Executive summary

While the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) explicitly calls for climate finance to be gender-responsive, the global reporting architecture has failed to keep pace. At the bilateral level, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) uses the Rio markers and the Gender Equality Policy Marker to track intent during project design. However, a growing transparency gap exists between these ‘tags’ and real project outcomes. The share of bilateral climate official development assistance (ODA) carrying a gender marker has increased from approximately 45% in 2019–2020 to over 55% in recent estimates, yet existing data often fails to capture how gender equality objectives actually shape project governance and results. Independent audits suggest that providers may over-report climate content by 21% to 64%, and similar audits for gender integration are lacking.

1 Introduction

Climate risks are fundamentally gendered, with women and girls in low- and middle-income countries facing disproportionate vulnerability. This is partly due to their dependence on climate-sensitive sectors; for example, agrifood systems employ 66% of women in sub-Saharan Africa and 71% in South Asia. Structural inequalities further limit their adaptive capacity. However, women are central to climate responses as resource managers and leaders. Research by McGee et al. (2020) across 140 countries indicates that gender equality is associated with cleaner patterns of economic growth. Within the UNFCCC, the mandate for gender-responsive action has evolved from the 2010 Cancún Agreements to the 2015 Paris Agreement and the Belém Gender Action Plan (GAP) adopted at COP30 in 2025. Despite this, some governments continue to push back against gender-explicit language in international negotiations.

2 Tracking gender integration in climate finance

Reporting on climate finance is primarily conducted through Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) and the OECD DAC Creditor Reporting System (CRS). The CRS uses a three-tier scoring system—not targeted (0), significant (1), or principal (2)—to record policy intent. These markers are designed to identify intent at the point of commitment rather than measuring implementation effectiveness. Recent studies found that fewer than a third of projects with a Gender Equality Policy Marker published clear gender-disaggregated results. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) and multilateral climate funds (MCFs) also show inconsistent reporting practices. For instance, only 10% of Green Climate Fund (GCF) proposals assessed in one study were found to fulfil the mandate to promote gender equality effectively.

3 Conceptual framework

This paper addresses the analytical gap between measured intent and substantive delivery by operationalising Nancy Fraser’s three dimensions of justice: recognition, redistribution, and representation. These dimensions are mapped against the OECD DAC gender integration continuum, which runs from gender-negative to gender-transformative. Recognition evaluates whether projects acknowledge differentiated gendered impacts through clear analysis. Redistribution examines who benefits materially and whether gains are documented as outcomes rather than just outputs. Representation assesses the roles women play in design and governance and their influence over decision-making. This multidimensional approach allows projects to be graded across different levels of integration, from gender-blind to gender-responsive.

4 Methodological approach

The study utilizes a four-stage systematic document retrieval process: filtering OECD DAC data, matching activities to public project documentation, manual screening, and grading against framework indicators. Japan is used as a primary case study because it is the largest bilateral climate finance provider by face value. In 2023, Japan’s bilateral and attributed multilateral climate finance totalled $22.26 billion. Between 2015 and 2024, Japan committed $85.2 billion in bilateral climate-related finance, of which $50.8 billion (2,286 activities) was gender-tagged at a significant or principal level. The methodology was also tested on South Korea, which provided $2.7 billion in climate finance in 2023, though only 19% was gender-tagged.

5 Results

Of the 2,286 activities in Japan’s tagged portfolio, only 11 project documents covering 10 projects could be confidently matched and assessed. The pool was transport-heavy, with seven documents covering urban metro, high-speed rail, and road projects in South and Southeast Asia. Analysis revealed that gender integration is concentrated in recognition and redistribution, typically treating women as a category of user. Measures often include women-only carriages, breastfeeding rooms, and safety-focused lighting at stations. Projects were almost uniformly blind regarding gender representation, with women rarely treated as decision-makers. The Yangon–Mandalay Railway Improvement Project in Myanmar was the only case documenting substantive leadership by women in project management units. None of the sampled projects reported gender-disaggregated equivalents for performance indicators like tonnes of CO2 avoided.

6 Conclusion and recommendations

The study finds that current documentation makes it extremely difficult to verify gender claims at the project level. To improve transparency, bilateral providers should reform documentation templates to make gender a ‘first-class field’ requiring specific analysis and disaggregated performance indicators. The UNFCCC and Standing Committee on Finance (SCF) should add mandatory gender-responsive reporting fields to the finance chapters of the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) by 2028. Additionally, the OECD DAC is encouraged to include project-documentation audits in its peer review process. Further research should expand this methodology across more providers, sectors, and language versions of agency catalogues to deepen the evidence base on substantive climate-and-gender integration.