As climate impacts intensify in Bangladesh, EcoMen highlights how women-led leadership and reimagined masculinities strengthen resilience, challenge inequality and drive accountable, community-centered climate justice from grassroots to policy arenas nationwide.
Bangladesh faces some of the most severe impacts of climate change. Floods, cyclones and rising seas displace communities, destroy livelihoods and disrupt ecosystems every year. Yet global and national climate discussions often overlook a crucial question: who leads, who decides and whose voices are heard? Meaningful climate justice requires placing women’s leadership at the center while re-examining and reshaping dominant forms of masculinity.
Who decides: Beyond technical solutions
Global climate debates focus on carbon markets, net-zero targets and renewable energy transitions. These solutions are essential but rarely ask deeper questions: who defines development? Who benefits from extraction and growth? Whose suffering is normalized or ignored? Across institutions, markets and states, dominant masculinities equate strength with domination, success with accumulation and leadership with control over land, labor and nature. These norms shape both whose voices count and the resilience of entire communities.
Men are harmed by these expectations too. Societal pressures to be invulnerable providers often lead to stress, mental health crises and, in some cases, increased domestic violence during climate disasters. Engaging men and boys in climate action is not about blame; it is about responsibility. But responsibility alone is not enough. Real climate justice requires structural transformation with accountability, where women lead, gender equity guides decisions and men’s roles are reimagined in partnership with women and other gender identities.
EcoMen: transforming communities and norms
Through EcoMen, a movement by YouthNet Global, women’s leadership and agency are central in communities affected by climate change. EcoMen empowers women to influence decisions on food systems, livelihoods and community development. Simultaneously, it engages men and boys in challenging patriarchal norms, redistributing unpaid care and domestic work and supporting fair access to land, water and economic opportunities.
This norm-changing approach strengthens climate action while amplifying the voices of the most marginalised. EcoMen reaches manta fisherfolk, char dwellers, women impacted by river erosion, Harijan sanitation workers and tiger widows protecting rivers from pollution.
Across Bangladesh, EcoMen has mobilized 50,000 women, men, boys, girls and young people to confront harmful masculinities and promote women’s leadership, shared caregiving and environmental stewardship. By working with communities affected by floods, river erosion and pollution, EcoMen reframes gender equality as a collective responsibility essential for climate resilience and social cohesion.
In Kurigram, EcoMen empowers char residents displaced by river erosion to address gender disparities, secure livelihoods through locally led adaptation and protect ecosystems. In Barishal, fishing communities strengthen their agency and gender equity. Harijan sanitation workers in Khulna benefit from programmes improving both environmental health and social inclusion. EcoMen also highlights the plight of tiger widows in Shamnagar, Satkhira, who are marginalised near the Sundarbans due to ecological pressures, poverty and entrenched social norms.
Redefining masculinity and boosting women’s leadership
The EcoMen initiative promotes ecological masculinities, encouraging men to embrace caring and climate-conscious behaviours instead of dominance. Youth leadership programmes prioritize women leaders while reshaping masculinity for future generations by highlighting responsibility, care and collaboration. When men act as conscious partners alongside women leaders, they become powerful agents for climate justice. Inclusive leadership with women at the center fosters more resilient and fairer communities.
At the national level, EcoMen turns grassroots demands into policy advocacy. It contributes to debates on preventing child marriage, addressing gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights, climate adaptation and water governance. Its engagement with national coalitions and government bodies ensures that marginalised communities’ voices influence climate, nutrition and development policies.
Global implications and accountability
Worldwide, UN climate summits repeatedly show that women, especially in the Global South, bear the greatest burden of the climate crisis but are often excluded from decision-making. Fossil fuel politics, including petro-masculinity, continue to dominate discussions and reparations for climate loss remain limited.
A Just Transition is vital. Communities and workers must move toward low-carbon and resilient economies without losing livelihoods, while protecting forests, wetlands, fisheries and biodiversity. Success depends on women’s leadership and gender equality guiding crucial choices.
Technical solutions alone are not enough. Funding transformative programmes like EcoMen under the Gender Action Plan is not charity; it recognizes that climate action separated from social justice and ecological protection risks entrenching inequality. Renewable energy projects, adaptation efforts or ecosystem restoration that exclude women leaders risk further marginalising those most affected.
Accountability must be central. Listening to frontline communities, sharing decision-making and remaining open to critique are essential. Those with influence, often men in political, corporate and institutional leadership, carry greater responsibility to act.
Supporting women-led initiatives is a concrete step toward addressing the climate debt owed to the Global South while advancing adaptation, mitigation, justice and gender equality.
A collective responsibility for climate justice
Redefining masculinity alone will not solve the climate crisis, but without it and without women’s leadership at the heart, technical solutions remain limited and vulnerable communities continue to carry the heaviest burden. Strength must be re-envisioned as care rather than control.
Power must be exercised responsibly and human and ecological rights, guided by women’s leadership, must be central to every decision. Climate justice is not only about reducing emissions; it is about ensuring rivers, forests and communities survive together, with men and women participating equally.
Placing women at the heart of climate leadership transforms how societies respond to crises. It shifts priorities from extraction and accumulation to care, resilience and inclusivity. It challenges patriarchal norms that have historically shaped both environmental destruction and social inequality. Adaptation, mitigation and disaster preparedness are stronger when informed by those most affected.
Global leaders must ask whether they are ready to elevate women to central roles, engage men and boys as conscious partners, confront entrenched power hierarchies and commit to an inclusive and equitable Just Transition. The decisions made today will determine which communities and ecosystems survive tomorrow and whether climate action truly delivers justice for all.
In Bangladesh and beyond, EcoMen demonstrates that climate justice is inseparable from gender justice. Women’s leadership is not optional; it is fundamental to achieving meaningful and lasting solutions. Until leadership structures, social norms and policy frameworks reflect this reality, technical solutions alone will fall short. Strength must be redefined, power exercised responsibly and equity placed at the center of every climate decision.
Climate justice requires both women’s leadership and men’s engagement in partnership. Only then can communities, ecosystems and future generations thrive together.
