Twenty years ago the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was adopted to ‘… advance the goals of equality, development and peace for all women everywhere …’ (Beijing Declaration, 1995, paragraph 3).1 Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Chapter K (of the Beijing Platform for Action)2 on ‘women and the environment’ laid down three strategic objectives, inter alia, with objective 2 being to ‘integrate gender concerns and perspectives in policies and programmes for sustainable development’. This article demonstrates the importance of the implementation of this objective – on the one hand for progress on gender equality, and on the other hand for an ecologically sustainable development.