Gender Equality for Climate Justice

Dear KEDV Supporters,

Over the past year, our climate work has moved from awareness-building toward collective action and advocacy.

Women across Türkiye are already experiencing the climate crisis through drought, extreme heat, water shortages, rising food costs, pressure on livelihoods, and increasing care responsibilities. At KEDV, we believe climate justice must begin by listening to these experiences and ensuring that women are not only seen as people affected by the climate crisis, but as leaders shaping the solutions.

Preparing for COP31

This year, Türkiye will host COP31, the United Nations Climate Change Conference. For KEDV, this is an important opportunity to bring the experiences, knowledge, and demands of grassroots women into national and international climate discussions.

Building on our climate awareness seminars and our work with women’s cooperatives, we have continued to create spaces where women can discuss how the climate crisis affects their communities and what needs to change.

Through our Women’s Cooperative Climate Working Group, women are identifying shared challenges and developing demands they want to see reflected in climate policy. One issue has become especially clear: women are already developing local solutions, but climate finance and decision-making spaces remain difficult to access.

As part of our COP31 preparations, we launched our “Polluters Must Pay” campaign.

The campaign calls for:

• those most responsible for pollution to carry a fairer share of the cost of the climate crisis;
• climate finance to reach women-led and community-based solutions;
• care to be recognized as part of a just transition;
• women to have an equal voice in climate decision-making.

The message is simple: the cost of the climate crisis cannot continue to be passed on to women and communities that have contributed the least to causing it.

Care Is Also a Climate Issue

The climate crisis is often discussed through emissions, energy, and infrastructure. But its effects are also deeply connected to care.

When water becomes harder to access, food becomes more expensive, extreme heat affects children and older people, or disasters disrupt everyday services, unpaid and underpaid care work increases. Much of this additional work is carried by women.

This is why we are advocating for care to be recognized as part of climate policy and a just transition.

From Local Voices to Climate Policy

KEDV has also joined the Climate Network in Türkiye, strengthening our participation in national climate advocacy and creating new opportunities to bring women’s perspectives into policy discussions.

As COP31 approaches, our goal is to help close the distance between women already living with the impacts of the climate crisis and the spaces where climate decisions are made.

Women are not waiting for solutions. They are already producing them.

With your support, we can help make sure their knowledge, leadership, and demands are heard.

Thank you for standing with women for climate justice.