Rural women are on the front line of the climate crisis. It’s time the world acts like it

For millions of rural women living alongside logging concessions, industrial agriculture and mining sites across Africa, urgency is a daily reality. The extra two hours walked to reach a water source that dried up last dry season. The harvest that failed again because the rains came three weeks late, or came all at once and drowned the fields. The forest that fed and healed a family for generations, gone within a single industrial concession cycle, and with it, the seeds, medicine, income, and knowledge of how to use them. The weight of absorbing every climate shock first, hardest, and alone is left to communities while they remain legally invisible on the land they have managed for centuries.

Greenpeace Africa joined local and Indigenous communities for the Forest Cultural Show (Indigenous People's Day celebration) in Yaounde, Cameroon, to learn how they protect their environment, share their cultures, and chart sustainable solutions for the future. Together, they marked Indigenous Peoples' Day. Greenpeace Africa documented how the communities apply ancestral knowledge and traditional practices to protect the forest and peatlands they depend on.

Women's vulnerability is not an accident but by design

Rural women are dealing with the consequences of decisions made by others, elsewhere. Vulnerability is manufactured through competition for natural resources in a system that extracts wealth from their forests and lands while leaving rural women with none of the benefits but all of the consequences.

When rain cycles delay, rivers run dry and harvests collapse, women and girls in rural areas who are highly dependent on local natural resources for their livelihood absorb the shock first and hardest. When logging concessions, oil and gas or mining operations move in without their consent, the forest and land they depend on disappear, taking their food, their medicine, their shelter and centuries of knowledge with them.

Solange Sanhgan, 29 years old, a leader of the Bagyeli community sits in front of her mother's kitchen. "We were forced to move our camp twice already because of palm oil expansion. This time, we will not leave". The Bagyeli are a group of Pygmies living in South Cameroon. As other local communities their livelihood is under threat from palm oil and rubber uncontrolled expansion.

Women, youth and Indigenous People are the key to climate action

Let us be clear: climate change is not neutral. It's also driven by industrial emitters of fossil fuels, agribusiness and commercial deforestation. Often, these are the same actors encroaching on community territories. Those who cause the damage must stop causing it, and they must repair what they have broken. As Central African countries seek to meet global demand for fossil fuels, timber, palm oil and other raw materials through industrial logging, large-scale agriculture and oil blocks concessions, the threats to the forests, and most vulnerable people (women, youth and Indigenous People) will only increase.

Rural women practise agroecology developed over generations, protecting soils, selecting and preserving seeds with a rigour no industrial catalogue can match. They manage forests collectively, transmit ecological knowledge across generations, and adapt their farming systems to shifting conditions with remarkable creativity. They are the primary custodians of agrobiodiversity of the seed diversity, the medicinal plant knowledge, and the food systems that rural communities depend on. This is not folklore. It is a functioning climate adaptation infrastructure, built over centuries, that operates without subsidy, recognition, and more so without legal protection.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognises that agricultural practices incorporating indigenous and local knowledge can address the combined challenges of climate change, food security, and biodiversity conservation simultaneously. Despite being its most effective stewards, in Africa communities hold formal legal rights over less than 2% of forest land. When a concession moves in without consent, that system does not pause, it is destroyed. The women who maintain forest lands leave with nothing: no compensation, nor recognition, and a climate bill they did not create.

Farmers extract cocoa beans on a farm in Dikomi-Bafaws using a wood stick instead of a machete to improve the quality of the final product. As industrial agricultural techniques spread into Africa, and especially into forests of the Congo Basin, Greenpeace identifies farming alternatives that can both benefit farmers, consumers and to the protection of natural resources.

One of the most effective climate adaptation strategies available is securing women's access to land and recognising their rights over seeds and forest resources. Every hectare that remains outside legal community control is a hectare exposed to concession, to enclosure, to the erasure of everything communities have built, maintained and protected.

The IPCC agrees that insecure land tenure reduces adaptive capacity, while land policies that recognise customary tenure directly strengthen community resilience to climate change.

Climate finance, forecasting and adaptation tools must be delivered to the last mile

Climate finance exists, but if climate funds are flowing through banks and institutions that communities cannot access without formal land titles, then it is just a slogan. Weather forecasting tools, digital agriculture applications, green funds, real resources have been mobilised. But do they reach the women of Niabibeté, Nkoelon, or Zoulabot, Cameroon? In most cases, no.

Alerts arrive on phones they do not own, in languages they do not read, in zones without reliable internet.

Designing adaptation tools without designing their delivery to the last mile is not adaptation. It is a theatre. And rural women cannot afford theatre.

Driving change from climate awareness to climate action means four concrete things:

• Polluters should stop polluting and start paying for loss and damage. Our governments should cease granting land, forestry and mining concessions in areas of high conservation value and where communities, women and Indigenous Peoples are claiming and exercising their ancestral land rights.
• Decision makers must support the initiatives led by Indigenous People and local communities to ensure sustainable development, at least at the local level, by ensuring that the funding and technologies developed and made available are directly accessible to them. Today, these funds flow almost exclusively through states and large institutions. The communities who need them most are the furthest from them.
• National laws must protect the land and forest rights of local communities and Indigenous Peoples, especially in areas targeted by large-scale investment. In Cameroon, ongoing land reform processes offer a real window. Civil society and the nation's elected representatives must push hard to ensure these instruments protect communities.
• Policy makers must build solutions with rural women, youth, people with disabilities and Indigenous People, not for them. This will support women's roles as guardians of food security and biodiversity, and deliver adaptation policies designed with their knowledge at the centre, not as a footnote.

It will take more than a generation to grow back the forests retreating today. The knowledge disappearing with them needs nurturing and renewing too. Climate action cannot wait for those who have already been waiting too long.

Action must include countering threats from predatory corporations, like the world's largest meat company JBS, that are driving deforestation and climate destruction and setting their sights on massive expansion in Africa.

Stella Tchoukep is Forest Campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, based in Cameroon.

This article was originally published by Greenpeace Africa on 5 June 2026 for World Environment Day.