Cooled Prospects for Gender Justice from COP29

Anmol Irfan is a Muslim-Pakistani freelance journalist and editor. Her work aims at exploring marginalized narratives in the Global South with a key focus on gender, climate and tech. She tweets @anmolirfan22

For years, gender activists have been trying to draw attention to the disproportionate ways in which the climate crisis has been affecting women and girls. Studies show that by 2050, climate change may push 158 million more women and girls into poverty, which is 16 million more women and girls at risk than men and boys at the same level. For gender activists, there were small victories at this year’s United Nations COP29 climate change conference, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, but overall morale seems low as many find progress within this arena slow and tiring.

COP 29 participants described the  discussions as slow in many ways – and the intersection of gender and climate has been one of them. Following the conclusion of the conference, some of the victories recognized with the gender justice space have included the extension of the Enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender, for 10 years which will help hold governments accountable as they implement their climate policies. There was also an acknowledgement of gender within climate finance goals and an increase in participation of women at the conference, though it was late in the conference. With COP29 wrapped up in Baku this year, gender activists leave Azerbaijan fatigued and unsure about the future of their work. 

“I’ve been to so many COPs and this was one of the hardest ones” says Elise Buckle, founder of Climate Bridges and SHE builds bridges, when talking about what it was like to be in the room when gender just policies and solutions to climate change were being discussed and proposed at this years COP29 in Baku. “ We thought we wouldn’t have any texts, and then at the last minute we got it [extension of the Lima Work Programme ] so it gives me hope that this can be a floor not a ceiling”, she adds. 

Despite pushing for gender just solutions for decades, many have called this COP a “disappointment” and questions remain about whose responsibility it really is to accommodate the needs of women and girls within climate justice. 

What Went Wrong?

Lorena Aguilar, Executive Director at the Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls, describes the conversation around gender justice as constantly being in motion between success and failure. “When you talk about women rights and when you talk about gender equality , it’s like a pendulum, sometimes they [leaders] ignore, sometimes they accept and that’s what is happening with the UNFCCC,” she says. 

At Baku, it seems the pendulum swung the wrong way. As one of the nine stakeholder groups of the United Nations Framework Convention For Climate Change (UNFCCC) the Women and Gender Constituency was one of the main groups leading the call for more focus on gender-just initiatives during the conference. Environmental lawyer, researcher and activist Claudia Rubio Giraldo, who was one of the co-coordinators of the Gender Working Groups and the WGC’s representative in the room for many of the gender related negotiations, expected parties to move onto negotiations that built on red lines set by previous discussions.The Women and Gender Constituency typically divides areas around which red lines are often established into three groups: finance and implementation, language, and praxis. Rather than start from this point, Rubio says that backtracking on many previous discussions [by many countries who had an issue with the language around gender] made it tough to be in the room. She points out that despite parameters being set in forums before COP, many parties wanted to re-negotiate boundaries which meant actual action plans didn’t go forward till much later.

“There was a backtracking of previously agreed human rights language,” Rubio says. She’s talking about how the use of the term “women in all their diversity” became an issue at this year’s conference, as many other gender advocates also pointed out. 

Much of the contention came from conservative countries, led by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Russia and the Vatican, who felt that the use of the word ‘diversity’ within gender related language meant supporting LGBTQ communities, which is a topic many of those governments still have issues with. But while it’s sometimes easier to pass the burden of this thinking onto more ‘conservative’ countries, Imali Ngusale, founder of the African Center for Health, Climate and Gender Justice Alliance, also adds that there had been speculation that the US was supporting Saudi Arabia, which many believe was for personal gain. 

“In the past 2 weeks we saw how parties stepped forward to accommodate women “women in all their diversity”, and other countries opposed this. There’s significant language that remains bracketed around diversity. There’s a war around narratives and that’s how we’re coming to see how different countries and different parties receive lang around it,” says Natalie Sifuma, founder of Sisters in Climate.

Another barrier that gender justice groups faced was the lack of women within decision making and leadership positions. “In terms of the lack of women representation at the highest level of leadership, that’s the same, that hasn’t improved. Only 8% women were represented in the world leaders summit,” Buckle says, adding “ So in a way Cop29 is a mirror of the world. And it’s true there is a backlash on women’s rights in many countries around the world, like the issue of abortion rights in the US, or the more serious situation in Afghanistan.” 

She connects the overall backlash against women’s rights in many places across the world – including the US, as many feel has been demonstrated by the recent election – to the backtracking of gender justice in the climate space. 

Ngusale also further points out that the lack of gender diversity in leadership is amplified by the fact that women are burdened with unpaid care work across the world, making it difficult for them to also take up leadership positions because they “ cannot be in two places at one time.”

Not A Monolith

But even as we talk about women’s rights across the globe, Aguilar points out that the “women of the world” as it’s often termed, are not all the same. “They try to put all women in the same bag, we need to understand the knots of gender inequality, which can be very different for different women, such as the way that our countries allow us to have control, or how we can have agency,” she says. 

This is also what makes it far more complicated for groups like the WGC to advocate for the different needs of women and girls across the world, because they already find themselves fighting for space in these discussions which can make advocating for all the diversity in a nuanced way very difficult.

One example is how cultural norms manifest into gender restrictions differently across the world in ways other cultures or countries may not understand. Mobility restrictions on women due to religious and cultural norms in Kyengeza, Uganda, mean that men are twice as likely as women to travel to purchase improved seeds or visit markets, both of which are crucial factors to agricultural productivity and climate adaptation. This means if the solution international platforms are implementing is something like drought-resilient seeds, women on ground are probably not benefiting from it even if documents say that they should be. 

With gender and climate often being an afterthought in policy drafts and papers, it doesn’t leave a lot of room to go into further “knots” around class, access, ethnicity and much more. Aguilar also shares one instance of how a group of low-income women on the coast of Honduras were affected by disaster. 

“There were women in Honduras who were told winds of 260 km comings but they didn’t know what that meant, whether that was fast or slow, and so they continued to be on the coast and one of them lost two of her kids,” she says adding that when an NGO came to help them rebuild their house which had also been destroyed, they asked them for land property rights papers which these women didn’t have. 

“That’s a group of women that need to be supported,” Aguilar says. 

Implementing the Policies

But agreeing that women should be supported is one thing and actually implementing policies that work in the aftermath of discussions at spaces like COP becomes a whole other hurdle. 

Some of the biggest barriers within implementation are a lack of accountability and climate financing. 

“We want funds that are more liberating. Most of the funds given are not even sufficient to reach the grassroots, so there needs to be a scaling up of global finance in climate action,” Ngusale says, adding that it is crucial that these funds are scaled up in a way that directly funds locally led grassroots level action so the most vulnerable groups of women and girls can be affected. 

Unfortunately a big area of contention at this year’s COP – and previous conferences – has been that receiving countries have thought the finance pledges were too low and givers thought it was too high. 

But what many activists like Aguilar and Sifuma point out in different ways is that until countries like the US, and international bodies that have undeniable influence over global action – and in this case are also being called to account with regards to climate financing – don’t design implementable policies that take gender into account, nothing will change on ground. 

Aguilar shares that many countries being called on for climate finance keep sidelining gender because “they have bigger fish to fry.” 

“To which I always ask which fish and how are you frying them,” she says. She adds “You can’t leave half of the population behind. Disregarding the potential of half the world’s population is not logical, it’s absurd.”