Description
Feminist environmental activists, through years of coordinated and persistent advocacy, have secured a gender agenda within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), working within the institution to mainstream gender in political decisions. While recognising the important role these activists have played, as well as the challenges of working within a political system like the UNFCCC, feminist environmental scholars have criticised this advocacy for perpetuating problematic framings of women as either vulnerable to a changing climate or virtuous in their knowledge of climate solutions. However, in response to a rapidly changing political terrain which sees a worrying normalisation of climate denialism as well as a re-assertion of traditional gender roles and the gender binaries they entail, feminist activists in the UNFCCC are turning to different language. The Belem Gender Action Plan for instance, adopted in 2025, has seen the UNFCCC deploy more intersectional understandings of gender, despite broader language on human rights being removed, as well as shifting tactics to focus on mobilisation and movement-building outwith the institution. In this paper I analyse this shift, arguing that this new kind of feminist environmental activism might offer a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak political landscape.