COP26: Why women were failed on representation at Glasgow climate summit

It is nearly half a century since women in rural Kenya first raised the alarm about climate change.

Worried by soil erosion in family food plots, the Green Belt Movement launched a campaign against deforestation.

This grass-roots feminist organisation was founded by eventual Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai in 1977, shortly after the first scientific papers were discussing something called “global warming”.

On Tuesday, delegates at COP26 will discuss how to “progress gender equality and the full and meaningful participation of women and girls in climate action”.

Maud Bracke, a reader in gender history at Glasgow University, reckons women, and not just Maathai, have been at the frontline of global heating, and the fight against it, since the get-go.

Indeed, she argues grass-roots women’s groups in the global south have been ahead of the curve.

“Gender is central to climate change and the solutions to climate change,” Bracke said. “Around the word women are disproportionately affected by climate change and the impact it has on communities, livelihoods and local economies.”

Why women suffer

The UN, and global organisations and governments, recognise this, in theory at least. But why are women and girls hit hardest? “It is really to do with the gendered division of labour in families and communities,” Bracke explained. “The fact that it tends to be women who look after families, the family economy, who look after food, who look after the house, children, elderly. That is still kind of the universal phenomenon.”

But it is more than that. In the developing world, women also tend to be responsible for the gardens and fields where their families get their food. They tend animals and crops.

So they, like the Kenyan women farmers of the 1970s, are first to notice when things go wrong.

“In the global south it tends to be women who are at the frontline of agricultural work,” said Bracke. “Indeed, women in the global south have been at the forefront of calling out the immediate visible impact of climate change on agricultural communities.

“The devastating effects of resource extraction have already destroyed communities and livelihoods. This is not a problem that is just emerging now.

“Back in the 1970s a whole range of grass-roots organisations emerged, often led by women, who could see what was happening in their communities and their natural environment and economy.”

The big issues being discussed on the Clyde this month are not new for developing world communities, especially women’s groups or campaigns like Maathai’s or Indian biodiversity campaigner and expert Vandana Shiva “They have been saying this stuff since the 1960s and 1970s but we are still fighting to get that kind of thing on the agenda 40 or 50 years later,” Bracke said. “They were ahead of the curve. It is important to take seriously not only the activism of these groups but their insight and their knowledge, especially local knowledge nobody else has. Often it is women who have this knowledge.”

Ecofeminism

BIG policymakers – again, in theory at least – realise they have to tap into some of this know-how, not least when coming up with solutions. This could be about something very mundane like public transit.

There is not much point putting on buses, for example, if women won’t feel safe on them or if they turn up at the stop at the wrong time for women with, for example, childcare responsibilities.

“There is a danger in solutions which have been thought up by people who are not fully thinking through the impact on women,” Bracke said. “You might come up with a solution that does not work.”

Much of this thinking is driven by an understanding of traditional gender roles. Bracke admits that makes some feminists uncomfortable.

“We are going to have to foreground women’s roles and empower women in their communities based on their traditional roles, their caring roles,” she said. “There is a dilemma there because that could be seen as perpetuating roles.

“Generally speaking it is fair to say most feminists would agree on the one hand we have to value those caring roles, for families and communities and the environment.

“And that includes valuing them economically.

“But on the other hand, we have to create spaces where gendered roles can be transformed as well. There is a tension between that but both things are important.”

Ecofeminism

Bracke, who specialises in 20th-century gender history, stresses the long history of ecofeminism. “There is a lot of feminist theory that has been done since the 1970s around interlinking women’s equality with the natural environment and the climate,” she explained. Now big politics at events like COP26 focus on just transition as a buzz term. “Climate justice has to be centred on gender justice, that is fair to all groups,” Bracke said. That is easier said that done. Gender equality may be on the agenda at COP26. But the people discussing it in the halls are still far more male than female.

For Bracke, that was underlined by a photograph of world leaders – mostly men in suits – gathered at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum last week.

That is not, she says, just a sign of a lack of fair gender representation in developing countries. “There was a point last year when it appeared the UK delegation was going to be all male. Even in the first world, so called, there are issues,” she said. “At COP itself, at high-level decision-making, there is an issue with women being under-represented politically. In the UN as well. Activists have been calling this out as a problem.”

Greenwashing

BRACKE links this to “greenwashing” being flagged up as an issue by groups like the Feminist Green New Deal. “There is a lot of blah blah blah, especially from those in power,” she said. “How do we come up with sustainable futures rather than short-term fixes? The Feminist Green New Deal have a list of false solutions, like carbon trading or nuclear energy. They want 100 per cent renewable energy and you can’t compromise on that.”

Getting gender justice right is not just for women. Failing to hear female voices could mean failing to tackle climate change. And that, as Bracke and many others campaigners point out, is bad for boys and men too.