David Leask: Critics say gender discussion at COP26 was just virtue signalling. They are wrong

These last ten days or so on the Clyde have offered a historic opportunity for many otherwise ignored or marginalised voices to be heard, if far from always heeded.

We have seen – more outside the conference halls than in – calls for action on carbon emissions from those on the front line of global heating, such as women from the developing world.

But even inside the SEC, at the heart of COP, this week there was a day-long discussion on gender and climate change, one of nine key topics raised during the summit. Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nicola Sturgeon attended but some critics scoffed at what they saw as a trendy distraction, as politically-correct box-ticking. The conference, they argued, should be laser-focused on finding and funding carbon-reducing technology and policies.

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That might sound hard-headed. It is anything but. Technological or political fixes that do not work for women won’t work at all.

The United Nations has a simple – maybe simplistic – illustration for this point. Public transport initiatives, UN advisors say, won’t work in societies where women do not feel safe getting on a bus.

Climate justice, as the slogan goes, also means gender justice. This straightforward principle reflects an even bigger emerging consensus: if we really want to save the planet, we cannot leave anybody out.

There are still a few people who see limiting global warming – or helping us to live with climate change it is already too late to avoid – as a fundamentally technical challenge.

Science and engineering, of course, are never done in a vacuum, they don’t just exist on a computer screen. They always have socio-economic contexts.

But tackling climate change is bigger than anything humanity has tried to do before. We are not just talking about building a pyramid, or waging a world war, or putting a man on the moon. We are trying to find a way to secure the future of our species’ only habitat.

Scientists and engineers know they cannot do this alone.

This is not exactly a fresh idea. We had to do the same to minimise the horrors of Covid, which was far from just a job for medics.

READ MORE: Women failed by COP26

Many of us, I think, reassessed the way we value certain roles in our society. Suddenly we realised how much we needed, say, carers, bin men, supermarket staff and bus drivers.

Sir Patrick Vallance made this point this week. Britain’s chief scientific adviser, one of the suits who flanked Boris Johnson at pandemic briefings, equated tackling Coronavirus and climate change.

“Two things are crucially important with Covid – science and innovation needed to come with solutions and we all needed to pull together as humanity to take certain decisions in order to repel and prevent the virus from spreading,” he said.

“In terms of science and innovation, it’s right the way across the breadth of science, from behaviour change to social science and into innovation and tech and R&D. And behavioural change is part of that.”

Beating Covid – or at least cutting the death toll – meant finding ways to get people to do things differently, to change their behaviour. Limiting global heating will too.

And that means understanding psychology, sociology, economics, law, politics and communications. And – whisper it – public relations.

Speaking to The Herald this week, the dean of research at Glasgow University, Chris Pearce, cast his net for wisdom even wider than Sir Patrick.

“We cannot assume technology can solve the problem in isolation,” he told this paper. “Any technological solution which does not take account of the context – of resources; costs; infrastructure; and, above all, human behaviour and culture – will fail.”

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Prof Pearce, a computational engineer to trade, added: “Climate change is a global problem and therefore requires global collaboration. We have to work across cultures and disciplines.”

His colleague, Maud Bracke, a gender historian, also told this paper how people with real insight had been ignored in the past. Women’s groups in Kenya raised a red flag over deforestation and climate change in the 1970s, nearly a decade before, for example, the great scientific sage Carl Sagan told the US Congress they needed to act on the “greenhouse effects”.

Not listening to women from the global south – many of whom do the heavy lifting on agriculture and horticulture – has already cost us as a species. It is too late to repeat such basic mistakes.

"There tends to be a belief that science and technology can save us and, of course,” it is important,” Dr Bracke said. “But there is now an understanding we need to get social scientists on board as well, that we need expertise beyond hard physical science. We need insight on the socio-economic impact of scientific innovations.”

Again, it is easy to let this kind of language wash over us. But we need to listen – and think about what it means.

It is exhausting to try and imagine of the sheer variety of skills and knowledge needed for an effort of this magnitude, from waste management, finance, and town and transport planning to farming, energy supply and oceanography.

You cannot work globally without people with cross-cultural and linguistic skills, without diplomats and politicians to help us smooth over differences, misunderstandings and wrong-turns.

There is a healthy humility from many of the experts we are calling upon to fix our climate. There is an acknowledgement that we are all going to have to get better at listening.

This, as most of us find out the hard way, is the most important skill in any aspect or walk of life but also the one that is hardest to master. Most of us are capable of failing to really pay attention. Will we learn to listen through the blah, blah, blah in Glasgow?

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.