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Climate Change—Combatants at Work

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize, shared between Al Gore and the UN’s climate science panel, is a victory for environmentalism and science. It underscores the gravity of global warming and leaves no space for skeptics. The prestigious award marks a high in intensified efforts on climate change this fall, which include UN meetings and a coordinated campaign by women.

Inuit Leader Says Planet Earth Is the Winner In the speculation leading up to the Nobel Peace Prize announcement, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit leader, was a prominent frontrunner along with Al Gore and the UN panel. While not yet a household name, she will be recognized more and more for bringing a human face to global warming. In a CBC News interview she remarked, "For me, the issue has won and, in fact, our own planet Earth was a winner in all this.” The consensus is that Watt-Cloutier has done more than anyone else to bring to the world’s attention the threats to Arctic peoples from a rapidly degrading environment caused by human activity far away. Her work and influence go beyond the melting north. “What happens to the planet happens up here first,” she explained. “We are the early warning for the rest of the world.” Watt-Cloutier was instrumental in negotiations on the Stockholm Convention of 2001, banning the making and use of persistent organic pollutants, which reach extremely damaging levels in humans and the food chain in the far north. She and her team then commissioned a scientific report to document the alarming changes she and the rest of the Inuit community had been experiencing for years, and she began to make a case connecting human rights and climate change. They petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, claiming that unchecked green house gas emissions from the United States violate the environmental and cultural rights of the people of the Arctic. The petition—one of the first international legal claims on global warming and perhaps the first connecting the issue to human rights—is still pending. Growing up in northern Quebec, Watt-Cloutier, until age 10, traveled only by dog sled. Today, at 54, she lives in a remote village 200 miles below the Arctic Circle, yet she speaks around the world to save the culture and environment of Inuit and other indigenous peoples of the far north. In a video she made last year, “Inuit’s Challenge in the Artic,” she explained that “nowhere else in the world really does ice and snow represent transportation, mobility and life.” This icy highway, she said, “links us to each other.” She is now working on a book, The Right to Be Cold.—Regina Cornwell

Two weeks before the prize was announced, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gathered world leaders from some 150 countries in New York to focus on climate change, while women were ready with their own agenda. A few days in advance, Mary Robinson and Gro Harlem Brundtland, former president of Ireland and ex-prime minister of Norway respectively, had led roundtable discussions among government and UN leaders designed to bring a human face to a topic all too often relegated to dry and technical debate in UN deliberations.

As the secretary-general’s gathering—“The Future in Our Hands: Addressing the Leadership Challenge of Climate Change”—was itself an effort to build momentum for major climate negotiations beginning in Bali in December, the women met to make sure gender issues would be central to the larger forums. A dominant message of their September 21 event, “How a Changing Climate Impacts Women,” was that climate change affects women and men differently and that women must be recognized as critical agents of change and thus welcomed at high levels as decision makers.

In her keynote address, Brundtland, who is now UN special envoy on climate change, said women and their organizations have the secretary-general’s support for “the promotion of a more gender-sensitive and participatory approach,” particularly when it comes to developing countries and vulnerable communities. In developed nations, several participants stressed, women must take the lead in changing consumer habits and reducing consumption.

Robinson, who chairs the Council of Women World Leaders (CWWL), moderated the discussions, which were initiated by Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) in partnership with CWWL and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. At the heart of the gathering was the notion, fully documented by WEDO and others, that adverse effects of climate change are hardly gender neutral.

As WEDO’s June Zeitlin has testified, “women and children are fourteen times more likely to die than men during a disaster.” Women accounted for 70% or more of victims who died as a result of the 2004 Asian Tsunami and the 2003 European heat wave, for example. Zeitlin wants to arm climate change combatants “with enough information to join us to preach to the unconverted.” And, as Brundtland and others stressed, it is also women who take the lead in mitigating, adapting, saving land and homes and protecting and caring for children, the sick and injured in face of floods, droughts, and energy and water scarcity.

For Irene Dankelman, a Dutch professor and WEDO vice president, the meeting was “a landmark” in bringing gender to the climate change agenda and making people recognize that women and girls, particularly those who are poor, are disproportionately affected and, at the same time, often the most powerful agents of change. The policy recommendations prepared by the three roundtable partners were delivered directly into the secretary-general’s hands.

Secretary-General Ban’s meeting was also historic, with more than 80 heads of state and government participating, making it the largest ever assembly of world leaders focused on climate change. One important player was absent, however. George W. Bush sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to represent the United States during the day’s proceedings and only attended the dinner that evening. Although Bush has recently acknowledged that climate change is a serious problem, the lack of American leadership and its to-date unwillingness to agree to mandatory emission reductions has created international delays and given developing nations an excuse not to participate in green house gas reduction schemes. As Ban insisted, delay is unacceptable. “We have affordable measures and technologies to begin addressing the problem right now,” he said. “What we do not have is time.”

In various plenary sessions, presidents and prime ministers of rich and poor countries alike went on the record to take what was called “common but differentiated responsibility” for making change. For small states with few resources, the cost of such efforts is dramatic. Emanuel Mori, Micronesia president, said retreat from rising water levels was not an option for those on low-lying islands. “Relocation could be an option,” he said. “But how does one justify moving an entire society from their ancestral home? And how does one explain to the inhabitants that their plight is caused by human activities done in far-away lands?” Yet the will to attack potentially devastating problems was readily displayed by such speakers as Madagascar’s president, Marc Ravalomanana. Pointing out the world-treasure status of the island country, which possesses the “highest rate of biodiversity,” he said his poor nation was “aiming for a high growth economy.” But, he added, “to achieve our goal, we will never compromise our environment.”

By the end of the day Secretary-General Ban was upbeat and talking about a new era going into December’s meeting, when all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will begin negotiations for a strong and inclusive global agreement with binding green house gas emission reductions. “Today I heard a clear call from world leaders for a breakthrough on climate change in Bali,” he said. “And now I believe we have a major political commitment to achieving that.”

But a major political commitment, even if all of the big polluting nations sign on, will be lopsided unless women in representative numbers are among the decision makers. That will be a truly new era in which climate change will always have a human face.



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