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Paper long abstract

Climate justice exposes the paradox that those least responsible for greenhouse emissions, primarily women, indigenous peoples and small-island states, suffer the gravest climate harms yet remain marginal to legal regimes allocating carbon rights and adaptation finance. Transformative futures envisage institutional rearrangements that redress these asymmetries through reparative redistribution, recognition of plural knowledge and democratization of land, energy and fiscal governance. This article examines how environmental-law instruments can be recalibrated to facilitate community-centered, gender-responsive development pathways for the attainment of climate justice. Employing doctrinal-systematic analysis, the study first codes 180 NDCs, green-bond frameworks and REDD+ programmes (2015-2024) to trace textual marginalization of collective tenure, reproductive labour and indigenous epistemologies. It then interprets these findings against hard-law obligations in the Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Escazú Agreement to identify normative gaps.

The analysis reveals a persistent framework that treats women as vulnerable beneficiaries rather than autonomous rights-holders. It highlights statutory silence on valuing unpaid care work as an ecological contribution and the absence of mandatory finance linking historical emissions to current loss and damage. This obstructs community-centered, gender-responsive development. Consequently, the article proposes model legislation embedding Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), mandating gender-responsive budgeting in adaptation finance, and recognizing collective tenure. By demonstrating how environmental law can operationalize redistribution, recognition, and representation, the study offers a roadmap for advancing climate justice through transformative, gender-responsive frameworks.