Socio-economic status, origin, age as well as gender are factors that determine people’s ecological footprint and contribution to global warming, their willingness to change and their possibilities to cope with the multiple impacts of climate change. While often viewed as a purely scientific and technical phenomenon, climate change is in fact a social, economic and political phenomenon with profound implications for social justice and gender equality. Women and men do not experience climate change equally. Power relations and socially constructed gender norms shape the rights, roles, capacities and preferences of women and men throughout the world. Women are often impacted disproportionately by the impacts of climate change compared to men. At the same time, women are underrepresented at all levels of climate policy-making and in climate science. This has negative implications for gender equality and the consideration of gender issues in these areas as well as for the diversity of solutions developed and implemented. The project GenderNETCLIM seeks to contribute to making programmes, strategies and measures for the mitigation of climate change and adaptation to its numerous impacts more (gender-) equal and thereby socially just. At the national conference „Climate needs change: fostering the potentials of gender research“ the project’s core messages are presented and discussed with experts from science and practice in the fields of climate change and gender equality. We will debate how climate mitigation and adaptation can become more (gender-)equal, where and how findings from Gender Research can be made useful for political strategies on climate change and explore the need for action for the integration of gender in climate mitigation and adaptation. We will discuss the development of (gender-)responsive climate policies and politics and the respective implementation.