Beyond vulnerability: a review of gendered resilience, Paris agreement and rural farmers’ adaptation

Introduction Climate change impacts are not gender-neutral, yet standard reporting relies on aggregate household indicators that obscure intra-household power dynamics and diverse individual vulnerabilities. This review assesses gender-differentiated climate resilience in rural farming households and evaluates the extent to which empirical evidence aligns with the gender-responsive, participatory and transparent mandates of the Paris Agreement. Methods Peer-reviewed studies published between 2015 and 2025 were retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, AJOL and Google Scholar following PRISMA guidelines. A total of 117 eligible studies were screened and analysed thematically using a hybrid inductive–deductive approach in R. Methodological quality was appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT), and evidence coverage was characterised using GRADE-CERQual adequacy criteria. Policy alignment was mapped against Articles 2.1b, 7.1, 7.5, 11 and 13. Results Eight interrelated resilience domains were identified: livelihood, water, food, ecological, social, community, agricultural and economic. The review reveals a significant implementation gap between the Paris Agreement and ground-level reality. While Articles 7.5, 11 and 13 emphasise equity and participation, resilience is often achieved through paradoxes of depletion. We propose the Gendered Resilience Paradox Framework (GRPF), a novel theoretical model encompassing resilience as a distributive process rather than a neutral capacity. The framework identifies five interlocking mechanisms—workload-resilience, biological buffer, mobility-stability, restoration-marginalisation and hydrological time-poverty—through which household resilience is achieved via the systematic transfer of adaptation costs onto women’s bodies, time and agency. These paradoxes form a self-reinforcing Depletion Cycle, creating a resilience debt that may compound intergenerationally. A co-occurrence network (n = 117) shows that workload-resilience is the most frequently documented paradox (53.0%) and reveals that embodied paradoxes remain the least studied. Articles 2.1b and 7.1 show partial alignment; Articles 7.5, 11 and 13 show misalignment. Men also face climate-related hardships, including psychosocial stress, migration-induced vulnerabilities and systemic exclusion from aid. Discussion Resilience achieved through depletion is not resilience but a debt. Closing the implementation gap requires distributional indicators, time-releasing infrastructure, secure land tenure, and bundled interventions that address multiple paradoxes simultaneously. Systematic review registration Open Science Framework (OSF https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WFR7Q ).