Women & Gender at SB62 in Bonn

As climate negotiations resume at SB62 in Bonn, we are clear: gender justice is climate justice. With the development of a new Gender Action Plan expected to commence and key negotiations, including adaptation and just transition, expected to make substantial progress, time to deliver transformative, ambitious, and actionable outcomes is NOW. At this moment of deepening climate crisis and systemic exploitation of people and nature, gender justice should never reduce to tokenistic mentions and technical tweaks. It has to be at the center of structural and systemic change. The development of the Gender Action Plan offers Parties unique opportunity to ground climate action in the lived reality of our diverse global community to fulfill the promise of leaving no one behind.

As the world backtracks on our collective rights, we call on Parties to advance gender equality.  We urge Parties to deliver an ambitious GAP that moves beyond tokenistic and task-oriented activities. The new iteration must be transformative, address systemic issues and root causes, and confront gendered power relations at all levels. At its core, the GAP should dismantle structural barriers that exclude, marginalize, and discriminate against women, girls, and gender diverse people. To be effective, it must ground activities in national and subnational implementation. To respond to the varied realities of our lived experiences,  we urge Parties to approach GAP development and negotiations with an intersectional and intergenerational lens, with the view of addressing the compounded impacts of discrimination, marginalization, and inequality.

While the world grapples with shifting politics, the UNFCCC must reaffirm its commitment to human rights, justice, and transformative climate action. Its façade of multilateralism is faltering, and we are losing faith. Captured by corporate interests, hollowed by inaction and lack of transparency, and increasing repression of dissent, we are calling for a change of system, to reform and transform the UNFCCC to serve its purpose and serve the most vulnerable. The expo-ification of COP has not increased meaningful inclusion and participation, but has diluted the impact, legitimacy, and effectiveness of these processes. In reality, it has allowed an increasing corporate capture of COP and the proliferation of greenwashed false solutions and distractions. The UNFCCC should not reproduce the same structures driving the climate crisis, silencing dissent, and shrinking civic space. In the face of converging crises; ecological, economic, political, we are not backing down. We are building power, pushing forward to advance our rights, and demanding a feminist just, livable future that centers human and environmental wellbeing.

For too long adaptation and its funding have been put on the back burner, but we need action, we need public, adequate, new and additional funding for adaptation, and we need it now. Human rights and gender equality must be at the heart of all adaptation negotiations, plans, and action. This goes beyond merely recognizing differences. It requires gender responsiveness, with corresponding indicators to effectively monitor, understand impact, and respond accordingly. With the expected culmination of the UAE-Belem work programme, we call on Parties to not let this opportunity pass without integrating and mainstreaming gender-responsiveness and rights-based approaches in the Global Goal on Adaptation by adopting gender responsive indicators. Without dedicated and robust gender indicators, parties and  other stakeholders will be rendered unable to recognize and address the compounding gendered impacts of climate change, Parties will fail to truly build adaptive capacity, strengthen resilience, for all.

We are not accepting a just transition that relies on the exploitation of bodies, labor, and lands of the Global Majority countries especially marginalized communities on the same racist, patriarchal, and extractive structures of the fossil-fuel based economies that drive and benefit from the climate crisis and injustice. A just and equitable transition requires systemic change and an end to the relentless pursuit of economic growth through fossil fuels, critical minerals, and market mechanisms. Just transition is only as just as it is inclusive, and without recognizing and integrating care, domestic and informal work, it will fail half of the world’s population. This is why SB62 must deliver progress on gender-just actionable outcomes in the Just Transition Work Programme, grounded in principles of equity, common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capacities, care, collective human rights, and rights of nature.

We demand an end to the silence on genocides across the world, from Palestine and Sudan to Congo, and too many more to list. We reject the facade of neutrality that serves solely to enable exploitation and extractivism, occupation and militarism, and imperialism. Human rights are not neutral issues and cannot be compartmentalized. Climate justice cannot be realized without human rights. It cannot be achieved on occupied lands, or through imperialist plunder. True climate justice requires system change, and the power structures driving injustice, marginalizing the Global South, and violating the environment must be dismantled.

We are at a turning point, the people need us, we are calling on you to answer.