On 30 September 2025, Ursula von der Leyen announced that the European Union will present new climate targets for 2035 and 2040 at COP30 next year. As Europe prepares for COP30 in Belem, these goals are meant to reinforce Europe’s global leadership on climate action. This statement shows that the EU is preparing to move from long-term promises to concrete actions toward climate neutrality.

However, as new targets take shape, Europe’s spending priorities are beginning to raise questions about the EU’s genuine commitment to climate action. The Climate Policy Initiative highlights that only a small share of global climate finance in 2021–2022 — about 5% of the total per year — was directed toward adaptation. The aim of adaptation is to help people and ecosystems cope with the unavoidable effects of climate change — such as building flood defences, improving drought-resistant agriculture, or developing early-warning systems. Yet much of this funding failed to reach low-income countries, where the need for such support is greatest. Moreover, the debate surrounding the $250 billion climate finance proposal at COP29 underscores this issue. While adaptation funding struggles to reach affected communities, NATO members collectively spent €343 billion on defence in 2024, and new rearmament plans could generate hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO₂ emissions over the next decade. This imbalance underscores how Europe’s spending priorities may tell a different story about what it values — human security or military power?

This gap in priorities has tangible human consequences. Ultimately, addressing the climate crisis is not only about emissions trajectories or dates on a roadmap, but also about people: the farmers who lose crops to drought, families who flee floods, or communities forced to move because their homes are no longer safe. From local to global, climate change is reshaping mobility across Europe and beyond.

And here, one fact must be underlined from the very beginning: the effects of climate change are not gender neutral.

Women and marginalised groups often face the steepest barriers in displacement: reduced access to resources, higher risks of poverty, and greater exposure to violence. It is essential to adopt a gender lens in any global response to climate-induced migration, especially when it comes to resilience building and addressing the gendered dimensions of climate migration. Yet EU policy frameworks still largely overlook these realities by making almost no reference to gender or intersectionality in national or EU-level approaches.

EU governance policy is gender blind

For all its progress on climate mitigation, the EU remains unprepared for the challenges to governance posed by climate migration.

People displaced by environmental disasters are not protected under the 1951 Refugee Convention, and within the EU, such cases rarely qualify for international protection, as there are deficiencies in the protection of environmentally displaced persons under existing asylum frameworks. While complementary protection mechanisms — such as the Qualification Directive, the Temporary Protection Directive, and the Return Directive’s non-refoulement provisions — could in principle offer alternatives for people displaced by environmental factors, each of these instruments has significant gaps and limitations. Most climate-displaced people remain in a legal limbo: not fully recognised, not adequately protected, and often excluded from access to housing, work, or healthcare.

A European Parliament’s report highlights that people forced to move due to environmental factors fall outside existing protection regimes. Although the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in 2024, is an attempt to create a more coherent approach to migration management, it still fails to acknowledge climate-induced mobility as a distinct governance challenge. It continues to prioritise border control and return procedures over forward-looking adaptation and inclusion measures, leaving a major policy gap.

This gap becomes even more concerning when seen through a gender lens. Displaced women often depend economically on others, face reduced mobility and political visibility, and are more vulnerable to gender-based violence. The UN Women policy brief on migration and climate change explicitly warns that women on the move are more likely to experience exploitation and loss of income after climate-related displacement, while having limited access to legal protection and humanitarian assistance. Despite this, EU frameworks continue to treat migrants as a homogeneous group, overlooking how overlapping inequalities — gender, age, migration status, disability, etc.— compound vulnerabilities.

Towards an intersectional approach

These limitations lead to a broader gap in EU governance, one that calls for a more integrated and inclusive approach. Addressing this blind spot requires an intersectional shift in EU governance. Intersectionality helps us understand how different dimensions of identity overlap, producing compounded risks. For example, a woman with an irregular legal status displaced by flooding does not only experience climate stress. She also carries the burdens of gendered exclusion and legal precarity that deepen her vulnerability.

Without acknowledging these intersections, EU migration and climate frameworks risk reproducing the same inequalities they claim to address. Symbolic attempts — like adding the word ‘gender’ to a strategy document — are not enough. Professor Gill Allwood points out that the EU’s Adaptation Strategy (2021) refers to gender just once in a single footnote noting that “men and women, older people, persons with disabilities, displaced persons, or socially marginalised groups have different adaptive capabilities”. The Mobility Strategy and Action Plan does little better: it mentions gender once, in a paragraph about encouraging more women to work in transport. However, these are acknowledgments, not actions.

The European Institute for Gender Equality has underlined that gender considerations in EU climate and environmental policies remain unevenly integrated and insufficiently implemented. In this sense, many scholars and civil society organisations criticised the EU Gender Equality Strategy (2020–2025) for lacking concrete mechanisms to implement its intersectional commitments, arguing that it remains largely rhetorical and fails to translate intersectionality into actionable policy change. Hence, can the EU truly claim leadership on climate justice if gender remains an afterthought?

What is needed is structural integration, not rhetorical inclusion. This means creating genuine coordination between climate, migration, and gender policy bodies, so these areas work together rather than in silos. It also means using gender-disaggregated data to guide adaptation and migration funding, ensuring that resources reach those most at risk. Local actors, particularly municipalities, must be supported, as they are often the first to face the realities of displacement and adaptation. As highlighted by the Platform on Disaster Displacement, responses to climate-related displacement should prioritise human dignity, rights, and inclusion — not only border control.

Why now?

The urgency is clear. The European Environment Agency recently warned that more than 81% of Europe’s protected habitats are already in poor and bad conservation status. Floods, fires, and heatwaves will grow more severe in the years ahead, driving mobility both within the EU and across its borders.

At the same time, the Gender Equality Strategy (2026–2030) is currently being rewritten. Civil society groups and the European Institute for Gender Equality are calling for stronger, institutional commitments that move past tokenistic mainstreaming. This moment offers a rare opportunity to connect those gender commitments with climate and migration governance. If the gendered dimensions of climate impacts and mobility are not identified and measured at this stage, they will not be meaningfully addressed and implemented at the later stages. Inherently, the same blind spots will persist in the next decade of EU policymaking.

COP30 will be remembered for the targets Europe sets. But it could also be remembered for whether Europe recognizes that climate ambition without social justice is incomplete. Climate migration is already happening; its gendered impacts are already visible. The question is whether the EU will take them seriously.

Conclusion

Climate change is not gender-neutral — and neither is climate migration. Across Europe and beyond, women and marginalised groups are already experiencing its unequal effects. Yet decades of fragmented policies have shown that treating climate, migration, and gender as separate agendas only deepens inequality. The next phase of EU action must confront these overlaps head-on.

As Europe prepares to set new climate targets for 2035 and 2040, this moment offers more than a chance to tighten emission goals — it is an opportunity to redesign governance around inclusion and justice. That means integrating gender and intersectionality at every stage, from policy design to implementation and evaluation, and ensuring that those most at risk are both visible and heard in the process.

If the EU is consistent about equality, dignity, and justice, this is the time to act. Climate action that fails to account for who is most affected will never be truly effective. Targets and numbers may define ambition, but intersectionality will define fairness.

Berfin Tutku Ozcan, PhD Candidate in Human Rights, Global Politics and Sustainability at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy.

Authors are responsible for the content of the blogposts.

This blog post is based on the outcomes of the SCEUS Summer school on European Union migration policies, which took place in Salzburg, 7-11 July 2025, as part of EUCHALLENGES, a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence co-funded by the European Commission under grant agreement no. 101127539.