In 1730, when soldiers arrived in Khejarli village in Rajasthan to fell trees for a royal palace, Amrita Devi Bishnoi wrapped her arms around a Khejri tree to protect it. She was killed, along with 362 others from the Bishnoi community, in an act of resistance that helped bring the tree-felling to a halt. More than two centuries later, in Uttarakhand, Gaura Devi and 27 women embraced trees in Reni village in 1974 to prevent the felling of about 1,000 trees. In Assam, the Hargila Army, founded in 2007 by conservationist Purnima Devi Barman, continues to mobilise rural women to protect the endangered greater adjutant stork and its nesting trees.
From protecting sacred trees in Rajasthan to conserving forests in Uttarakhand and saving endangered birds in Assam, women across India have shaped the fight to protect biodiversity. Yet, their knowledge, leadership, and contributions do not always translate into an equal say in decisions about how nature is conserved, who controls natural resources, and where conservation funding goes.
That gap is at the heart of gender negotiations at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), being held in Yerevan, Armenia.
As countries review the implementation of the Gender Plan of Action (2023–2030), the negotiations raise a critical question: will the women who protect biodiversity on the ground have the power, resources, and recognition to shape the policies that govern it?
For India, the stakes extend beyond women's representation in conservation. Millions of people depend on forests, fisheries, and other natural resources for their livelihoods. This means that decisions about access, ownership, and management of biodiversity are particularly consequential for women in these communities.
India has several legal and institutional mechanisms intended to bring women into biodiversity governance, but gaps in implementation continue to limit their influence over decisions affecting natural resources, a report by the CBD Women's Caucus has found.
The report, Policies in Practice: Learning from National Experiences for Gender-Responsive Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), examines India's experience with gender quotas in local governance, the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, and the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. It highlights the gap between women's formal representation in governance institutions and their ability to influence decisions on the ground.
India's constitutional amendments mandate at least one-third representation for women in Panchayati Raj institutions and urban local bodies, while some states, including Maharashtra, have raised the quota to 50%. The Biological Diversity Act also provides for women's representation in Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs), which document local biodiversity knowledge, prepare People's Biodiversity Registers, and organise conservation activities.
Yet, the report points to a gap between representation and meaningful participation. India had constituted 2,76,653 BMCs at the grassroots level, but monitoring of women's influence within these bodies and the biodiversity outcomes of their participation remain limited. A study in Kerala cited in the report found that women were actively participating in only 37% of BMCs.
The report also identifies the Forest Rights Act as an important legal instrument for advancing gender equity. It provides for joint land titles, recognises single women and widows as eligible rights holders, and enables communities to manage forests through gram sabhas. However, implementation has been slow, particularly in recognising community forest rights. The report cites estimates from civil society organisations that 90% of villages eligible for community forest rights still lack them, limiting communities' authority over forest management and the use and sale of forest products.
The report's central finding is that representation alone does not guarantee power. Social norms, limited legal awareness, bureaucratic hurdles, and customary practices that favour men can prevent women from exercising their rights, even where laws provide for their participation. It argues that gender-responsive biodiversity governance must recognise women's rights to land and resources alongside their authority in decision-making.
This makes the negotiations at COP17 particularly relevant for India. As countries review the implementation of the Gender Plan of Action (2023–2030), the challenge is not simply to secure commitments to women's participation, but to ensure that those commitments translate into decision-making power, adequate funding and measurable progress before 2030.
Women’s relationship with biodiversity extends beyond their participation in conservation projects. They often hold knowledge about local plants, traditional food, medicinal remedies, and seasonal changes, passed down through generations but rarely documented in formal systems.
Shruti Ajit, project officer, Community Building and Capacity Development at the CBD Women Caucus, said this knowledge is increasingly at risk as biodiversity declines and traditional practices change.
When a bee stung her as a child, Shruti remembers her great-grandmother rushing into the yard, picking a wild plant, crushing it between her fingers and pressing it onto the wound. The remedy worked immediately, drawing on a vast, undocumented body of medicinal knowledge passed down through generations of women.
“I don’t know what that plant was,” Shruti recalls. “Our mothers and grandmothers carry this knowledge, but it is oral and qualitative, rooted entirely in the local ecosystem. With globalisation, environmental degradation, and shifting climate patterns, those plants vanished from the markets and the knowledge disappeared with them. Inside multilateral negotiations, these systems are routinely left out because they cannot be neatly codified or turned into an abstract number.”
At the negotiating tables of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the disconnect between high-level diplomacy and everyday survival has become a central concern for gender advocates. For decades, international biodiversity frameworks treated gender equality as an afterthought, relegating it to guidance notes. Now, negotiators and civil society leaders are pushing to make gender justice an essential pillar of ecological survival, rather than a peripheral social concern.
A central challenge is the tendency to equate gender inclusion with simply having women represented.
“You can't just list numbers and say, ‘Oh, we had women, and they were engaged.’ Rather, say how they are engaged, what impacts, or what roles are being contributed to?” says Mrinalini Rai, director of Women4Biodiversity.
Mrinalini points to national reviews that exposed the gap between representation and meaningful participation. Although governments reported high levels of female participation, women's actual contributions to national biodiversity planning remained limited.
“What they realised was that they have women in numbers, but when they really started to look at their policies and plans... their data was really very low. That’s when they decided to have a target that does not talk about participation only. It talks about seeing how women can be part of the biodiversity planning model.”
Shruti sees the same problem in India's decentralised biodiversity governance. Although Biodiversity Management Committees (BMC) reserve one-third of their seats for women, formal representation does not necessarily translate into decision-making power.
“It exists on paper, but often the man decides,” Shruti says.
“The deeper question is: who decides what gets conserved or restored? When women lead ecological restoration, they don’t choose commercial timber; they prioritise medicinal plants, wild fruit trees, and food sources that sustain community health. Women don’t look at biodiversity, climate change, or economics in isolated silos. For them, their lives depend on it: they link biodiversity directly to food, health, and livelihood security.”
The three pillars: Why ‘technical’ issues are women’s issues
Mrinalini stresses that the convention's mandate extends beyond conservation to two more pillars: sustainable use and access and benefit-sharing (ABS).
Within the CBD, gender concerns are often confined to community-level conservation, leaving women out of technical negotiations.
The exclusion becomes particularly apparent in negotiations on sustainable wildlife management, where references to gender and indigenous peoples are often challenged.
Shruti points to marine ecosystems as a key example of how women's contributions can be overlooked when biodiversity is treated as a technical issue.
“In marine areas all over the world, women are artisanal fishers, mollusc and mussel harvesters. They aren't just harvesting; they are actively restoring and protecting their territories to keep the ecosystem intact for their livelihoods. If policy negotiations only look at marine issues through commercial quotas or aggregate species counts, the women who sustain these marine and coastal ecosystems remain completely invisible.”
The adoption of Target 23 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) in 2022 marked a turning point for gender advocates. Gender responsiveness became a standalone commitment that countries must report on.
Target 23 of KMGBF calls on countries to ensure gender equality in biodiversity action by addressing barriers that prevent women from accessing natural resources and participating in decisions about their conservation and use.
It recognises that women play a significant role in managing natural resources, agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, but gender-based inequalities can limit their influence over decisions and their control over land and other resources.
The target calls for equal opportunities and rights for women and girls, secure and equitable access to land and natural resources, and their full, equitable, meaningful and informed participation and leadership in biodiversity-related policies, decision-making and implementation at all levels.
It also calls for a gender-responsive approach, which means that biodiversity policies, programmes, and institutions must account for the different needs and experiences of people based on gender. Achieving this may require changes to laws, policies, and social practices that restrict women's rights and access to resources.
At CBD COP17, discussions on implementing Target 23 are important because they examine how countries can move beyond recognising women's contributions to ensuring they have the rights, resources, and decision-making power to shape biodiversity conservation.
“Before the KMGBF, there has always been a mandate for the parties to mainstream gender into their NBSAPs [National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans], but they were always on the side of the Secretariat... as guidance notes,” Mrinalini explains. “With the KMGBF, having the target was really very important for us because whether they use the guidelines or not, when they have to submit the report... they all have to report on Target 23 as official reporting.”
Mrinalini also notes that several Global South countries have proactively adopted national gender equality targets under the framework, in some cases going further than their European counterparts.
“This is a small step; it may take time, but now this has become where you can hold your government accountable, this has become a baseline,” Mrinalini says. “You have a strong argument to make that, ‘Look, we did this. We cannot let our ambitions go lower than this; we always have to go above.’”
Yet implementation remains a challenge. At the midterm review of the Gender Plan of Action, only 20 countries and 14 observers submitted reports, Shruti notes, with reporting often relying on superficial indicators while overlooking fundamental questions of land tenure.
“In India, feminisation of agriculture is accelerating because men migrate to cities for labour, leaving women to tend small holder farms without tenurial security,” Shruti explains. “If they decide to sell the land, the women who lived off it are left destitute. Without tenure and resource security, gender targets remain paper promises.”
A major blind spot in the midterm review of the Gender Plan of Action was the lack of concrete evidence itself. Without solid gender and biodiversity data, conducting a comprehensive global assessment proved nearly impossible. To fix this gap, at the CBD COP17 venue, the CBD Women’s Caucus released the Women’s Biodiversity Outlook and a practical handbook on gender-responsive tools and methodologies.
Together, they provide documented proof of women-led conservation worldwide and offer clear tools to capture the ground reality to all those who work on biodiversity data, including governments.
Even where political will exists, bureaucratic divisions can undermine implementation. Mrinalini identifies the siloed approach of ministries as a major obstacle to implementing the KMGBF.
“The biggest challenge of implementing the KMGBF is the silo approach of the ministries,” Mrinalini says. “You have the Ministry of Environment talking about KMGBF; then you have the Ministry of Climate Change saying, ‘This is my sector’; then infrastructure.”
Gender ministries, meanwhile, have historically operated separately from environmental policymaking.
“The women ministries have always been connected only with education, children, health, or jobs, and not the environment sector,” Mrinalini observes. “I cannot ask an environment ministry official to talk about gender. For that, I would hope they have a gender expert in their team. But usually the gender expert is not following the environment... You have a gender expert, but you don't have someone who knows how to look at, supposing, gender and digital sequence information [DSI]. The idea is that you don't have to create new systems, especially in a time when you don't have so much money. The idea is: how can you be more resourceful with what you have?”
The question of who gets recognised as an expert is another barrier to meaningful inclusion in multilateral negotiations. Shruti challenges the assumption that expertise depends primarily on advanced academic qualifications.
“There is a persistent misnomer that only individuals with massive academic degrees count as experts,” Shruti says. “Indigenous peoples, local communities, women, and youth bring deep, empirical expertise from the ground. They are the ones generating real solutions. They must be active proponents, and for that, it needs to be ensured that these groups are considered within the various expert committees and technical groups that design and inform the work undertaken within the CBD, not treated as passive beneficiaries.”
Bridging the gap between diplomatic language and grassroots realities also means confronting resistance to inclusive language in negotiations. Shruti recalls how civil society groups struggled to secure broader recognition of women's diverse experiences. Initiatives such as Women4Biodiversity's Restore Her Voice seek to bridge this gap by bringing grassroots and indigenous women into CBD negotiations and helping them engage directly with treaty language.
“One side is the policy level, and understanding that sometimes the policy is very far removed from the lived reality of what happens on the ground,” Mrinalini explains. “We built the capacities of women from these communities to engage. They are working at the national level, local level, but we brought them to the CBD negotiations... to really understand how to talk this language when they go back.”
As countries negotiate monitoring frameworks, financing mechanisms and national reporting requirements, advocates argue that gender equality cannot be achieved through token representation or voluntary checklists. It requires direct, flexible funding for grassroots initiatives, disaggregated intersectional data and governance structures that respond to women's lived realities.
“Institutions love to hide behind their standard operating procedures, claiming women simply aren’t available to participate,” Shruti says. “You created the unsafe systems and the scheduling barriers, and women are the ones paying the price. We don’t need symbolic presence, we need active, structural power.”
A draft decision on the midterm review of the Gender Plan of Action (2023–2030), submitted at COP17, calls on countries to integrate gender-responsive approaches across biodiversity policies and ensure women and girls have a meaningful role in decision-making.
The draft identifies four priorities: embedding gender considerations in biodiversity policies and national action plans; ensuring women's participation and leadership, particularly among indigenous peoples and local communities; improving the collection and reporting of data disaggregated by sex, age and other demographic factors; and providing adequate funding, institutional capacity and targeted support for women-led initiatives.
It also invites international financial institutions, including the Global Environment Facility, to improve access to funding for women-led biodiversity initiatives, including through simpler application processes. The draft calls for technical support and capacity-building, particularly for developing countries, and a final review of the Gender Plan of Action before the CBD's 19th Conference of Parties.
The draft largely encourages countries to implement the plan and invites financial institutions to provide support. Whether these commitments translate into adequate resources, measurable progress and meaningful participation will depend on how they are implemented.
This story was produced as part of the 2026 CBD COP17 Fellowship, operated by Informed Earth in collaboration with Internews’ Earth Journalism Network
Follow TNM's WhatsApp channel for news updates and story links.