Women are fighting for a voice in climate negotiations

Stay up to date with free updates

Simply log in Climate change myFT Digest – delivered straight to your inbox.

More than 200 female business and political leaders from around the world gathered at the elegant Madison Avenue offices of wind energy company Ørsted during the recent New York Climate Week, in an evening that ended with a team photo of women clenching a fist, Rosie the Riveter style.

Supporters of the new female leadership coalition, set to be formally launched at COP29, include climate veterans such as former UN Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa, German envoy Jennifer Morgan, British envoy Rachel Kyte and former French envoy Laurence Tubiana.

Her show of strength was motivated by the Azerbaijani COP29 presidency's failure to include even a single woman on an original 28-member organizing committee. After a backlash, President Ilham Aliyev expanded the group to 42, including 12 women and two more men. The number of members has now grown to 55, but gender parity has not yet been achieved. However, COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev's six-member team is now evenly distributed.

This misstep at COP29 prompted 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, led by former Canadian climate minister Catherine McKenna and leader María Mendiluce The We Means Business Coalition was promoted.

In the past decade, only one woman has held the host country-appointed position of COP president: Chile's former environment minister Carolina Schmidt, who led COP25.

Behind the scenes, more women than ever before are involved in country negotiations in the UN program working groups

In contrast, the top UN climate role of executive secretary is evenly split between men and women.

The post is now held by Simon Stiell of Grenada, who took over as executive secretary from Espinosa, a former Mexican foreign minister who also served as COP president and chaired the 2010 Cancún summit. Espinosa himself, took the baton from Christiana Figueres, who led the COP that signed 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 in national delegations. In its first year, female delegates to the UN climate talks in Egypt at COP27 formally complained of being bullied, mistreated and sexually harassed by male negotiators, prompting letters of protest from two dozen countries. Camila Zepeda, Mexico's head of delegation, was among those who told the Financial Times that she had suffered sexual harassment.

Further allegations were made last year at a negotiating session in Bonn, where Stiell concluded the talks by saying he had been “made aware that inappropriate behavior had occurred during this session”. He 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 before are involved in country negotiations in the UN program working groups.

An analysis by the campaign group Gender Action Tracker shows that the proportion of female party delegates at meetings at the UN climate headquarters in Bonn rose to almost 48 percent last year. However, for COPs held alternately in national capitals, the proportion is around a third. At the level of head of delegation, often in the role of a minister, this proportion is only around a fifth.

The more women [feel they] The more you can increase, the more transformative change you can achieve

The essential work being done by the countries' negotiators is exemplified by deputy US envoy Sue Biniaz, referred to as “the close” by the New York Times. The former senior climate lawyer at the U.S. State Department was the right-hand man of many delegation leaders over the decades, including John Kerry and Todd Stern. She is seen as a “warrior” by Canadian McKenna.

McKenna herself was one of the previous female delegation leaders and, as then Minister of Environment and Climate Change, led the Canadian team at COP23 in Bonn – a role that earned her the nickname “Climate Barbie,” which she has since adopted.

This week in Baku, as chair of the high-level group of experts, she will tell UN secretaries-general in blunt terms what needs to be implemented through “real” private sector climate plans.

The first report of its kind, presented at COP27 in Egypt, touched a nerve when it noted that “some companies, particularly financial institutions, do not understand that making a net zero commitment means something.”

Among the background issues McKenna identifies at the corporate level is the isolation of the sustainability agenda, which is often left to women in leadership positions. “Power can’t be about doing it alone and feeling like you’re an outlier in your company,” she says. “The more women [feel they] The more you can increase, the more transformative change you can achieve.”