Environmental degradation, pollution, and the climate crisis in recent decades have impacted impoverished regions with the most intensity and cost. The deterioration of common natural resources such as water, forests, and land has forced women—especially rural, Indigenous, and urban marginalized women—to dedicate more time and effort to securing family subsistence. Even in contexts dominated by systemic gender-based violence, more and more women are joining resistance movements to defend their territories, communal natural resources, and public services.
Since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, global policies have aimed to regulate society’s interaction with the environment, recognizing women’s essential role and their effective participation in environmental policies. Unfortunately, these policies often fail to address the structural causes of environmental degradation and gender inequality. In practice, most environmental policies have been designed as “reactions and remedies” rather than structural transformations toward just and sustainable societies.
In the face of neoliberal proposals that frame the energy transition around supposedly lower-impact production chains that remain oppressive, local and Indigenous communities, along with women, youth, and children, have positioned themselves in defense of their territories. These resistance movements target not only fossil fuel extraction but also imposed renewable energy projects, as seen in the Isthmus of Oaxaca, Mexico.
These movements are not led by traditional trade organizations. Instead, they take the form of networks, assemblies, or associations, often transcending national borders and being spearheaded by women. Examples of these struggles include:
- The Ecofeminaria Initiative: Women in Defense of Territories, which has influenced the implementation of the Escazú Agreement in Mexico.
- The Red Latinoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Sociales y Ambientales, which seeks to expose the gendered impacts of extractivism.
- Wayuu Women in Colombia, who resist the Cerrejón coal mine in La Guajira and imposed solar energy projects, while advocating for sustainable, community-led energy models.
- ONAMIAP Women in Peru, who have developed proposals for a just energy transition that integrate community knowledge and ancestral technologies to restore biodiversity and challenge extractivist capitalism.
Other notable groups include organisations collaborating with the Community Resource Exchange (CRE), such as the Women’s Rounds of San Antonio in the Hualgayoc province of Peru, the Women of the Última Esperanza Citizen Group in Chile, and the Association of Environmentalist Women fighting the transboundary Cerro Blanco mining project between Guatemala and El Salvador. Sharing situated experiences has been essential to resistance: these collaborations and exchanges strengthen networks across Latin America and female-led activism, weaving and rearticulating collective struggles.
When women mobilize, their participation is often minimized, and their leadership stigmatized, attacked, and criminalized. By stepping into the public sphere to defend their rights, women challenge corporate and state power, as well as the patriarchy entrenched in their communities. They are targeted not only as defenders of territories and common goods but also as women who defy gender norms and dominant conceptions of “development” or “progress.”
In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in the criminalization of women defenders of land and the environment. At the same time, concepts such as “territorial body” and “territorial femicide” have emerged, reflecting how women’s bodies, like territories, are commodified and exploited under extractivist logics. These systems strip away not only common goods but also collective identities and rights, exacerbating precariousness and perpetuating violence. All of this underscores the importance of women’s leadership while highlighting the severity of the challenges they face, affecting their physical and mental well-being, human rights, and dignity.
The current polycrisis—climatic, economic, and sanitary—demands a rethinking of ideas from environmental feminisms about economic rationality, scientific neutrality, productivism, unlimited growth, common goods, territory, care work, and intersecting forms of discrimination, as they relate to just transitions. The connection between women and nature is not inherent to being women but arises from historical roles, subsistence economies, and other social factors.
As protagonists in the defense of their territories, women demonstrate remarkable organizational capacity and resistance against the capitalist and patriarchal logic of social and economic organization. They challenge unsustainable production and consumption models that threaten life itself. Through their struggles, they teach us dignity, love for their territories, and ancestral knowledge. They call for a new way of relating to the environment, to each other, and to the world. The necessary and urgent energy transition will not be possible without the contributions of women and their diverse territorial struggles.
From the Latin American Group for a Just Energy Transition (Grupo LATEJ)—a coalition of over 40 civil society organizations in Latin America, including groups working alongside women defenders in the region—it is clear that a truly just transition must be built from feminist, community-centered, and grassroots perspectives. LATREJ’s Gender Committee supports this collective vision because current initiatives, whether public policies or private ventures backed by public funding, will not achieve genuine transformation without the intersectional voices of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and campesina women. It is time for development to be community-led, drawing from ancestral knowledge, clean and green technologies, and models that challenge the prevailing extractivist paradigm. Only then can we dismantle neocolonial impositions on ecosystems and communities while addressing the profound impacts on people and the planet as a whole.
This article was developed under the leadership of our colleague Karla Priego Martínez, who has over 20 years of experience in gender and environmental issues. It is produced with the substantial contributions of the members of the Gender Committee of the Latin American Group for a Just Energy Transition (Grupo LATREJ). This committee carries out coordination activities with other organizations and communities to promote and ensure that the transition is genuinely just and built from a perspective of gender, human rights, and feminisms. These approaches have been present since the first meetings of the regional working group, which has sought, from its inception, to develop its own narrative, deepen ideas and concepts for the analysis of policies, and address different contexts through an intersectional lens.