Women at COP27

Throughout this series of blogs, it has become clear that there is a need to involve women in water management policy arenas. Climate change will induce changes in the water cycle which will have gendered-implications in Africa. Despite the evident need for the involvement of women in policy making, there is a lack of female participation in both local scale (see blog 3) and global scale discussions. As world leaders gathered in Egypt for the COP27 summit, Twitter users remarked on the absence of women at the negotiations.

Figure 1: Three Tweets noting the absence of women in senior positions at COP27 (Source: Licypriya Kangujam, Twitter 08/11/2022; David Ho, Twitter 08/11/2022; Ita O'Kelly, Twitter 08/11/2022)

The recognition of the importance of women’s voices in climate change negotiations is not new. In 2001, the first decision to recognise gender equality was adopted by the COP and particularly noted the importance of women’s participation to mitigating climate change (WEDO 2012: 2). Since then a series of decisions formalised an institutional commitment to gender balance in COP negotiations (Morrow 2017: 406).

Despite the recognition of issues at play, progress in women’s participation has been painstakingly slow, and has even been making backward progress since 2018, as is shown in Figure 2. Analysis by the BBC found that less than 34% of country negotiation staff at COP27 were female, and some teams were more than 90% male (BBC 2022). 

Figure 2: A graph showing historical rates of participation of women in country delegations at Climate Change Conferences (source: BBC 2022)

In addition to commitments to gender equality in negotiations, many recent COP events have included a thematic ‘gender day’. The promotional video for this year’s COP27 gender day can be seen below. 

Video 1: Promotional video for Gender Day at COP27 (Source: YouTube 2022)

The promotional video focusses on describing the plight of impoverished women, rather than presenting them as empowered agents of change. As such, we might interpret this video and the ‘gender day’ to be promoting the same infantilising narratives Wainaina reflected on in his piece ‘How to Write About Africa’ that ultimately amount to a post-colonial ‘victimisation fallacy’ which present African woman in particular as victims who must be saved (Wainaina 2019 ; Frohlich and Gioli 2015: 145).

However, women’s oppression and vulnerability to climate change becomes their strength in the context of climate change policy discussions. African women’s traditional economic and social roles, such as water collection mean that they develop a relationship with local ecologies and therefore are entwined with the ecological changes associated with climate change (Steady 2014: 313). As a result, women are bound to develop a strong understanding of the environmental changes that take place locally. In addition to this, understanding the ways women are vulnerable to the implications of climate change (as I explored in my previous blog) can mean that appropriate mitigation strategies are established.

From this, it becomes clear that integrating gender-perspectives into climate reduction policies is essential to mitigating climate change, and moving forward women must be present and empowered to contribute at climate change conferences. Perhaps the legally-enforced gender-quotas that were implemented at local scale in Malawi (see blog post 3) would be a useful means to driving gender-equitable participation at global climate change conferences.