Where Are Women?
No commentsMembers of different women’s organisations at the COP14 summit in Poznan, Poland, have expressed concern over the UNFCCC’s ambit. According to them, the convention has no human face or social dimension — it is felt that the climate change summits are one of the few global conventions that do not include women and gender issues. Activists now want to make sure that women are included when the Copenhagen agreement is signed.
At the UNFCCC summit in Poznan, Poland, women’s rights activists are working as a team to try and find inter-connections that enable gender issues to be incorporated in the post-Kyoto Protocol treaty.
Many studies have been done on this subject. In fact, at recent disasters, these studies have proven that the effect of extreme weather on women is great, said Monique Essed-Fernandes, interim director of the Womens’ Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO).
“Women also adapt well to climate change,” says Essed-Fernandes. “They plant things and take decisions. Who are the ones that decide to save energy by telling children to turn the light off? Women.”
According to Tracy Raczek, public affairs specialist at UNIFEM, it is basically commonsense to include all stakeholders in the negotiations, including women. “Our potential and contributions should be included, because we are half the world’s population, so we have half the skills and half the needs, and if our needs are incorporated and we are allowed to contribute in the decision-making process, the entire negotiations will be more productive, adaptation policies will be more effective, and mitigation efforts will be more effective,” Raczek says.
Women’s organisations have a large working plan and one of the areas on which they are working is to provide an orientation for UNFCCC delegates on the issue of gender and climate change.
“We had a training yesterday, where we brought 40 delegates together and showed them the gender implications of adaptation, and what they will mean when disaster strikes,” said Rebecca Pearl, co-coordinator of the Global Gender and Climate Alliance. “What are the gender implications when men and women have different responsibilities on the ground? Men and women have different roles in the area of mitigation. For instance, there are a couple of initiatives happening where women are planting trees and also doing energy projects that could be contributing to reducing emissions.”
Next week, during the high level segment of the Poznan conference, women campaigners will have a meeting with women ministers of environment, who were brought together under WEDO by Gro Brundtlantd, a Norwegian politician and international leader in sustainable development, now serving as a special envoy on climate change for the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. During the meetings, it is expected that Nobel Laureate Wangari Matai, one of the founders of WEDO, will share her views via video.
Talks are expected to centre on financing mechanisms, acknowledging that women have a role to play in UNFCCC, and that they have to be included in adaptation and mitigation.
