Women and Forests: Sustaining Rural Livelihoods through Forest Resources

Forests are far more than a landscape feature. For hundreds of millions of rural women around the world, they are the foundation of daily survival – the source of food, fuel, medicine, income, and centuries of accumulated ecological knowledge. Yet the scale of women’s dependence on forests, and the devastating consequences when those forests disappear, remains significantly underestimated in mainstream economic and policy conversations. Understanding how women relate to forest resources is not just an environmental issue; it is a gender issue, a livelihood issue, and an economic justice issue all at once.

The depth of women’s dependence on forest resources 🔗

The relationship between women and forests is practical and immediate. Across the Global South, forests provide what markets often cannot: free, accessible resources that sustain households daily. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), more than 750 million women depend on forests for employment and household consumption globally. This dependence is not peripheral – it is central to survival.

The primary resources women collect from forests fall into three broad categories. The first is fuelwood, which remains the dominant cooking energy source for rural households across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The second is fodder for livestock, which supports dairy and meat production integral to household nutrition and income. The third is non-timber forest products (NTFPs) – a wide category covering wild fruits, vegetables, medicinal plants, honey, resins, fibers, and materials for handicrafts.

Research on women’s contributions to community forestry and agroforestry systems finds that women make up 60-70% of those involved in fuelwood, fodder, and NTFP collection. That same research shows that more than half of the annual income of women in forest-dependent households comes from forestry and agroforestry activities – compared to roughly one-third for men. This makes women significantly more economically exposed to changes in forest availability than their male counterparts.

The economic contribution of NTFPs to rural livelihoods is well-documented. A 2025 review published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems estimates that approximately 2.77 billion people in the Global South use NTFPs in some form, with households in a six-country study generating an average of 24.4% of their total income through these products. For women specifically, these products function as both a safety net during crises and a consistent supplementary income stream when markets are lean.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) highlights that forests are not only sources of raw products but also contributors to nutrition and health. Wild foods gathered from forests – fruits, leaves, fungi, edible insects – supplement diets in ways that agricultural production alone cannot, particularly during lean seasons. In many communities, women are the primary gatherers of these supplementary foods, making their forest access directly tied to household food security.

Gender norms and access to forest resources 🔗

Women’s access to forest resources is not simply a matter of geography – it is shaped by gender norms that determine which resources are “for women” and which belong to men. Research published in the journal Environmental Evidence notes that gender relations in low-income rural areas can place a disproportionately large burden on women for managing household food sourcing, making their access to forest products not just preferred but functionally required. The gathering of firewood and consumable NTFPs is predominantly a female activity in most forest-dependent communities, while the extraction of timber and large-scale fishing tend to be male-dominated domains.

Crucially, in India, women own less than 14% of agricultural land, which severely limits their access to credit and formal economic structures. This makes NTFPs – collected from common lands that require no private ownership – one of the few income sources women can access without land tenure. Their dependence on common property regimes is therefore not a choice but a structural consequence of gendered land ownership patterns.

Women’s role in forest conservation movements 🔗

Because women’s livelihoods are directly tied to forest health, it is no coincidence that some of the world’s most significant forest conservation movements have been led by women. The most iconic example is the Chipko Movement, which emerged in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand, India, in the early 1970s. The Hindi word “chipko” means “to cling” or “to hug,” reflecting the movement’s defining tactic: villagers, predominantly women, physically wrapped their arms around trees to prevent commercial loggers from felling them.

Women from the Himalayan villages of Reni and Mandal initiated the movement as a grassroots response to deforestation that was stripping them of the fodder, fuel, and fibers their households depended on. While men often engaged with the economic and political framing of the struggle, women led its most decisive moments. In 1974, when loggers arrived at Reni village while local men had been summoned away to a distant city, Gaura Devi – a 50-year-old village woman – mobilized 27 women who confronted the loggers and guarded the trees through the night. Their action directly forced a government inquiry into deforestation in the Alaknanda valley.

The Chipko Movement’s female leadership was not incidental. Women’s leadership emerged organically from daily reality: they spent hours each day collecting resources from forests, making them intimately aware of ecological changes long before they showed up in official reports. Men in the region frequently migrated for work, leaving women with stronger ties to the village and a greater stake in its long-term environmental sustainability. This grounded, lived knowledge became the backbone of one of India’s most consequential environmental movements.

The political outcomes were significant. The Chipko Movement led to a 15-year ban on commercial logging in Himalayan forests, issued by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1980. It also directly influenced the Forest Conservation Act of 1980, which established regulatory controls over deforestation across India. Beyond policy, the movement is widely recognized as one of the earliest examples of ecofeminism in practice – a demonstration that environmental rights and women’s rights are inseparable.

Chipko’s legacy extends beyond India. Women-led movements from India to the Amazon have continued to challenge extractive industries and deforestation. In Ghana, women shea and baobab butter producers organized through the Ghana Federation of Forest and Farm Producers to protect the trees their livelihoods depend on, drawing attention to the issue at local and national levels until it was resolved. In Nepal, the Mount Everest Forest Botanicals Alliance counts 82% women among its 13,720 members, using collective organization to pursue both sustainable livelihoods and forest conservation simultaneously.

The gap between contribution and governance 🔗

Despite women’s demonstrated commitment to forest protection, their representation in formal forest governance remains critically low. Studies show that women hold less than 10% of decision-making positions in formal forest governance bodies, even as they carry out more than 60% of the labor involved in collecting non-timber forest products. This exclusion is not simply a matter of fairness – research consistently shows that women’s inclusion in forest governance improves conservation outcomes. When women are elected to or represented in forest management committees, forest health measurably improves, because their direct dependence on forest resources incentivizes sustainable management in ways that more abstract economic interests do not.

How deforestation hits women hardest 🔗

When forests shrink, the consequences are not evenly distributed. Women, as primary collectors of forest resources and managers of household welfare, absorb the impact most directly and most severely.

The most immediate effect is an increase in the time burden of daily labor. Deforestation directly increases women’s workload as they must travel longer distances to gather the same quantity of fuelwood, fodder, and water. Estimates from the early documentation of the Chipko period suggested that fuelwood collection alone was consuming six to eight hours per day for many women in deforested areas. As forests recede further, that time expands further still – time that cannot be spent on income-generating work, education, or rest.

Beyond the time burden, deforestation directly undermines women’s income-generating activities. Women who sell NTFPs – wild honey, medicinal herbs, handcrafted goods made from forest materials – lose their raw material base when forest cover is lost. In communities where women depend on forests for non-timber products, forest loss translates directly into lost income, increased household poverty, and heightened food insecurity. For women who lack land titles and cannot easily pivot to alternative income streams, this loss can be catastrophic.

The ecological knock-on effects of deforestation compound the damage. Deforestation leads to soil erosion, reduced rainfall, poorer crop yields, and the drying of natural springs – all of which fall disproportionately on women to manage. When water sources dry up, women must travel farther to collect water. When crop yields drop due to soil degradation, women – often the primary managers of household food security – must find alternative food sources. When firewood becomes scarce, they must either spend more time gathering it or reduce cooking frequency, with direct nutritional consequences for children and families.

The relationship is cyclical and self-reinforcing: poverty caused by deforestation pushes communities toward further forest extraction for survival, which accelerates deforestation, which deepens poverty. Women sit at the center of this cycle, experiencing its effects most acutely while often having the least political power to intervene at the policy level.

Women’s traditional knowledge as a conservation resource 🔗

One of the most underutilized assets in forest conservation is the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) that women in forest-dependent communities have accumulated and transmitted across generations. This knowledge is not informal or anecdotal – it is a sophisticated, empirically grounded understanding of how ecosystems function, how species interact, which plants regenerate under which conditions, and how harvesting can be calibrated to avoid depletion.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), indigenous and local women are fostering traditional practices for protecting natural spaces and growing food that experts believe could play a key role in countering climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. This knowledge is intergenerational and community-based, meaning it has been tested, refined, and adapted across centuries of lived environmental change.

Research from Tropenbos International documents how, among the Ba’Aka people of Central Africa, women’s ritual and practical expertise quietly shapes the rhythms of forest life – guiding the use of medicinal plants, determining the timing of seasonal resource collection, and managing extraction in ways that prevent depletion. Yet these women are rarely consulted in formal conservation planning. Similarly, in Ecuador, Quijos Indigenous women maintain agroforestry systems called chagras that serve as spaces of both food sovereignty and ecological continuity – living libraries of biodiversity knowledge transmitted through practice.

A study published in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine found that indigenous and local communities’ territories contain approximately 80% of the world’s remaining forest biodiversity, and that the lands they manage release significantly less carbon than those managed by other groups. Traditional ecological knowledge is not separate from this outcome – it is a key driver of it. The sustainable harvesting practices, species selection strategies, and rotational use systems embedded in TEK produce conservation outcomes that formal resource management frequently fails to replicate.

In many regions, women have been custodians of seed preservation, soil regeneration techniques, and traditional ecological knowledge that fosters biodiversity and resilience. India’s women-led Navdanya movement, for example, has championed seed sovereignty and biodiversity conservation. In Africa’s Sahel, women have led grassroots reforestation efforts through agroecology, directly combating desertification while improving food security. These are not isolated cases – they are part of a global pattern of women applying inherited ecological knowledge to address contemporary environmental crises.

The risk of losing traditional knowledge 🔗

Traditional ecological knowledge erodes when communities lose access to forests, when younger generations move to urban areas, and when formal conservation frameworks fail to recognize or document women’s expertise. Research from the U.S. Forest Service notes that TEK is rapidly eroding due to loss of access to traditional land areas and the prohibition of traditional forest management practices, with the result that the forest resources on which many social and cultural practices were based have declined alongside the knowledge itself. Once lost, this knowledge cannot simply be recovered through scientific research – it requires the living practice of communities who hold it.

This creates an urgent case for integrating women’s traditional knowledge into formal conservation and forest management strategies. It also makes a case for securing women’s land and resource rights – because communities cannot maintain traditional ecological knowledge when they lose access to the ecosystems that knowledge describes. Research on indigenous women in the Philippines found that gender-restrictive communities – those that limit women’s self-expression and participation – experience greater environmental degradation. The link is clear: restricting women’s agency in forest governance restricts the flow of ecological knowledge that sustains those forests.

Policy implications: what needs to change 🔗

The evidence is consistent across regions and decades: women are disproportionately dependent on forests, disproportionately harmed by deforestation, disproportionate contributors to conservation through traditional knowledge and grassroots activism, and disproportionately excluded from the governance structures that determine how forests are managed. Addressing this requires changes that go beyond symbolic inclusion.

Strengthening women’s land and resource rights is foundational. Without tenure security over the forests and common lands they depend on, women cannot invest in sustainable practices, advocate effectively for conservation, or access credit and markets for the NTFPs they collect. The IUCN identifies joint forest management projects and self-help groups as proven mechanisms for expanding women’s access to resources and decision-making, with documented improvements in forest conservation and household livelihoods as outcomes. Mandatory inclusion of women in community forest management committees – as practiced in Myanmar’s Community Forestry Initiative – is another concrete structural intervention with measurable conservation benefits.

Equally important is the formal recognition of traditional ecological knowledge as a legitimate and valuable input to forest management policy. The UN-REDD Programme emphasizes that Indigenous Peoples and local communities, women and young people, must be included in forest conservation, sustainable management, and restoration plans from planning through to benefit distribution in order to achieve the best conservation results. Without women’s knowledge at the table, conservation planning is working with an incomplete picture of the ecosystems it seeks to protect.

The stakes are high. Forests are central to climate change mitigation, biodiversity preservation, and rural poverty reduction – and women are central to forests. Keeping them at the margins of forest governance is not just a gender equity failure; it is an ecological one.

What do you think? If women contribute the majority of forest labor and hold generations of ecological knowledge, why do they remain so underrepresented in formal forest governance? And as deforestation accelerates globally, what responsibility do policymakers have to ensure that the communities bearing the heaviest burden – particularly rural women – are centered in conservation decisions?

References

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