This article was originally published in French on 16 November by the Magazine de l'Egalite Femmes-Hommes and in collaboration with Gender Experts, an international and free directory of experts on gender issues and gender equality, which currently lists the profiles of nearly 1,500 experts. They are researchers, activists or professional leaders integrating a gender approach in their activity. The aim of the platform is to reaffirm that gender and gender issues are a fully-fledged scientific and technical expertise with its place in the media and public space.
For 10 years, feminist non-governmental organisations have had observer status in the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. These organisations, about thirty in total, are united within the Women and Gender Constituency. Their objective: to challenge governments on the need to put the issue of gender inequalities at the heart of solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change.
COP26 ended on 13 November, and their conclusion is overwhelming: the current commitments of rich countries in terms of action and climate finance are insufficient and disconnected from local realities. At the demonstration that brought together more than 50,000 people in Glasgow on Saturday 6 November, the feminist bloc walked to make the voices of the activists who are missing heard: those who have not been able to make the journey to Scotland as well as those who have been murdered because they defended the environment. In 2020, 227 land and environmental defenders were killed, mainly in Colombia and the Philippines.
Still waiting for full parity
For the feminist observer group, defending human rights and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals go hand in hand. Governments that are signatories to the Paris Agreement will not be able to implement ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions – the so-called NDCs, which translate each country's efforts to reduce its national emissions and adapt to climate change – if human rights are not fully respected. However, human rights, especially those of women, are still far from being acquired for all, and this inequality influences the development of climate change policies.
First, women are still systematically under-represented among policymakers at the heart of climate governance. Parity among the members of the government delegations participating in the COP is still not achieved. In 2018, only 38% of delegates at COP24 in Poland were women. Even the UK, the host country of COP26, planned to send an all-male delegation to Glasgow. Under fire from critics, the parity of the delegation was finally put back in the spotlight, although the high-level public figures are mostly men. Equality between women and men requires equality of their decision-making power. While parity does not guarantee that women's needs and priorities will be taken into account, their presence at the negotiating table and in the media is still necessary for them to be able to express them.
In 2019, only two countries are governed by a joint parliamentary assembly: Rwanda and Bolivia (with respectively 61% and 53% of women MPs, according to OECD statistics). This lack of parity is damaging to the ambition of the negotiations because it is shown that women's representation in Parliament leads their governments to adopt more ambitious climate change policies. There is also a correlation between the increase of women parliamentarians and the reduction of CO2 emissions per capita through the adoption of environmental laws.
Making inequalities visible to better tackle them
Second, inequalities in social status and economic opportunities between men and women persist in the majority of countries and explain why women have different needs and interests than men, but also reinforce their exclusion from decision-making positions. The degree of these inequalities varies from one region to another and within countries; they range from school dropout for young adolescent girls – often due to early marriage and pregnancy – to discrimination against inheritance or property rights, to the persistent gender pay gap or the unequal sharing of domestic and care work. These differences exert multiple influences on people's ability to protect themselves from the risks associated with natural hazards or to adapt to environmental changes, particularly in crisis contexts where social protection is non-existent.
Making these inequalities and their consequences on social development visible is necessary for public policies that will better tackle them. The energy transition, for example, will not solve inequalities if employment and related profits only serve a minority. For instance, in the United States, women and ethnic minorities account for only 20% and 35% of new renewable energy jobs, respectively. In contrast, they occupy three-quarters of professions in the care economy and public health – sectors that are often ignored by political priorities for investment and adaptation.
Women's right to defend the environment
Thirdly, the backlash against civil society, which campaigns for women's rights and for the protection of the environment, adds up to the gender-based violence of which women and girls are the first victims on a daily basis. In March 2016, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran environmental activist and spearhead of protests against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam project, was murdered. Last July, a Honduran court found a former energy executive whose company had been awarded the contract, guilty of planning the murder. Killings, death threats, online violence against the young activists of Fridays for Future, are all means used to silence the demands of human rights and environmental defenders. Even within the COP negotiations, women face sexual harassment.
Feminists demand that the implementation of the Paris Agreement address social inequalities. More diversity in climate governance among the expertise and opinions that shape discourses on mitigation and adaptation objectives, is necessary for policies to resonate with as many people as possible so that they are more in line with the realities of populations most impacted by climate change. The other demands remain unchanged – the same for decades: ending the exploitation of fossil fuels and public subsidies for polluting industries, respecting human rights and protecting biodiversity.
Author Bio
Dr Virginie Le Masson is the Monitoring and Evaluation Lead for GRRIPP and a Research Fellow and co-Director of the Centre for Gender and Disaster at UCL’s Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction. Virginie is also a Research Associate with the Overseas Development Institute. Twitter: @Virginie_LeM.