Historical overview - NIKK

The international climate negotiations were begun more than 20 years ago, when most of the world’s countries, with a few exceptions, signed onto the United Nations Climate Convention, UNFCCC. The Convention was ratified in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, during the UN Conference on Environment and Development – the so-called Earth Summit. The aim of the Convention is to reduce global warming and mitigate its impact on the environment and on people. It has been ratified by 192 nations.

Rio Earth Summit

Besides the Climate Convention, also approved in Rio de Janeiro were the following:

• Agenda 21  
• Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
• Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
• Rio Declaration

Also part of the Climate Convention is the so-called Kyoto Protocol, which is more binding and is considered more powerful than the Convention itself. Neither the Climate Convention nor the Kyoto Protocol makes any reference to gender. The Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention to Combat Desertification and Agenda 21, on the other hand, do include a gender perspective.

Over the last four years, the Nordic countries in cooperation with the Global Gender and Climate Alliance and others have worked to ensure that the Climate Convention includes resolutions about the inclusion of a gender and women’s perspective. To attain this objective, these partners have arranged events for climate experts and decision-makers to examine the relationship between climate change and gender equality, and have brought women from the Southern Hemisphere into the climate negotiations by financing their participation. More than 3,000 experts and decision-makers have taken part in these events, and the number of female delegates at the climate conferences has been growing and five adaptation programmes incorporating a gender equality perspective have been completed. The most important points make reference to women’s active participation eight times. 

Gender and the Kyoto Protocol

A total of 184 countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol since it came into effect in January 2007. Thirty-seven industrialized countries and the EU committed to reduce their emissions levels by about 5 % from 1990 levels before 2012.

The signatories to the Convention meet once a year at so-called COP-meetings to evaluate the Convention’s progress. These conferences have yielded a series of activities and recommendations concerning the gendered aspects of climate change. Women are named officially for the first time in the text of the resolution from the COP7 meeting in Marrakech in 2001. Read more about the inclusion of gender in the COP process here (p.30) or about gender equality-related events arranged during COP meetings here.

Ten years after Rio de Janeiro, in 2002, a summit on sustainable development, the “Rio+10”, was arranged in Johannesburg. The summit took up Agenda 21 from a gender equality perspective and concluded that developments were going in the right direction internationally, nationally and locally, but that progress was often splintered and ad hoc.

In 2003, the Commission on Sustainable Development selected gender as one of the central themes in its work up until 2015.

United Nations’ women’s conferences

The United Nations has raised the connection between gender and climate change at a number of its women’s conferences. In Nairobi in 1985, the focus was on the interconnectedness of development, gender equality and women’s participation. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) arranged a special session on women and the environment. In Beijing in 1995, the environment was identified as one of twelve critical areas for women. The Beijing Platform for Action talks about the connection between women and the environment. Read more about the work done by the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) in regards to this matter. 

The UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has also focused on gender equality and climate change:

• Starting in 2002, it was required that a gender equality perspective be integrated into all research concerning the impact and causes of climate change.
• In 2008, the Commission declared that the effects of climate change are not gender neutral and that they directly affect the lives of women as a consequence of the tasks traditionally assigned to women. The Commission called for financing for gender equality work and for governments to gender-mainstream their national environmental policies, to strengthen their mechanisms and to support women’s participation in decision making.
• In 2009, the Nordic countries, under Iceland’s Presidency of the Nordic Council of Ministers, arranged an expert seminar on gender equality and climate change in New York.
• In 2009, the CSW issued an opinion on gender and climate change demanding that states include gender equality as a systemic principle in climate negotiations, which were expected to conclude during COP15 in Copenhagen that year.

The importance of including women in international climate negotiations

Women are under-represented in the international climate negotiations, even though more are participating than before. In January 2009, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that the world will see better results when women are included in the work to combat climate change. He challenged member states to support living environments where women are the central decision-makers on climate change and promised to nominate more women to higher posts.