Released on: 21/11/2024 – 19:42Changed: 21/11/2024 – 19:40

2 minutes

Past climate summits, as well as many UN events, have routinely spoken of the need to involve women, who according to studies face a disproportionate burden of the planet’s rising temperatures and disasters.

But at COP29 in Azerbaijan, a draft proposal in the negotiations was stripped of references to women’s experiences and even the word “diversity”, Ireland’s first female president, Mary Robinson, who has been in Baku for the talks, told AFP.

Saudi Arabia has been the key force in opposing sexist language and has received support from Russia, which talks about promoting traditional values, Robinson and other participants said.

After years of trying, opponents of gender language are feeling “emboldened” now, Robinson said.

“I think they have a sense of entitlement to do it now, because gender is going backwards. There is a backlash against gender in, for example, the United States and in parts of Europe where you have right-wing governance,” said Robinson, who has also served as the UN ‘s Human Rights Commissioner and helped form a group of veteran leaders known as The Elders.

A draft text circulated at COP29, where the top priority has been to increase money to the hardest-hit countries, has retained a reference to gender, saying climate finance must be “human rights-based and gender-sensitive”.

More concretely, COP29 will decide on a proposal to extend for another 10 years an initiative established in 2014 in Lima to systematically incorporate gender into the UN climate agency’s policy work.

Opponents have refrained from openly campaigning against the gender language.

But a Saudi official speaking on behalf of the Arab group at COP29 said human rights issues were “not relevant” to climate finance.

“The final decision must be short, concise and clear,” Albara Tawfiq told delegates.

Decisions at UN climate conferences must be made by consensus, although the meaning of consensus is debated.

“Not so normal anymore”

About 80 percent of people displaced by climate change are women and girls, increasing the risks of human trafficking and other abuses, according to a UN study.

Yet the politicians are predominantly men. At last year’s COP28 in Dubai, which activists credited with forward movement on gender, 34 percent of delegates were women, according to the Women’s Environment and Development Organization

At a UN-themed gender day on Thursday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock gathered other female envoys at COP29 for a group photo.

“Normally, this is just a normal given, but we’ve realized — not just at this COP, even in the past, but especially at this COP — that somehow normal things aren’t so normal anymore,” she said.

Baerbock pointed to the effect of climate change on women and called for a renewal of the Lima program and the language on gender.

“To fight the climate crisis, it needs female power, it needs female power, and we can only fight the climate crisis together,” she said.

Ayshka Najib, a feminist climate activist at COP29, said the Azerbaijani hosts did not prioritize gender but credited pressure with restoring limited language.

“This COP was intended to be as much a gender cap as it is a finance COP, but what we are seeing is not progress, but an alarming regression of gender across agenda items,” she said.

Canada’s climate negotiator, Catherine Stewart, said maintaining a focus on gender was bowing to reality.

“We are worried,” she said. “A text that takes us back 10 years is unacceptable.”

© 2024 AFP