Women on the frontlines: Tackling climate-driven violence at work
Across the globe, women workers are contending with the dual crises of climate change and gender-based violence and harassment, or GBVH, in the world of work. These forces are not separate. Whether it's rising heat or forced migration, climate change is making workplaces increasingly unsafe for women workers as existing vulnerabilities leave them more exposed to violence and harassment, according to experts.
But as the risks for women are accelerating, so is the organizing. From landfills in South Africa to garment factories in Central Java, women workers and their allies are taking collective action. They are participating in negotiations for international agreements, designing solutions for safer workplaces, and holding businesses and governments accountable for decent work amidst rising temperatures.
Since its launch in June 2024 — coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the International Labor Organization’s Convention 190, or C190 — the Women Rising series has explored the intersection of GBVH and climate change in the world of work, and the essential role of women in advancing change.
This final piece in the series brings together voices from diverse spaces — workers, funders, researchers, and organizers — who are turning women’s lived experience into transnational strategies for structural change. Together, they show that climate-driven GBVH is not inevitable — and that solutions already exist.
The question is: what will it take to scale them?
From the landfill to the UN: Women leading the charge against climate-driven violence
Photo: AfricaForZeroWaste via Instagram
Photo: AfricaForZeroWaste via Instagram
For Maditlhare Koena, a waste picker in South Africa and treasurer of the International Alliance of Waste Pickers, or IAWP, climate injustice is not an abstract issue — it’s a lived experience. “Women waste pickers have to take their kids with them to the landfill where there is no protection, no shade, no running tap water or sanitation, and the working conditions are not good at all,” she told Devex.
These are not only dangerous working conditions — they also constitute forms of GBVH in the world of work, according to C190, which includes physical, psychological, and economic harms that disproportionately affect women workers.
The threats faced by women waste pickers — including exposure to toxic waste, lack of access to sanitation, being forced to work with children in unsafe environments, and displacement without consultation — can all be considered gendered violence. They are systemic, foreseeable, and avoidable harms that arise from neglect, discrimination, and exclusion from policy-making processes, explained Koena.
“We inhale emissions. We face harassment. And now, policies meant to protect the environment are pushing us out.”
As part of the negotiations around the United Nations plastics treaty — an international legally-binding instrument meant to end plastic pollution — and through IAWP, women waste pickers have insisted that physical and psychological harms be recognized under GBVH protections. IAWP is also calling for the development of just transition frameworks that give waste pickers a seat at the table and explicitly include informal women workers in their ambit of protection.
According to Koena, change doesn’t happen when others speak for women waste pickers — it happens when they, themselves, lead campaigns to change their working conditions. Taking collective action, IAWP is advocating for access to fair compensation, a just transition to new environmental protection systems, reduced use of toxic substances, and holding companies responsible for the impact of what they produce, she explained.
But for advocacy to translate into meaningful change, participation can’t be a mere box-ticking exercise. That means ensuring translation is available during negotiations and meetings so that women can participate in their own languages, financially supporting participation in negotiations, and designing environmental policy with — not for — waste pickers, explained Koena.
“You cannot say you help me when you do everything for me. You help me when you do it with me."
Philanthropy’s role in ending structural GBVH
Photo: Fundación Avina
Photo: Fundación Avina
For Patricia Carmona Hernández of Fundación Avina, addressing climate-driven GBVH in the world of work means tackling the problem at its roots. “Inequality is at the center of this crisis,” she said. “We need systemic change — not just band-aid fixes.”
From improving working conditions for factory workers exposed to violence and extreme heat, to improving crisis response to violent situations, the foundation’s model focuses on the most vulnerable workers, explained Carmona, who is part of the foundation’s team working on labor innovation.
One program addresses the intersection of care and climate by focusing on how climate change increases care work — which is predominantly unpaid and performed by women. Women and girls play a crucial role in community resilience, ranging from water conservation to food security and waste management. Climate impacts increase the need for this type of work, ultimately limiting the time women can spend on paid labor.
Avina works closely with grassroots organizations, especially in the global south, recognizing that collective action is one of the strongest protective factors against structural violence — including GBVH made worse by the environmental crisis, explained Carmona.
“Organizing is a protective factor — against violence, against climate harm, against exclusion”
— Patricia Carmona Hernández, Fundación Avina
Through long-term partnerships, Avina supports local collectives of women workers to lead advocacy, document lived impacts, and push for inclusive policy change, she explained. Avina supports women’s organizations in conducting participatory research to better understand the intersection between climate and care, generate applied research, and advocate for policy integration. “If the issue is being discussed, we make sure that women from the global south are in the room — and speaking for themselves,” said Carmona.
What sets Avina’s grantmaking apart is its flexible and trust-based approach, funding core operations rather than project-only outputs, resisting extractive reporting demands, and co-designing strategies that reflect the complex realities women face. “We don’t want reporting to be more important than the work. We want to work with organizations to gather the evidence they need — for their advocacy — not just ours,” she added.
From data to action: Why research must center women’s realities
While we’re only beginning to understand how climate change is driving GBVH in the world of work, some research institutions are working to narrow the knowledge gap. At the Atlantic Council’s Climate Resilience Center, which uses actionable research to support resilience solutions, “we don’t have time to think in silos,” said Nidhi Upadhyaya, the center’s deputy director for global policy and finance.
Her team’s research has shown that extreme heat and other climate stressors widen gender gaps in incomes, health outcomes, and economic participation for women in India, Nigeria, and the U.S. There is an urgent need for more research to document existing climate impacts and model future ones, especially as the world etches closer to several so-called tipping points, defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as “a critical threshold beyond which a system reorganises, often abruptly and/or irreversibly.”
But the center doesn’t stop at reporting and quantifying climate impacts. In India, they are co-developing and piloting parametric insurance solutions with the Self Employed Women’s Association to help informal women workers recover any income they lose when extreme heat makes it impossible to work.
Based on community-led research, these pilots measure conditions before and after heat waves, and test ways to support climate-affected livelihoods — not only financially, but also through health, access to decent housing, and long-term resilience, explained Upadhyaya.
“Understand these challenges as systemic — and build solutions with those who are most impacted.”
Upadhyaya calls on the global community to invest in gender-disaggregated climate data and embed gender in every adaptation plan. Without this, policy will remain unresponsive to the people most at risk. With it, community-led resilience-building can help shape climate action at every level — from informal settlements to international finance, she explained.
Redefining business accountability: Enforceable agreements for gender justice
Local trade unions in the hospitality and garment sectors are redefining business and financial accountability to make sure employers — as well as development finance institutions — address climate-driven GBVH in the world of work.
In Rwanda, India, and Indonesia, unions are linking labor protections to global investment and sourcing practices, ensuring that GBVH isn’t treated as an isolated problem — but as a structural issue made worse by climate vulnerability, supply chain pressure, and lack of investor accountability, explained Jennifer “JJ” Rosenbaum, the executive director of Global Labor Justice, or GLJ. Making the workplace safe for women workers also lowers the risk for those businesses in terms of legal compliance, she added.
The Rwanda Hospitality and Tourism Workers Union is working with GLJ and the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations to hold both hotel owners and the International Finance Corporation to account. The union is making the case that climate justice must extend to workers, and it’s using C190 to align training and grievance processes, document GBVH, and press both employers and investors to act, explained Rosenbaum.
“We see much less investment in labor rights than in green infrastructure. Workers are a key constituency in climate response — and we must measure climate impact on workers too.”
In the garment sector, unions are pioneering enforceable brand agreements to address GBVH. The Dindigul Agreement, won by the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union in India, Asia Floor Wage Alliance — or AFWA — and GLJ was the first in Asia to secure binding commitments on GBVH from a global clothing brand, covering over 5,000 workers.
The Central Java Agreement, signed in March by four local unions in Indonesia alongside AFWA, GLJ, and the Workers Rights Consortium, builds on this model — tying buyer conduct to factory conditions and the implementation of C190 through strong local leadership and transnational accountability structures.
By embedding gender and climate risk into enforceable labor frameworks, these union-led agreements are working to transform global value chains from the bottom up, explained Rosenbaum. GLJ’s role is to help engage regional and international alliances that support trade unions confronting hostile power dynamics, whether from employers, investors, or governments.
Together, these efforts represent a new model for addressing climate-driven GBVH — one that begins with worker agency, builds on transnational partnerships, and demands accountability from the powerful players shaping global labor markets.
“Financial institutions and brands must be accountable for what happens on the shop floor — not just on paper.”
From the ground up
Across landfills, hotel corridors, and union halls, women workers are rewriting the rules of engagement and making sure their voices and experiences are heard — and addressed.
For Koena, that means standing in international treaty rooms far from her hometown in South Africa to demand that women waste pickers be seen and heard.
Meanwhile, funders such as Avina are accepting that systemic change takes time and patience. “We don’t need quick fixes,” said Carmona, adding that “we need to change the systems that are failing women in the first place.” That starts with listening and with putting resources in the hands of those already doing the work, she explained.
Upadhyaya sees the consequences of climate “blind spots” — where policy forgets women workers — but she also sees hope in solutions co-created with women.
And in hotel unions in Rwanda and garment unions in India and Indonesia, workers are showing that accountability isn’t just a word on paper. They’re filing grievances and negotiating with brands and banks to make it clear that safety isn’t a side issue — it’s the foundation.
The future of this fight isn’t being imagined in boardrooms — it’s being built in the places hardest hit by climate impacts — and women on the front lines already know the paths to change.
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