According to UN Women, the climate crisis is not “gender neutral.” Women and girls experience the greatest impacts of climate change, which amplifies existing gender inequalities and poses unique threats to their livelihoods, health, and safety.
Mary Robinson, the Chair of the Elders, and a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Envoy on Climate Change, talks about the importance of advancing gender equality and leadership in climate change response.
Question: What message do you want to get across at COP?
Mary Robinson: I recall the photograph of the Heads of State and Government at the start of this COP and we had to look for the women's faces. So many women said to me, is this the 21st century? So we're looking for gender parity, but we don't mean just numbers, we also mean women at the highest level. That is really important, increasingly important, because we need transformative decisions at that level.
Question: What kind of push do you want to see on the gender agenda at COP?
Mary Robinson: The COPs should be more inclusive of women and girls. There should be far more real acknowledgement of the gender discriminations in the climate crisis, the need for gender disaggregated data, the need for gender finance, and just right across the board. And, there's a promise to double adaptation climate finance by 2025, that's extraordinarily important to women because they're doing so much on the ground to build communities. They are now talking about loss and damage - the loss and damage suffered by women and girls is disproportionately terrible. We need to have a mosaic of approaches.
We need a financial facility, hopefully at this conference - The Elders are very strongly calling for it. I see a lot of enthusiasm and activity in the climate action side. I'm really worried that governments are still not stepping up enough. And women will suffer more if that doesn't happen. And unfortunately, not enough of them at the highest level happened to be women.
Question: You have been a politician. Many are focused on short-term political goals. How do you then get all countries to come to an agreement?
Mary Robinson: It's very hard and the problem is it’s short term. Will I get reelected if I take a stand? I think they underestimate - people now know that we need longer term, big decisions. We need to fund them now. I often say this - we even need to spend our children and our grandchildren's money now, so that they will have a safe world. And then they will have a much cheaper world because they will be living on clean energy.
Read what other prominent Voices from COP27 are saying about the themes, negations and the way forward.
