COP26: Gender-sensitive Climate Action?
A 3.5 meter tall puppet takes centre stage at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, better known as COP26. The giant puppet depicts a young Syrian refugee girl and is named "Little Amal". After walking thousands of kilometres across Europe to raise awareness on the plight of refugee children on the front line of climate change, she made it to Glasgow, where she opened Gender Day. COP26 aims to update and further countries' plans to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, a commitment that was set out in the Paris Agreement in 2015. Gender Day was thus devoted to discussing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, and providing technical guidance on incorporating this into National Action Plans and Technology Needs Assessments.
You might be wondering, why was there a dedicated day for gender during COP26? What does gender have to do with climate change?
Neither the impacts of and responses to climate change are gender neutral. The relationships men and women have to their environment vary greatly, as a result of their ascribed societal roles. In my previous blog posts, I explained how women disproportionately hold the burden of water and food provision at the household level. Africa in particular is one of the "most vulnerable continents due to its high exposure and low adaptive capacity". With climate change, these issues become exacerbated through an amplification of extremes, like greater interruptions in water supply through longer droughts, pollution of water sources, and increased crop failure. Such is the case in Nigeria, where the persistent droughts and flooding brought on by climate change have reduced educational participation in girls, as they have to travel further to collect water. Furthermore, declines in fish stock in lakes across Nigeria have seriously impacted women whose livelihoods depend on it.
Institutional attention to gender-inclusive climate change policies is hence crucial to facilitate a more effective means of climate action. However, this must extend beyond the exclusive focus on women as passive victims of climate change. Uniquely positioned in influential roles in their families and communities, there remains a wealth of opportunities to elevate women as active agents of change. For example, women in rural communities of Mozambique became single-heads of their households as a result of increasing economic migration of men to neighbouring South Africa. These women were hence able to take on more 'male' productive labour and responsibilities, like charcoal production and livestock rearing. Acknowledging cases like these can emphasise their agency as managers of their environment.
Caution must also be taken to avoid portraying women as homogenous across the global South. In order to do so, it is imperative for women to be included in these political conversations at all decision-making levels.
The question then remains: How effective is COP26 on these fronts?
Furthering the Gender Action Plan (GAP) that was first adopted at COP25 was one of the key focuses of Gender Day this year. Nigeria was one of the only African countries to set out a gender-sensitive climate commitments to expand its Implementation Strategy for their National Gender and Climate Action Plan.
Although some progress has been made through GAP to increase women's participation in climate delegations by 3-5% year on year, there remains a lack of female leadership in climate negotiations. In fact, "only 20% of Technology Needs Assessments make reference to gender considerations to ensure women's effective participation in stakeholder processes and decisions taken on technology needs".
Most notably, the initial COP26 team consisted entirely of men. Only after drawing public criticism did they reorganise the unit to be 45% comprised of women. Even so, the senior public-facing roles continue to be occupied by men, while women played event-organising or advisory roles. Such a gendered division of labour within the leadership team is perhaps representative of wider systemic issues in climate negotiation. Diaka Selena Koroma, an ActionAid climate activist from Sierra Leone, emphasised the importance of female leadership at global conferences to add pressure to commit to these gender-climate targets.
Indeed, decisions on institutional climate policies emerge from gendered power and political relations, which ultimately influence the social and ecological outcomes of the interventions. While COP26 presented the perfect opportunity to champion gender-responsive climate action, it seems there still disappointingly remains a disconnect between policy and reality.
What do you understand by this statement from Makina and Moyo, 2016: Institutions play a central role in facilitating policy effects and forming major nodes of interaction as well as determining the
ReplyDeleteaccentuation of risk.
There are interesting questions riased in this post; how to effectively measure and report on disparity across case studies in relation to gender inequality and access to resource? How do institutions engege in the developing noded of intersection for gendered climate risk but also facilitate effective negotiaitons.?
Well presented with good engagement with literatures but they need to be embeded.
Hi Clement, thanks for your comment! In regards to the Makina and Moyo (2016) article, I believe they are emphasising the importance of institutions in progressing gender-sensitive climate policy as not only do they have the agency from a top-down perspective to include gender-based discussions on climate change, but it is at this level that multiple stakeholders can be brought into the conversation to ensure that the policies implemented are culturally and socially embedded. For instance, conferences like COP26 that have the opportunity to include public and private sectors, as well as raise the voices of members of the community that the policies will be affecting, can result in building adaptive capacity and reducing vulnerability to climate change. However, I feel this is where COP26 may have failed with the lack of substantial female representation at all decision making levels, and thus the opportunity that institutions have to effect real change in gender-sensitive climate policy that Makina and Moyo (2016) discuss is not realised to its full potential.
DeleteI loved reading this blog! You clearly linked the issues of gender and climate change, which is crucial for a sustainable future. You mentioned how there is still a lack of female leadership within climate negotiations, how do you think this gap could be closed? And is this more of an issue for some African countries over others? A really good post and I loved the inclusion of 'Little Amal'!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Ellie! I think solving the issue of the lack of female leadership within climate negotiations is complicated. As shown in the example of the COP26 team, many instances of gender and diversity inclusion are deemed as a 'checkbox' requirement, without meaningful consideration for actually including women as decision-makers. I think in order to really improve female representation in climate negotiations, this also requires the men that currently hold disproportionate power to acknowledge and facilitate greater female representation. In this way, it's evident that greater gender inclusion is a problem that needs to be jointly solved by collaboration between men and women. In regards to your second question, there is definitely disparity across the continent, with some African countries doing better than others. This could be due to the stricter patriarchal norms in certain countries, which make it more challenging for women leadership to emerge. On the other hand, I found this article by UN Women that highlights 10 female leaders across Africa that are playing significant roles in fighting for women's empowerment: https://africa.unwomen.org/en/news-and-events/stories/2021/03/ten-african-women-leaders-we-admire
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