The overlooked variable in climate action investment: Why women’s leadership deserves a central place in climate philanthropy

As climate philanthropy gains momentum in India, the challenge is no longer only how much capital is being mobilised, but how effectively it is being deployed. For instance, the India Philanthropy Report 2026 notes that as philanthropic families broaden their giving portfolios, nearly 28% now support climate action. While this growing commitment is encouraging, a more pressing question remains: are climate investments being directed in ways that can fundamentally shape the success of climate interventions and empower those who are most well-placed to lead and drive change on the ground? 

This matters because climate action is ultimately implemented through people. The effectiveness and sustainability of climate solutions depend on whether those leading them understand local realities, hold long-standing community knowledge, and are positioned to respond to evolving risks. In India especially, these leaders are often women. 

This is not incidental. Across much of India, a gendered division of labour has led to women being responsible for activities that are deeply intertwined with natural resources and environmental conditions. In many rural households, women spend significant time collecting water, firewood, and fodder, managing household consumption, caring for family health, and contributing to agricultural work. The scale of this engagement is substantial: recent labour force data, for instance, indicates that nearly two-thirds of working women in India are engaged in agriculture. When rainfall becomes erratic, groundwater levels fall, heat stress increases, or crop yields decline, these responsibilities become more difficult and time-intensive. Women are often among the first to notice changing water availability, shifts in cropping patterns, increased time spent gathering resources, or the health impacts of extreme weather on family members. 

Their proximity to these challenges also means that women frequently develop practical coping mechanisms long before they are formally recognised as climate adaptation strategies. Whether it is changing crop choices, altering water-use practices, diversifying livelihoods, preserving seeds, more efficiently managing community resources, or coordinating informal support networks during periods of stress, women often play a central role in helping households and communities adapt to changing environmental conditions. Over time, this creates a form of lived expertise that becomes invaluable in designing climate responses that are effective, locally relevant, and sustainable. 

Of course, women are not a homogeneous group. Experiences of climate risk and opportunities to exercise leadership are shaped by factors such as caste, class, geography, indigeneity, and livelihood. The forms that climate leadership takes therefore vary considerably across contexts. Across these differences, however, the point remains that women frequently occupy roles that place them in close engagement with climate-sensitive systems, positioning them at the forefront of sustaining and adapting them. 

Unlocking the full value of this expertise requires investment. Women own only around 13% of agricultural land in India, and an Oxfam study in Uttar Pradesh found that just 4% of female farmers had access to institutional credit. By addressing such structural barriers, philanthropy has an opportunity to strengthen the capacity of some of the most strategically positioned climate actors. 

A recent publication by the ClimateRISE Alliance and Dasra, ‘Women-led Climate Action: Impact on People, Planet, and Parity’, highlights a recurring pattern: when women are positioned as leaders, the resulting benefits often extend well beyond gender equity or individual empowerment. Climate outcomes, livelihood resilience, community ownership, and local institutional capacity frequently advance together. 

Consider the diverse range of challenges being addressed by women-led collectives across the country. Women farmers in Rajasthan and Gujarat are reviving indigenous seed systems that strengthen agricultural resilience in the face of unpredictable rainfall and rising temperatures. In Madhya Pradesh, women-led water user groups are governing solar-powered irrigation systems. In Karnataka and Maharashtra, women’s producer collectives are building bamboo-based value chains that contribute to carbon sequestration while creating sustainable rural livelihoods. Across these examples, the value lies in the ability of women’s leadership to embed that solution within communities, sustain it over time, and ensure that its benefits are more broadly shared. 

Perhaps the most striking thread running through these examples is the role of collective action. Women are driving change through self-help groups, producer organisations, water user committees, and other community institutions. These structures pool resources, aggregate local knowledge, and sustain solutions long after project cycles end. In other words, women are often strengthening climate outcomes, as well as the social infrastructure that makes those outcomes durable. For instance, a women’s water user group does not just manage water access: it builds local ownership, distributes decision-making power, and creates an institutional base that outlasts the grants that fund it. 

This is crucial because climate solutions fail when social infrastructure is weak. The effectiveness of any climate intervention ultimately depends on whether communities have the institutions, relationships, trust, and collective capacity needed to adopt, govern, and sustain it. Without these foundations that are often created by women’s collectives, even otherwise well-designed interventions can struggle to achieve lasting impact or scale beyond the life of a project. 

Yet if women as individual actors are underfunded, women’s collectives are even more so, because most funding frameworks simply do not have the language, the metrics, or the mental models to recognise the creation of this social infrastructure as a climate investment in the first place. 

Climate funding would be remiss to treat women merely as a box to be checked under inclusion when they are often among the actors most critical to delivering durable climate outcomes. 

Experiences emerging from across India suggest that gender intentionality and effective climate action is a false separation. For philanthropy, this presents a strategic opportunity to shift from asking, “How do we ensure women benefit from climate investments?” to “What climate outcomes become possible when women and their collectives are entrusted to lead?” 

In a resource-constrained world, the most potent climate investments will be those that deliver multiple returns simultaneously, including strengthening resilience, improving equity, and building community capacity. Investing in women’s leadership, and in the collectives through which that leadership operates, is one of the few pathways that has the potential to do all three. 

(Karuna is Associate Director of the ClimateRISE Alliance at Dasra; Singh is Team Lead of the ClimateRISE Alliance at Dasra. Views are personal.)