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Image of Sharon Ruthia speaking into a microphone at a conference. She sits in front of caucus members holding up signs and wearing medical masks.
Programme:
Biocultural Diversity Biocultural Diversity
Years Funded:
2025, 2026
Geographic Focus:
International
Website:
https://cbdwomenscaucus.org/
Social links:

CBD Women’s Caucus

The CBD Women’s Caucus is the women’s major group operating within the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) empowering women and girls to advocate for their rights in biodiversity policies, contributing to the implementation of these policies in a gender-responsive manner.

In the early 2000's, women's rights advocates and gender experts noticed a gap within CBD frameworks: a lack of recognition of the link between gender and biodiversity, especially in the context of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities. The CBD Women's Caucus was founded after the adoption, in 2008, of the CBD's first gender action plan that prioritised enhancing the capacity of women to participate in processes and decision-making under the Convention, therefore drawing greater attention to biodiversity issues facing women's organisations worldwide. 

Representing the interests of women and gender equality in conservation, the CBD Women's Caucus brings together members from governments, UN agencies, women's organisations, Indigenous Peoples, and feminist advocacy groups. Part of our Biocultural Diversity Programme, it currently has over 700 members worldwide from 90 different countries, working together to advocate for the recognition of women's contributions to biodiversity conservation, ensure gender-aware policies at the national and international levels, empower women to engage on CBD negotiations, and monitor and influence the implementation of gender-related decisions within the CBD. 

Group photos of members of the CBD Women's Caucus smiling at the camera. One of the women holds up a paper that says

The CBD Women's Caucus at COP 16.2. Image credit: IISD/ENB | Mike Muzurakis.

An example of an initiative it is leading is the Advancing Gender Justice in Biodiversity Data and Policy project, working to address the gender blindness present in existing biodiversity conservation research. The team is combating this issue through, first, creating a needs and capacities inventory of what women's organisations who are generating gender-aware biodiversity data require. Then, bringing women-led and community-based organisations together in a peer-to-peer learning process to create dialogue and bring collective evidence grounded in lived experience and community knowledge. The final step will be compiling findings into a Gender and Biodiversity Data handbook that will be shared across key CBD policy forums, influencing the future of data collection. 

Guided by the experiences of women and women's organisations worldwide, the CBD Women's Caucus is actively ensuring that gender equality is present at all levels of CBD policy. 

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