Climate change is often discussed as an environmental emergency, but its most profound consequences are social, political, economic, and deeply gendered. The climate crisis does not operate in isolation from existing systems of inequality; rather, it intensifies historically entrenched hierarchies of gender, caste, class, race, labour, sexuality, and power. Women and gender minorities, frequently experience climate change not as a distant ecological abstraction but as everyday reality lived through food insecurity, water scarcity, displacement, unpaid labour, agrarian distress, and precarious working conditions. Thus, climate vulnerability is produced through unequal access to land, resources, healthcare, mobility, education, and political representation. An intersectional understanding therefore becomes essential, as climate crisis acutely affects those already marginalized by caste, indigeneity, gender, migration, sexuality, and poverty.

Contemporary scholarship in Feminist Political Ecology (Dianne E. Rocheleau) demonstrates that ecological crises reshape gendered divisions of labor and everyday survival practices. In many regions, women bear the burden of securing water, fuel, food, and care in unsustainable ecological conditions. Simultaneously, capitalist models of development and environmental policies frequently overlook local communities while appropriating Indigenous ecological knowledge and subsistence practices. Within this context, Ecofeminism has argued that the exploitation of nature and the subordination of marginalized bodies emerge from interconnected systems of patriarchal and capitalist domination. However, newer climate-gender intersectional scholarship moves beyond the associations between women and nature to emphasize agency, resistance, collective care, and ecological activism. Grassroots feminist movements, indigenous environmental struggles, and community-led sustainability practices increasingly challenge dominant models of development and propose alternative futures embedded in reciprocity, ecological ethics, and social justice.

Colonial histories of resource extraction, industrialization, and gender oppressions, remain central to contemporary ecological devastation, yet the responsibility for climate adaptation is often imposed on vulnerable communities themselves. Hence, Decolonial Ecology (Arturo Escobar) critiques dominant climate discourses that continue to privilege Eurocentric frameworks of sustainability while marginalizing indigenous and Global South epistemologies. It emphasizes indigenous ecological knowledge systems, community-centered sustainability practices, and alternative modes of co-existence that resist exploitative frameworks of development and resource extraction, thus waging a constitutive struggle for environmental justice.

Climate change must be understood as not merely an environmental catastrophe but as a critical site where questions of gender, power, embodiment, labor, mobility, governance, and justice converge. Any meaningful engagement with climate futures, therefore requires a serious engagement with gendered inequalities and the political structures that sustain them. To address these concerns, we invite abstracts for academic papers on the following areas of inquiry (but not limiting to):

●      Gendered dimensions of climate vulnerability and resilience

●      Feminist political ecology and resource governance

●      Climate justice, caste, race, and environmental inequality

●      Decolonial approaches to climate discourse

●      Ecofeminism and critiques of development

●      Indigenous ecological knowledge systems and environmental ethics

●      Gender, labour, and agrarian/ecological precarity

●      Water politics, food insecurity, and reproductive labour

●      Queer ecologies and environmental crisis

●      Urban ecologies, pollution, and environment deterioration

●      Literature, cinema, media, and cultural narratives of climate crisis

●      Sustainability, care ethics, and community resilience

●      Disability and climate change