By Guest Blogger Alice Finno
At the annual UN Climate Conference (COP), there are always more applications to attend than there are passes. FAWCO believes in the active participation of our youth. For COP27, we gave one of our available passes to Alice Finno, a student at John Cabot University, who attended the second week of the conference. The following is her experience:
Attending COP27 was an incredibly enriching experience for me. Being an observer at the UNFCCC consultations among parties allowed me to better understand the functioning of diplomatic processes and the hardships to reach a common agreement among such a diverse group of world leaders. Unfortunately, the scarce presence of women during negotiations was pretty evident at COP27. As the inaugural photo with all the Heads of Delegations showed, only 7 of the 110 world leaders present were women. Nevertheless, at the official side events, many female leaders and activists shared their experience at the frontline of the climate crisis with powerful interventions.
During the Panel “African Women Climate Change Realities: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Response,” Dr. Usha Rao-Monari, Under-Secretary-General and Associate Administrator at the United Nations Development Programme, explained that gender and Africa are two key priorities for the UNDP. African women are among the most affected by the climate crisis; hence, their voices must be part of the conversation. According to Dr. Rao-Monari, if we want to tackle the climate crisis, we need to include a larger number of stakeholders in the discussion to find targeted solutions. To ensure women’s inclusion, we need to work on economic and financial empowerment that will allow them to achieve greater emancipation but also on political empowerment since women are still significantly excluded from decision-making processes.
Another extremely interesting panel was “COVID-19 and Climate Change: Women at the Center of Planning and Response.” In this panel, Ms. Raquel Lagunas, Global Director of Gender Equality at the UNDP, said that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the task forces the government created to deal with the crisis were mostly composed by men, and therefore, only 7% of the measures they adopted addressed women’s unpaid care work. Ms. Lagunas underlined that it is time to stop ignoring the care economy because, in every crisis, women’s caregiving responsibilities become a big barrier preventing them from tackling different challenges. This is true also in the case of the climate crisis, as being the primary caregivers makes women more vulnerable during and after climate disasters.
The Executive Director of UN Women, Sima Sami Bahous, also emphasized that it is crucial to amplify the voices of all those involved in climate action, especially at the grassroots level, because we have a lot to learn from Indigenous women and African women. Bahous added that the creation of a dataset with all the actions and solutions women have adopted to address the climate crisis is needed so that their knowledge can be shared and used to implement solutions in other places around the globe.
Women have specific ideas and solutions derived from their personal experience and the community they live in. Since on the global stage women are not always given the space they deserve, they have found a way to spread their knowledge through these panels. Anne Songole, Climate Justice Coordinator at FEMNET, said that African ecofeminists also organized a feminist COP27 in Namibia, creating a space to share and exchange ideas. This confirms the importance of elevating the voices of those more impacted by the devastating effects of climate change, as they are also better able to address this crisis.
Photo credit: Ayuska M.