Coal belt climate reform starts with women

At sunrise in a village in Sundargarh along the highway in eastern India’s Odisha, 32-year-old Sushila walks half a kilometre to fetch water. She uses her sari to shield her face from the coal dust that settles on her skin and in her lungs as coal-laden Tata Hyva trucks drive past. These trucks ply day and night, transporting coal dispatched for thermal power from the big open-cast coal mine five kilometres from Sushila’s village. Her daily walk illustrates how far removed women like Sushila are from the climate negotiations that affect them; that women and marginalised communities in India’s coal regions are already living the future the world is trying to avoid. Their everyday struggles are part of the realities of coal production in India, exacerbating the effects of climate change felt globally — polluted water, degraded forests, insecure livelihoods, rising care burdens, and the social stresses of an economy in transition.

This is why the adoption of the Belém Gender Action Plan (GAP) at COP30 deserves attention in India. For the first time, UNFCCC signatories have agreed on a nine-year, legally anchored global framework that places women and girls at the centre of climate action. UN Women called it a “blueprint for action”. For countries like ours, where the transition away from coal is inevitable to achieve net zero, the Belém GAP provides the policy scaffolding to ensure the shift is not only low-carbon but also socially just.

A reality India cannot ignore

In India’s coal-bearing districts — from Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh to Odisha — women face layered risks that national climate policy has yet to fully confront. Water sources remain compromised. Forest products that tribal women rely on for income have declined because of environmental degradation. As men migrate in search of work due to the shifting economy following old coal mine closures, women bear the full weight of caregiving, farming, managing household debt, and coping with a power dynamic skewed against them.

These are not isolated anecdotes. They mirror exactly the challenges the Belém GAP identifies: deteriorating health, increased violence, unequal access to decent work, and the compounding effects of discrimination on Indigenous, rural, disabled and marginalised women. Importantly, the new plan introduces explicit provisions on women’s health, gender-based violence, decent work, and protection for women environmental defenders - issues that have long remained at the periphery of climate policy.

India’s transition plans must now catch up India has taken important steps towards just transition planning, and the adoption of the Belém Gender Action Plan offers an opportunity to strengthen this work further. The Plan provides a clear roadmap for ensuring that women are not only included but actively supported in shaping transition strategies. It encourages countries to anchor climate policy in human rights, recognise unpaid care work as a factor that limits women’s participation in the labour force, and advance meaningful representation and leadership of women at every level of decision-making.

The Belém GAP also sets out commitments to safeguard women environmental defenders — who frequently lead community efforts to address pollution and land-use concerns - and to expand gender-responsive finance that can enhance women’s livelihoods, mobility, enterprises and local institutions.

For India’s coal districts, these provisions are not abstract principles. They mirror what women have been consistently asking for: clean water, safe homes, stable livelihoods, recognition of their labour, and a seat at the planning table.

A transition that works for women works for everyone

There is compelling evidence that when women are included in climate and energy governance, policies are more ambitious, equitable and durable. TERI’s recent work in Giridih illustrates this potential: through the People-Centric Transition initiative, women’s groups in four coal-adjacent villages established micro-enterprises — from mop and wiper units to incense stick production, home décor manufacturing and beautician services - after receiving financial literacy, business ideation and technical training. Forty-nine women and adolescent girls are now running enterprises that were set up through group and individual models, supported by joint liability groups and seed capital.

These experiences show that with targeted investment and structured capacity-building, women in coal regions can move from informal, low-productivity work to managing viable businesses that strengthen local economies and support a more people-centred transition. India has an opportunity to align its district-level just transition plans with the Belém GAP, turning global commitments into local action. This means earmarking funds — especially District Mineral Foundation (DMF) resources and the ESCROW funds for coal mine closure — for women’s health, mobility, skill development and entrepreneurship. It means measuring the impacts of transition on women as rigorously as emissions are tracked. And it means redesigning governance mechanisms so that women are not merely present but influential.

The cost of ignoring women is too high

Evidence from global climate programmes consistently shows that gender-responsive approaches lead to stronger outcomes across mitigation, adaptation and resilience. By incorporating the provisions of the Belém Gender Action Plan into national and state-level strategies, India can strengthen transition governance, reduce social risk, and expand economic opportunity in regions that have historically borne the costs of extraction. It means earmarking District Mineral Foundation (DMF) and coal mine closure ESCROW funds for women’s health, mobility, skills and enterprise development; tracking gender-differentiated impacts with the same rigour as emissions; and redesigning local governance so that women are not merely present but influential in decision-making.

The adoption of the Belém GAP sets a clear global benchmark for embedding gender justice in climate governance. For India, the real test lies in translating these commitments into district-level action that protects livelihoods and expands opportunity for women in coal regions. These questions — on finance, leadership and accountability — will be central to discussions at the forthcoming Silver Jubilee edition of TERI’s flagship World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS), where leaders will examine how to ensure the energy transition is not only low-carbon, but genuinely inclusive.

Jiwesh Nandan, Distinguished Fellow & Advisor, World Sustainable Development Summit (WSDS) 2026, TERI; Arpita Elisheba Victor, Research Associate & Contributor, WSDS 2026, TERI; views are personal