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More than 200 female business and political leaders from around the world gathered at the elegant offices of wind energy company Ørsted on Madison Avenue during New York’s recent climate week, in an evening that ended with a team photo of women closing the fist, Rosie- clincher style.
Among those backing the new women’s leadership coalition that will be formally launched at COP29 are climate veterans such as former UN executive secretary Patricia Espinosa, German envoy Jennifer Morgan, British envoy Rachel Kyte and former French envoy Laurence Tubiana .
Their show of force was motivated by the fact that the Azerbaijani presidency of COP29 did not include a single woman in an initial 28-member organizing committee. After a reactionPresident Ilham Aliyev expanded the group to 42, including 12 women and two other men. It has since grown to 55 members, but has not reached gender parity. president of COP29 Mukhtar Babayev’s own six-person team However, it is now evenly divided.
This COP29 misstep led 75 women leaders from business, civil society and academia to sign a letter to president Aliyev, and led to the launch of the Women Leading on Climate initiative, promoted by former Canadian climate minister Catherine McKenna and María Mendiluce, leader of the We Means Business Coalition.
In the last 10 years, only one woman has served as COP president appointed by the host country: Chile’s former Environment Minister Carolina Schmidt, who oversaw COP25.
By contrast, the UN’s primary climate role as executive secretary has been shared equally between men and women.
It is now in the hands of Simon Stiell of Grenada, who replaced Espinosa as executive secretary, a former Mexican foreign minister who was also president of the COP and led the summit in Cancun in 2010. Espinosa herself, She took over from Christiana Figueres, who led the COP that achieved the historic Paris agreement on global warming.
Since Stiell took over as UN climate chief two years ago, he has had to deal with a number of serious gender issues among national delegations. In its first year, delegates to the UN climate talks in Egypt at COP27 formally complained of being intimidated, abused and sexually harassed by male negotiators, prompting a letter of protest from two dozen countries. Camila Zepeda, head of the Mexican delegation, was among those who told the Financial Times that she had suffered sexual harassment.
Further allegations were made at a negotiating session in Bonn last year, where Stiell closed talks by saying he had been “informed that inappropriate behavior had occurred during this session”. She said: “Let me make a clear statement: harassment, whether in the form of sexism, bullying or sexual harassment, is not acceptable in the UNFCCC process.”
Behind the scenes, more women than ever are participating in national negotiations, as part of the United Nations program working groups.
Analysis by Gender Action Tracker The campaign group shows that the percentage of female party delegates has risen to almost 48 percent at sessions held at the UN climate headquarters in Bonn last year. But in COPs held in a rotation of national capitals, the level is around one third. At head of delegation level, often a ministerial role, it is reduced to about a fifth.
The essential work that national negotiators do is exemplified by US deputy envoy Sue Biniaz, dubbed “closest” by the New York Times. The former top climate lawyer at the U.S. State Department has been the right-hand man to many heads of delegation over the decades, including John Kerry and Todd Stern. Canadian McKenna considers her a “warrior.”
McKenna herself was among the previous heads of delegation and led the Canadian team at COP23 in Bonn as then Minister of Environment and Climate Change, a role that earned her the epithet “Climate Barbie,” which she has since adopted.
This week in Baku, as chair of the High-Level Expert Group, she will tell UN secretaries-general, in direct terms, what must be achieved through “real” private sector climate plans.
He first report of this type delivered: at COP27 in Egypt, hit a nerve, as it identified “some companies, particularly financial institutions, that don’t understand that when you make a net zero commitment it means something.”
Among the underlying problems that McKenna identifies at the corporate level is the isolation of the sustainability agenda that is often left to women in executive ranks. “The power can’t be that you go it alone and feel like an outlier in your company,” he says. “The more women [feel they] “You can take one step forward, the more transformative changes you can achieve.”