Winnie Byanyima, director of Oxfam International
I saw my mother working in women’s clubs – to increase incomes, do childcare, keep girls in school. I was very aware as a little girl that I had to claim rights. It is a life story – it only became my job much later.
Climate change is an issue of justice. The poorest are the most vulnerable, particularly women. The drudgery of domestic work, of unpaid labour, is getting worse because of climate change. Women’s roles are still quite rigid. Devastation for women who live near coastal regions is harsher, since they generally have less mobility. People can live insular lives in the household and don’t have the information they need to avoid a storm, for example.
The other side of the coin is that women are leading in adaptation. They’re finding solutions to the way they do agriculture in order to keep food at home, they are involved in leading responses at a community level. Women’s leadership shines through. [But] only a trickle of governmental money reaches the household, and when it gets there it may be taken by the head of the household.
Who inspires me? Solome Mukisa leads a community-based children’s organisation in Uganda. My local government counsellor Beth runs a women’s group. Both are innovative, resilient and strong. Graça Machel. I also admire men like [South African human rights activist] Kumi Naidoo. I hope that adaptation as much as mitigation becomes the norm, that we do development differently: that we factor in the cost to the environment and the cost of women’s work.
Mary Robinson, former Irish president and climate campaigner
I came to climate change and its undermining of all kinds of rights of poor communities worldwide very late. From 1997 until 2002, as UN high commissioner for human rights, I don’t remember making any speech of any seriousness on climate change because another part of the UN system, the UNFCC, was dealing with it.
My foundation is about climate justice. I am encouraged about the women at all levels who want this to work. I’m as inspired by grassroots women like Constance Okollet of Uganda, or Ursula Rakova from the Catoret Islands [in Papua New Guinea], who says there’s nothing she can do about moving her people from the land of the bones of their ancestors. Then there’s good leadership. Christiana Figueres [the UN climate chief] is always positive and never lets it get her down.
Some countries seem to want a narrow environmental agenda, like Norway. We need to keep gender in the text, as it’s necessary for good climate policy, because we [have] made mistakes. We had corn for ethanol that drove up food prices, big dams built and people displaced.
I have five grandchildren who will be in their forties in 2050, and will share the world with nine billion people. We are the last generation to make decisions. That gets me out of bed in the morning. Remember the injustice of climate change – prioritise that. It’s the passion of my life.
Usha Nair, volunteer, climate change programmes, All India Women’s Conference
Women experience climate change but don’t know what lies behind it or how to mitigate it. In one village a woman had to go to the field to work at 4am since it was so hot through the day. She used to cook food for the family before going out, get her children ready, care for elders – she can’t do that [now she leaves so early].
We have run programmes related to alternate energy efficiency for almost 40 years, before climate change even existed as a term, in the form of smokeless cookstoves, bio-gas and popularising solar energy appliances – solar cookers, parabolic cookers, water heaters, lanterns. Those are “climate mitigation strategies” now, but when we started that was just a way of helping the women reducing their drudgery and bills.
It was hard to find technicians, so with a manufacturer we trained poor women for the assembly, repair and maintenance of solar panels in two slum areas in New Delhi, as well as Dasna Jail, on the outskirts of Delhi. They could earn an income. Women use energy at a domestic level, and have a strong say in the matter, even if the man might have a final say in the house.
Vandana Shiva, Indian environmental activist and author
There’s only one model for the future – destroy the world’s resources with military rights.
The same patriarchal world view that abuses women has violated the earth’s ecological limits by thinking through separation and division. Women are the worst victims of ecological destruction. [Yet] women hold the solutions, both through other ways of thinking about economy, science and technology, and other ways of producing food than industrialised, globalised agriculture. Desertification and land degradation is at the root of conflicts, whether it be Nigeria or Syria.
Women live through diversity, they think diversity, they defend diversity. This is the path to sustainability, justice and peace.
Aile Jávo, president of the Saami Council, NGO for the indigenous people of Finland, Sweden, Russia and Norway
There are six of us Saami women at COP 21, at the frontline of this UN process. The men are home taking care of the reindeer herds. Our rights are often violated in the name of climate change, and adaption and mitigation processes. [Our] reindeer have problems in winter getting food as the temperature shifts; it’s warm and cold, and raining when it’s not supposed to be raining, and the ice is more insecure, which is dangerous for us and them too. There have always been harsh winters but now it’s every year.
I’m not hopeful at COP at all, it seems they’re deleting all texts about indigenous people’s rights. I’m disappointed my own country Norway is proposing to delete this from the text. Our traditional knowledge [needs] to be taken into account when it comes to finding out how climate change is affecting us.
Dessima Williams, Grenadian diplomat, academic and former UN ambassador
It’s fascinating how the idea of injustice is more easily understood when we think about issues affecting women – the lack of water, reduction in agriculture, and the crisis we face now in mosquito-born diseases and invasive species – women highlight that these are increasing. Most think of climate change mainly as pollution, but it has a big effect in the social sector, in health, education and agriculture.
Women change the agenda towards the social elements of agreements – there’s the science, economics, politics, diplomacy, but the women’s movement made issues of hunger and poverty a main analytic pillar of the agreement. I fought a battle and still do to get that accepted among delegates and key negotiators. In finance, I heard a senior EU minister complain that governments tend to ask for major mitigation projects like airports, dams or forest preservations, but that women and NGOs ask for things closer to people like cookstoves. [At the local level] is where climate change hits the hardest, where it’s best understood and can best be prevented. [We must] get the gender balance right so that women have an equal shot in the decision-making process.
Helen Hakena, director of Leitana Nehan Women’s Development Agency, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea
I’ve been working with women from the Cartaret Islands, the world’s first climate refugees, who have lost islands and been relocated. We have a matrilineal culture so when the sea erodes land, women lose their inheritance, their children’s futures and cultures and traditions, because everything we do is about land.
I work with the women who were tired of waiting for the government’s relocation programme. They migrated on their own, searching for husbands who [had] left for work and [had] since remarried. Gender-based violence has increased, and poverty. We have a militarised society; they’re scared. Bougainville went through 20 years of war.
The ones from small submerged islands continue to return [to them]. They want to sink with the islands they say, and die in dignity. Why relocate? We have not contributed to what is happening.
I’ve been doing this since 1992 and was a schoolteacher until there were no children to teach in the conflict, but there were so many human rights violations of women – my friends and I formed our agency to be together, and I mobilised groups to talk of women’s rights.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples
On women and climate change, there is a direct line between disaster and violence. In countries like Honduras, this situation leads to prostitution and trafficking for most women who have been forced to relocate due to climate change, since the criminal syndicates are in charge. Disaster affects children too – I have seen bridges destroyed so it is impossible to walk to school.
Indigenous women ask for respect for their reproductive health rights. During Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, there was no gender sensitivity about relief material like sanitary pads for women. Their world view is tied up in their land, and their knowledge is linked to that. Women are the seed-keepers, but their crops are destroyed. They transmit knowledge, and can provide solutions in times of floods or droughts.
Indigenous people have some anti-women traditions, like inheritance laws or male governance systems. My own Igorot community pushed for the removal of bride prices and dowry practices.
Tarja Halonen, former president of Finland
Women are under-represented and underestimated. They should be recognised as part of all of the human capital we have – both men and women, the young and the poor, indigenous people and disabled people. At this historical level, the experience of men and women is different.
Over the course of my career … what I did come to see was that [women in] all of the Nordic countries still had much better opportunities than many other women – so what could happen if we used all this knowledge and human capital? One of the key issues I campaign on is sexual and reproductive health; when I was a student radical in the 60s and 70s, I didn’t think it would take 40 years [to get this far]. Gender sensitivity is in effect and most people understand it. As for those in more masculine societies or governments who might feel threatened, my answer is always the same: the smartest men will survive.
Leni Buisman, member of Dutch delegation to COP 21
For the Dutch government, gender is important; our trade and development minister, Lilianne Ploumen, and the minister of foreign affairs have been great advocates; our new environment minister is a woman. I got the role of tackling gender and climate change as I experienced a lot over my 40 years in politics. On an institutional level the women and gender constituency is very well organised, but delegations would take gender on as an “extra”. With Finland and Iceland, we invented a network for women delegations at COP. It was slow at first but there is more of a feeling for gender on every delegation now. We seek to enlighten, and we need a gender-focused climate policy.
Two types of people look at gender – the emotional people who see it as a feeling – in Europe it’s in our genes – and those who see it as getting more efficient climate policy. Women need technology and can make decisions. We’re missing half the population otherwise – isn’t it so easy to see? You miss their power and energy. I am optimistic but when I see chances not taken … it’s all about being gender-responsive, and having an action-oriented plan. What comes next? It’s about women having access and being in control of their situation.
Isabella Avila Borgeson, Filipino-American poet
I’m from Oakland, California, and I went to the Philippines to find my mother when I heard about the Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, where the eye of the storm was in my family’s hometown. I didn’t know for almost a week if she was dead or alive. Family members died, our homes were destroyed. I meant to stay for three months to help the community, and I stayed for over a year.
Some livelihood projects after the typhoon were for men, like construction jobs. Some women had lost their husbands and were left out of conversations like [those on] relief-rehabilitation projects, working mainly with women in no-build zones, close to the seashores.
As spoken poets we’re representing marginalised communities. We won a competition inspired by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, and three out of four of us are women. I could write about being Filipino and my homeland. Our boats got washed away, our rice fields got flooded in sea salt, coconut trees are decapitated so you need to uproot and plant them for another seven years. The women’s livelihoods through [weaving with bushes were] completely wiped out. We’ve had so many more typhoons since then which don’t get coverage, even super typhoons.
