A message from Mary Robinson on Women's Leadership on Gender and Climate Change

MRFCJ believes the gender dimensions of climate change should be highlighted at COP17 in order to secure stronger references to gender in the texts, institutions and mechanisms agreed at the conference.

The climate change negotiations are led by a growing group of women leaders and COP17 represents a real opportunity to demonstrate the value of women's leadership. MRFCJ is working to harness this leadership at the international level through a Troika+ of women leaders on gender and climate change.

Transcript (closed captioning also available while playing video]:
[Mary Robinson]: I want to emphasise very strongly how important it is that we have women's leadership on climate change and I mean women's leadership at all levels. Women at grassroots who are faced with the shocks of climate change which do have different impacts on the lives of men and women, boys and girls. The impact on women is usually much more severe - if there is a prolonged drought, if she has to go further for firewood. If there is flooding, she has to cope with the problems of food, the problems of keeping the family together and if she is a farmer, we know the impact on poor subsistence farmers of the fact that weather is much less predictable. There are weather shocks, there are no seasons. We're seeing it all over Africa. It's something that has been focused on very much by Africa itself under the leadership of South Africa in holding meetings to focus on the gender dimensions. So we have an opportunity, if we link the leadership of women at the grassroots, their wisdom, their knowledge, their coping mechanisms, their need for more money and resources for adaptation. If we link this with the fact that more and more women are ministers, have access to the negotiating tables, have access to the important meetings where decisions are being taken and it is their responsibility and our endeavours in that regard that there will be a decision at every level on gender, whether it is on mitigation, on adaptation, on transfer of technologies, on financing, on the legal form of a new climate agreement. It's important we make progress on that. We won't get a final result in Durban but we have to make progress towards that final result because that's important also for the negative impacts that climate can have and also working towards Rio+20: the importance of access to affordable renewable energy - that too has a strong gender dimension and if we can really show our strengths as women leaders in Durban, we will change the narrative. We will genuinely change the debate on climate change itself and we will make it a much more practical solution in the future.

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