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During the recent New York Climate Week, more than 200 women business and policy leaders from around the world gathered at wind energy company Ørsted’s sleek offices on Madison Avenue, ending the evening with a team photo of the women clenching their fists. Rosie did. riveter style.
Among those supporting the new Women’s Leadership Coalition, which will be formally launched at COP29, are former UN Secretary-General Patricia Espinosa, German Special Envoy Jennifer Morgan, UK Special Envoy Rachel Kyte and former French Envoy Laurence Tubiana. This includes veterans of countermeasures.
Their show of strength was motivated by Azerbaijan’s COP29 Presidency, which initially failed to include a single woman in its 28-member organizing committee. In response to the backlash, President Ilham Aliyev expanded the group to 42 people, including 12 women and two men. Membership has since increased to 55 members, but gender equality has not been reached. But COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev’s own six-person team is now evenly divided.
This failure of COP29 prompted 75 women leaders from business, civil society and academia to sign a letter to President Aliyev, led by former Canadian Climate Minister Catherine McKenna and Secretary-General Maria Mendiluce, to lead on climate change. This led to the launch of the Women’s Initiative. I’m part of the We Mean Business Coalition.
In the past decade, only one woman has held the position of COP President, appointed by the host country. Carolina Schmidt, Chile’s former environment minister who oversaw COP25.
In contrast, the top role of UN climate change executive director is divided equally between men and women.
The meeting is currently being led by Simon Stiehl from Grenada. He takes over as secretary-general from Espinosa, a former Mexican foreign minister and COP president who led the 2010 summit in Cancun. Espinosa himself took the baton from Cristiana Figueres, who led the COP that delivered the historic Paris Agreement on global warming.
Since becoming UN climate chief two years ago, Steele has had to deal with a number of serious gender-related issues among delegations. In her first year in office, female delegates to the UN climate change talks held in Egypt at COP27 formally complained that they were bullied, abused and sexually harassed by male negotiators, prompting letters of protest from 20 countries. Camila Zepeda, head of the Mexican delegation, was among those who told the Financial Times that she had been sexually harassed.
Further accusations were made during last year’s negotiating session in Bonn, which Mr. Stiel ended by saying he “recognized that inappropriate conduct took place during this session.” “Let me be clear: Harassment, whether in the form of gender discrimination, bullying or sexual harassment, has no place in the UNFCCC process,” he said.
Behind the scenes, more women than ever are now involved in national negotiations as members of UN program working groups.
Analysis by campaign group Gender Action Tracker shows that the proportion of female party representatives at conferences held at the UN climate headquarters in Bonn over the past year has risen to almost 48 per cent. However, at the COP, which is held on a rotating basis in the capital, the level remains at about one-third. At the top level of delegations, often in ministerial roles, the proportion drops to about one-fifth.
The important work performed by national negotiators is exemplified by Sue Binias, the US deputy envoy, dubbed a “closer” by the New York Times. The former chief climate change attorney at the U.S. State Department has served as the right-hand man to many delegation leaders over the decades, including John Kerry and Todd Stern. She is considered a “warrior” by Canada’s McKenna.
McKenna herself is a former female delegation leader, having led the Canadian team to COP23 in Bonn as Minister of the Environment and Climate Change. This role earned her the nickname “Climate Barbie,” a term she has cherished ever since.
This week in Baku, as chair of a high-level expert group, she will tell the UN Secretary-General in blunt terms what must be achieved through a “real” climate change plan from the private sector.
The first such report she presented at COP27 in Egypt struck a nerve. “Some companies, especially financial institutions, don’t understand that there is any point in making net-zero commitments,” he said.
Among the underlying problems identified by McKenna at the corporate level is the isolation with which sustainability issues are often left to women in executive positions. “You don’t gain power by going it alone and feeling like you’re an outlier in your company,” she says. “The more women feel able to step up, the more change we can make.”
