledge for gender balance in the Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) and became convener of the Women's Major Group. 

We organized the Linkage Caucus at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. 89% of the Caucus recommendations were incorporated by the final Beijing Platform for Action, and almost two-thirds were accepted.

In 1996, Bella Abzug was honored by the UN and NGOs worldwide with a UN Peacekeeper's Beret for her work as both 'A Fighter and a Peacemaker'.

We launched the campaign 50/50 by 2005: Get the Balance Right! in June 2000 during the UN Beijing+5 Review session, bringing together women leaders from all regions to learn from each other's experiences and develop national and local strategies.

We began administering the Women Delegates Fund — a program to support and enhance the participation of women delegates in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process.

Our long fight for women's inclusion records a breakthrough when the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) adopts agreed conclusions on environmental management, including a comprehensive set of policy recommendations to enhance women's empowerment and promote gender equality in situations of natural disasters.

In 2005, we were recognized with the Champion of the Earth award by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

Alongside women's groups, we monitored, tracked, and fiercely advocated to enshrine gender equality and human rights language in the Paris Agreement and as a standalone and cross-cutting priority in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We launched the Gender Climate Tracker mobile app and desktop database. The GCT provides easy, on-the-go access to key statistics, policies, and research related to gender and climate. It also tracks implementation of gender-climate action under the UNFCCC.

After almost 20 years of lobbying and awareness-raising of women's issues, we were honored for our work on gender and climate by the National Council for Research on Women with its 2010 Advocacy Award.

We conducted trainings for more than 100 women environmental leaders on the climate change process, and after years of engagement and advocacy in the UN climate process, saw the launch of the first-ever UNFCCC gender action plan (GAP).

Co-convened by WEDO and IUCN, we launched the Gender + Environment Data Alliance (GEDA) and rolled out the GEDA Small Grants program to support organizations advancing systemic, gender-transformative shifts in policy, programming, financing, and planning through data.

We expanded our long-standing support for movement participation at the UNFCCC through enhanced travel and technical assistance, enabling hundreds of frontline and grassroots leaders to shape climate negotiations — including the renewal of the Gender Action Plan and emerging frameworks on just transition and climate finance.

We advanced gender-just climate solutions by growing the visibility and scale of the GJCS Awards and Scale Fund, resourcing community-led models that protect biodiversity, strengthen resilience, and transform local economies.

We engaged in global advocacy around the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the biggest public fund dedicated to climate change. Composed of Indigenous Peoples, civil society, and local communities from around the world, the GCF ensures that the voices of communities impacted by climate change are integrated into the Fund.

We launched The Feminist Action Nexus for Economic and Climate Justice to promote the necessary transformation away from the fossil-fuel capitalism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy that drive both the climate crisis and rampant inequality.