COP27: Outcomes, challenges, and the future of gender at COPs
No ‘gender justice’ in the gender negotiations
DFPA’s focus lies primarily on the gender negotiations during COP and COP27’s gender negotiations all cantered around the Gender Action Plan (GAP). The GAP sets out objectives and activities under five priority areas that aim to advance knowledge and understanding of gender-responsive climate action and its coherent mainstreaming in the implementation of the UNFCCC and the works of Parties, the secretari-at, United Nations entities and all stakeholders at all levels, as well as women’s full, equal, and meaningful participation in the UNFCCC process. At COP27 it was time to review the implementation of the GAP and hopefully pave the way for an enhanced implementation moving forward.
Prior to COP27, the Women & Gender Constituency, of which DFPA is a member, coordinated hundreds of gender experts and frontline women leaders and came with clear asks to enhance implementation of the GAP. We all met with Parties and found support for what are both clearly defined and well-reasoned demands for the GAP – demands that don’t even scratch the surface of what is truly needed for gender just climate action, such as solutions that tackling structural crises of debt, illicit financial flows, and social protection – but that can advance critical dialogue and implementation in this contested space which is the first step towards more just climate action.
With the Women & Gender Constituency, DFPA came to COP with a call for change: the GAP deliverables are not working to advance the leadership of grassroots and Indigenous women in this process; the gen-dered health impacts of climate change needs to be better recognised and understood, including SRHR; the intersection of a care economy and a just transition is critical to create dialogue to inform Parties’ na-tional plans and low emissions development strategies; and agriculture and gender, including land rights, are persistent intersections of effective climate action but are not informing national planning. We came demanding that at minimum, we recognise the increasing impacts that loss and damage are having on the lives of women and girls in all their diversity. We came with demands on financing for gender-responsive implementation and what that means in terms of delivery and direct access for grassroots women and women’s groups.
Unfortunately, we saw no substantial review of the content of the GAP neither prior to nor during the COP. In addition, experts, and human rights campaigners in the field of gender were most often not al-lowed access to the negotiations themselves. Negotiations where Parties negotiated about superficial phrasings in a text that does not manage to address the critical thematics of the gender-climate intersec-tion as well as a text that does not manage to deliver sufficiently on climate finance.
At best the gender-negotiations on the GAP at COP27 repeats mandates which already exists in other texts under UNFCCC. At worst it rolls back the normative language on gender equality and human rights in a UN context.
Our message for decisionmakers globally
Gender equality is not a sideshow, not tokenistic, not a thematic day, not an opportunity to host an event at a pavilion. We need Parties to make the gender negotiations about outcomes that serve women and girls in their full diversity at the frontline of climate impacts and forefront of climate solutions. Parties at the negotiating table need to prioritise a robust outcome or rethink the entire approach to gender just climate action. Parties need to prioritise gender in the negotiations, in coordination with the resources and dedication of agenda items such as finance and thereby create a real, detailed vision of what a GAP could accomplish. And lastly, Parties need to resource the GAP activities to ensure their implementation in all the days, weeks, and months between COPs.
