Three ways gender equality advances resilient development
News was produced by: UNDRR
Persistent gender inequalities continue to shape how societies prepare for, experience, and recover from climate and disaster risks. UN Women's Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2025 highlights how unequal access to resources, safety, services, and decision-making affects resilience across communities.
For UNDRR, the findings reaffirm a central message of the Sendai Gender Action Plan (GAP): resilient development depends on gender equality being embedded across risk knowledge, governance, financing, and recovery frameworks.
Below are three areas where the gender data reveals clear implications for disaster risk reduction and resilient development.
1. Goal 1 - End Poverty: Gender gaps undermine recovery and resilience-building
Gender-specific indicators show that women remain disproportionately represented in extreme poverty and are less covered by social protection systems. These gaps directly intersect with UNDRR's priorities on inclusive risk governance, particularly ensuring women's rights to land, economic opportunities, and productive resources.
Limited access to social protection and economic assets undermines women's ability to prepare for, withstand, and recover from shocks. This reduces household resilience, slows recovery, and reinforces structural inequalities that disasters tend to deepen. These findings echo the Sendai Gender Action Plan's call for gender-responsive governance and inclusive recovery frameworks that address the root causes of vulnerability.
2. Goal 11- Sustainable Cities: Safety and mobility shape who benefits from resilient cities
The findings reinforce the importance of:
- Strengthening risk knowledge through sex-, age- and disability-disaggregated urban risk data;
- Improving risk governance with inclusive and gender-responsive city planning; and
- Ensuring preparedness for recovery by safeguarding women's access to essential urban services.
The report tracks several indicators on urban safety, including women's access to public transport, open public spaces, and exposure to harassment, all critical components of urban resilience. Only 44.2% of the global urban population has convenient access to safe open spaces, with women disproportionately affected by mobility and safety concerns. Women market vendors, caregivers, and informal workers rely heavily on accessible, safe public spaces in their daily lives. Limited equitable access highlights gaps in readiness for safe recovery and shows why inclusive urban planning is essential for resilient cities.
3. Goal 13 - Climate Action: Gender gaps in knowledge and resources limit adaptive capacity
The data highlight direct connections to UNDRR's work on strengthening risk knowledge through inclusive climate education, improving risk governance by establishing mechanisms that promote gender equality in climate adaptation, and advancing disaster risk reduction financing by closing gender gaps in access to climate finance. Achieving these aims requires addressing systemic gaps in data, governance, and funding to meet the Sendai Gender Action Plan's vision of risk-informed, inclusive resilience.
Climate change could push up to 158 million more women and girls into extreme poverty by 2050 under worst-case scenarios, amplifying existing vulnerabilities. Education for sustainable development (ESD) is identified as a key indicator, and is essential for risk awareness, early action, and building the adaptive capacity needed to navigate a rapidly changing climate.
Embedding inclusion in all resilience efforts
The Gender Snapshot 2025 highlights the need to address gender inequalities as core determinants of resilience. For UNDRR, these findings underscore the urgency of advancing the Sendai Gender Action Plan by integrating gender equality across risk knowledge, governance, financing, and recovery.
Strengthening gender-responsive data systems, expanding inclusive governance, and ensuring equitable access to disaster and climate financing will be essential to accelerating progress on the SDGs and supporting risk-informed development.
These efforts aim to ensure that resilience building is equitable, effective, and grounded in the lived experiences of those most affected by risk.