It's a revealing shot: on November 12, the day after the opening of the 29th Conference of the Parties for Climate Change (COP29), only eight of the 78 heads of state and government in the traditional official photo are women. At COP28 in Dubai in 2023, women made up just 19% of delegation heads and 34% of national delegations – the same figure from a decade ago. This under-representation is striking, given that women are disproportionately affected by climate disruption, but are also key in offering effective solutions to combat global warming.
To better integrate women into climate policies, governments are expected to approve a new work program on gender equality at COP29. However, in recent days, negotiations have been disrupted due to opposition from a coalition of countries, leading to "a number of retreats, willingness to retreat, backtracking," according to Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the French minister for ecological transition, on Wednesday, November 20.
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Egypt and the Vatican have opposed various references to this issue. In the latest draft negotiating text, which could be adopted by the countries as it stands, they succeeded in removing references to women in all their diversity and intersectionality – the recognition that gender interacts with other elements of identity, such as ethnicity, to aggravate discrimination. References to human rights, fighting violence against women and supporting women human rights activists have also disappeared.
"These countries want to see a simple distinction between men and women, boys and girls," lamented Mwanahamisi Singano of the Women's Environment and Development Organization. According to various sources, the fear is that these expressions include transgender women.
More broadly, some conservative countries wanted "numerous paragraphs including the term 'gender' to be bracketed, in other words, renegotiated," explained Anne Barre, from the NGO network Women Engage for a Common Future. "They are opposed to this very broad concept, both because it includes non-binary people but above all because these countries refuse to integrate gender equality into their climate policies, which would force them to change patriarchal structures."
Eventually, a majority of the references to gender were retained, thanks to pressure from the European Union and Latin American countries. As a result, Barre considered the latest version of the negotiating text to be "a minimum acceptable basis," which does not mark any progress but does not represent any setbacks in relation to previous work programs.
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