Women’s Wisdom and the Global Ethical Stocktake: A New Lens for COP30 and Beyond
WEA invited grassroots women leaders across our global alliance to share how their values, cultural frameworks, and lived experiences shape climate action — offering ethical insight to guide the work emerging after COP30.
Thirty years after the first United Nations climate negotiations — what we know as COP (Conference of the Parties) — something remarkable is unfolding far from the closed rooms where official negotiations are taking place. Women farmworkers are restoring soils. Indigenous leaders are protecting forests. Fisherwomen are safeguarding the sea. Youth are organizing in their communities with resolve and imagination.
These are the places where the future is already being lived into — even as global leaders gathered for COP30 to determine the next chapter of climate action. The Global Ethical Stocktake (GES) was created to carry the knowledge, wisdom, and experiences of our communities into the COP process.
While the UN’s existing Global Stocktake (GST) evaluates national progress toward the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement through emissions data, policy commitments, and implementation gaps, it overlooked something essential: the lived experiences, values, and community wisdom that define what climate action must mean on the ground. The GES, launched in 2022 by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, is a people-led, values-centered response to what the GST leaves out, gathering ethical insight and cultural knowledge from people facing the climate crisis every day — offering a moral compass at a moment when global choices carry profound consequences.
Over the past several weeks, from every region where Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA) works, grassroots women leaders shared reflections that shaped WEA’s contribution to the GES — illuminating a broader understanding of progress, responsibility, and what it will take to secure a thriving future.
WEA’s Ethical Stocktake: Gathering Women’s Wisdom from the Frontlines
For nearly two decades, WEA has partnered with more than 52,000 women who are advancing community-rooted climate initiatives in 31 countries, reaching 24 million people with life-saving solutions. While global processes often overlook the people most affected by climate impacts, WEA seeks to amplify the leadership of women who have created their own spaces for reflection, strategy, and collective climate action.
As part of the GES process, WEA convened a Self-Organized Dialogue with women leaders and program partners across our global network. This dialogue invited women to respond — in their own languages, contexts, and cultural frames — to questions that reach beyond policies and pledges and reach into ethics, culture, and lived experience:
- What traditions, histories, or practices (cultural or ethical) from your community teach us to live in greater harmony with nature?
- In your view, what are the moral, cultural, or systemic causes driving the ecological and climate crises we face today?
- What values and responsibilities guide your leadership and work in this moment of climate and ecological crisis?
- What transformations or ethical shifts do you believe are needed for humanity to live in right relationship with the Earth?
Their reflections reveal a dimension of climate action that formal negotiations rarely capture: the values that shape how communities survive, adapt, and imagine the future.
What We Heard: Three Ethical Touchstones for Climate Action
Honoring Traditional Knowledge through Community
The first ethical touchstone to emerge from WEA’s Self-Organized Dialogue was clear: the wisdom needed for this moment is not new. It lives in ancestral teachings, cultural memory, and community practices that have ensured balance between people and the Earth for generations.
Across Indonesia, Uganda, Mexico, India, and beyond, WEA Leaders described traditions that carry an ethic of reciprocity — reminding communities that care for the land, water, and one another is a shared responsibility.
In Indonesia, WEA Leader Robiatul Adawiyah spoke of gotong royong — collective action rooted in mutual support — as a guiding practice that shapes how communities steward forests, rivers, and soils. Rituals like Nyepi and Muda’i Laman put this shared responsibility into practice, offering moments for rest, restoration, and reverence. Together, these practices create intentional pauses in daily life — spiritual covenants with the Earth that reflect a worldview where ecosystems are not background landscapes but living relatives with whom communities maintain ongoing relationships.
In Mexico, women highlighted sustainable fishing traditions informed by intergenerational knowledge and deep respect for the sea as a source of life. In Uganda, leaders described teachings that frame water and forests as kin — to be honored, protected, and cared for with humility.
Across all regions, the message aligned: ancestral knowledge is not relegated to the past. It is an active, foundational guide to living sustainably now — and one of the most powerful ethical touchstones the world can draw upon in this climate moment.
Naming the True Roots of Crisis
The second ethical touchstone that emerged across WEA’s dialogue was a shared clarity about what sits beneath the climate emergency. Women emphasized that today’s ecological crises are rooted in systems — political, economic, and cultural — that have normalized extraction and weakened relationships between people and the Earth.
They described how these systems have reshaped daily life: forests opened to industry, rivers diverted for profit, and traditional ecological relationships strained by development models built on speed instead of stewardship. These shifts are not abstract; they shape how families grow food, access water, care for land, and sustain community.
In West Papua, WEA Leader Rhidian Yasminta Wasaraka offered one of the clearest expressions of this systemic rupture. She described how colonial extractive structures “replaced kinship with capitalism, communal stewardship with industrial exploitation, and women’s ecological leadership with patriarchal authority.” Her reflection reveals the deeper fractures — relational, cultural, and ecological — that communities continue to navigate.
Within these responses, women tied these systemic harms to a deeper worldview: anthropocentrism — the belief that humans stand above the rest of the natural world. Leaders spoke about how this mindset justifies extraction, disconnects people from place, and erodes teachings rooted in reciprocity and restraint.
From West Sumatra, WEA Leader Novi Rovika called for an ethical shift “from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric paradigm,” from seeing humans as rulers of nature to recognizing that “humans are part of nature itself.” Her reflection underscores the need for cultural and spiritual realignment — not just policy change — if communities and ecosystems are to heal.
In Uganda, Godliver Businge of United Women in Climate Change and WASH (UWCCWASH) reflected on how policies shaped by short-term interests push communities toward practices that degrade soil, water, and forests — even when these practices conflict with long-held ecological values. She emphasized how these pressures fall heavily on women, who are responsible for securing food, fuel, and water for their families amid increasing instability.
Throughout these reflections, a consistent understanding came forward: the climate crisis is not only ecological — it is moral, cultural, and systemic.
And because its roots run deep, meaningful solutions must go beyond policy goals. They must transform the worldviews and structures that allowed extraction to become normalized — and uplift the relational ethics frontline women continue to carry, often in defiance of these systems.
Values Guiding Leadership in this Moment
The third ethical touchstone rising from WEA’s dialogue reflects how women are leading through the climate crisis: with values shaped by care, responsibility, courage, and reciprocity, lived out through daily practices that hold communities together in times of change and uncertainty.
From Mexico, Hañela Ancona Balam of Sirenas de México — a WEA Mexico Program Lead organization — described how these values guide her leadership on the sea and in her community.
“At Sirenas de México, we believe in the strength of women as guardians of the sea and in education as a tool for transformation. Our work is grounded in respect for nature, in the traditional knowledge of fishing communities, and in intergenerational collaboration to protect marine ecosystems. I am guided by the conviction that to lead is not only to direct, but to inspire, to listen, and to act with integrity — knowing that every small action can create a positive impact on the sea and on the people who depend on it.”
WEA Leaders around the world described similar value-driven approaches: leadership rooted in mutual support, shared responsibility, and the understanding that protecting land and water is inseparable from protecting family and community well-being.
These reflections show that leadership in this moment is not defined by position or authority. It grows from relationships — to land, to water, to ancestors, and to one another. It emerges in the quiet, steady work of restoring ecosystems, teaching youth, resolving conflict, and caring for community.
Together, these insights reveal a different kind of leadership for the climate era: one that is relational rather than hierarchical and anchored in the everyday acts that weave resilience across generations.
The Ethical Shifts Humanity Must Make
The final ethical touchstone that emerged from WEA’s Self-Organized Dialogue was a call for transformation — not only in policies and systems, but in the values that shape how humanity lives on the Earth. Women described a shift away from convenience, ownership, and consumption toward care, restraint, and collective responsibility.
From Central Java, WEA Leader Tri Astuti of Balwana Bumi Lestari, a WEA Indonesia Program Lead, captured this shift clearly: “Humanity needs to move from a mindset of taking to a mindset of caring. We must stop viewing the Earth as an infinite resource and start treating it as a living space that we all care for.” Her reflection resonates around the world, where women spoke about limiting harm, taking only what is needed, and allowing land and water to rest.
Leaders described this ethical transformation as a move toward reciprocity: recognizing that forests, rivers, oceans, and soils are not commodities but living relatives whose well-being shapes our own. They emphasized that healing ecosystems is inseparable from healing relationships: between people and place, between generations, and between human communities themselves.
This shift also calls us to re-examine the cultural habits that have normalized overconsumption. Leaders spoke about choosing what sustains life over what is most convenient, and about rebuilding practices that honor the rhythms and limits of the natural world.
Together, these reflections offer a guide for global climate action: meaningful change will require not only new technologies or stronger commitments, but a profound reorientation toward care, reciprocity, and responsibility — values that women on the frontlines are already putting into practice every day.
Why These Insights Matter for Global Climate Action
Taken together, the reflections shared through WEA’s GES Self-Organized Dialogue illuminate what formal climate processes often overlook: global climate action succeeds or fails on the strength of the values, relationships, and lived realities that shape how communities experience change.
Technical pathways alone cannot repair the fractures women described — the erosion of reciprocity, the dominance of anthropocentric worldviews, the pressure of extractive systems, and the loss of practices that once guided balance and restraint. These are not peripheral issues. They are the ethical conditions that determine whether climate commitments are meaningful, durable, and rooted in what communities actually need.
The wisdom shared by WEA Leaders underscores that climate action grounded in ethics is more effective, more just, and more likely to endure. It reveals that communities on the frontlines are already modeling the cultural and relational shifts global leaders must make: prioritizing care over convenience, responsibility over extraction, and collective well-being over short-term gain.
This is why the Global Ethical Stocktake matters. By bringing these perspectives into broader climate negotiations, it expands the conversation beyond emissions targets and implementation gaps. It reminds the world that climate action is not only about what we build, regulate, or commit to — but about who we listen to, what we value, and how we choose to live together on this Earth.
Looking Ahead: Carrying This Wisdom Forward
As we move into a post-COP30 world, the GES reminds us that the future of climate action will depend on more than what is negotiated in formal spaces. It will depend on the wisdom, values, and lived experience that frontline communities bring — and whether global processes choose to listen.
For Women’s Earth Alliance, this work does not end with dialogue. We will continue uplifting women’s leadership across our programs in Africa, South Asia, North and South America, Europe, the Pacific, and beyond — ensuring that the ethical clarity shared through the GES informs not only global conversations but the local and regional strategies that shape daily life. These insights strengthen the networks WEA Leaders are already building, and help guide the community-rooted solutions we design, implement, and grow together.
In the months and years ahead, WEA will carry this wisdom forward:
- by deepening partnerships with women who are restoring landscapes, protecting water, and transforming food systems,
- by strengthening the circles of support that help leaders respond to crisis while imagining new futures, and
- by ensuring that spaces of global decision-making reflect the ethical, cultural, and relational knowledge of those most directly impacted by climate change.
The GES demonstrates something powerful: frontline women hold essential guidance for the climate era — guidance rooted in reciprocity, responsibility, and care. When their voices shape the path forward, a more just and life-sustaining world comes into view.
