The so-called green transition is leaving women behind—ignoring ecology, care work and Indigenous land in favor of profit-driven, extractive solutions.
The U.N.’s current solution for mitigating the effects of global climate change is to deliver USD $300 billion per year until 2035 to developing nations. This is not as much of a solution as it is a hefty Band-Aid applied to a deep and ongoing environmental crisis.
The U.N.’s Conference of Parties’ (COP) idea of environmental and economic sustainability is renewable energies; however, there’s a longer lasting method to mitigating the impacts of climate change: ecology. Ecological-based solutions for the climate crisis don’t focus on manufacturing a fix but rather focus on harnessing the earth’s natural interactions to do the heavy lifting.
Every year since 1995, member nations of the U.N. have come together to discuss the planet’s climate crisis during COP meetings. This year marks the 30th annual meeting, which will be held Nov. 10 to 21 in Belém, Brazil.
“I don’t know if I’m sitting here and having déjà vu, [but the green transition] sounds like a remix of colonialism, and that is why I feel that a transition that isn’t just, fair, fast, feminist and fully funded will always be bound by limitations,” said Ayshka Najib, a climate activist from Dubai.
As solutions, like this big Band-Aid, try to hide the scab that is the man-made contusion of climate change, the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network came together to discuss what should be on the table for the upcoming COP30 meeting.
Over 100 panelists from 50 countries joined Osprey Orielle Lake, WECAN’s founder and executive director, for a six-day webinar late last month. The women-led discussion followed ecological solutions to the climate crisis, as well as protections for women and Indigenous communities most at risk by climate change. Nearly every woman spoke about moving away from fixing the planet’s crisis on a technological basis to moving toward a future that embraces ecology.
“We know what works,” Lake said. “Movements that are regenerating the earth while feeding families, policies rooted in climate reparations and care based economies, not corporate greenwashing, [but] a fair, fast-funded phase out of fossil fuels and a clear understanding that the leadership of women … across all sectors, is not optional. It is essential.”
The So-Called Green Transition
WECAN focuses on uplifting women’s voices when it comes to creating solutions for the earth’s climate crisis. Only eight out of 78 leaders that attended COP29 were women. There is still a large gender gap on display at such a globally crucial meeting.
Such a gap doesn’t allow for the voices who are most impacted by climate change to be heard. Women are 14 times more likely to die than men in climate disasters, and femicide increases by 28 percent during heat waves, according to U.N. research. So, while developed nations may watch as sea levels rise and as global temperatures shift, it’s the women and Indigenous communities of underdeveloped countries who feel these impacts the most.
Women disproportionately make up the world’s poorest population by the millions because of power dynamics, wage gaps and societal expectations. And it’s because of these variables that women are more vulnerable to food scarcity, gender-violence and displacement, especially during climate disasters, famine or drought.
The green transition seeks to promote renewable energies and implement more environmentally sustainable business and lifestyle practices. Panelists like Elle Rávdná Näkkäläjärvi, who is a Sȧmi activist, spoke about the immediate effects of the green transition in some regions of the world, like hers in Norway.
Näkkäläjärvi is currently fighting for the rights of Indigenous reindeer populations being harmed by copper mining operations, as well as wind turbine installations, in the country.
Copper mining is necessary to extract precious metal, which is in part used to create a less wasteful economy. This helps “close the loop” in manufacturing products like renewable energies so they can be recycled and reused, rather than rely on systems that promote unsustainable and wasteful practices.
Copper is important to the green transition because it’s used in nearly all renewable energies. The metal is perfect for allowing energy to flow through it without losing too much of it. But while it may help the climate crisis in the long run, communities like Näkkäläjärvi’s will feel a different kind of impact.
“This whole case reveals how asymmetric power relations continue to pave the way for colonial dispossession, dispossession of Sȧmi land and also human rights in this so-called green energy transition,” she said.
Mining company Nussir ASA will be heading the operations in Norway. Näkkäläjärvi said the company will dump mining tailings into Norway’s Repparfjord. The mountainous region where the invasive surface mining will occur will affect the expansive land needed for herding and grazing reindeer, which Sȧmi use for food, materials and as a way to preserve their generations-long culture.
“They are on a highway to total destruction of the lands and waters in that same area,” Näkkäläjärvi said. “The green shift is very much a game of smoke and mirrors and green-washing of the good old extractive capitalistic greed. The so-called solutions to transitions are not just false, they’re contributing to accelerating pollution, loss of biodiversity and loss of land and by that, our culture.”
By considering an ecological perspective of the globe’s crisis—including human interactions with the planet–leaders can choose to create more holistic solutions that intertwine climate, Indigenous land colonialism and the lives of women.
A Just Transition
The green transition rarely involves–if ever–a complete transition away from fossil fuels, and consequently, a shift away from unfair working conditions. Like the copper mines in Norway, intense mining operations are needed for manufacturing renewables, like solar panels. Metals like cobalt are mined primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles.
In terms of the waste stream and how these metals are procured, Susana Muhamad, former minister of environment and sustainable development of Colombia, said during the webinar, this vicious cycle is unsustainable:
“Other parties see that the next change will be another version of green capitalism … the logic of extraction by the [global] North from the [global] South is to be able to implement technologies in the North. This cannot be the next cycle, because this will be the end of the process.”
While the planet needs to heal from pollution and extraction, nations and communities need to find ways to fight for the women most impacted by climate change and the injustices that come with it.
“As women, … we have to stand up and back up women. We can make the transitions equitable, just for the woman, for Indigenous women, for Indigenous communities,” said Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Chadian environmental activist and geographer.
But before the U.N. addresses the green transition, more conversations with women need to happen. More conversations about their everyday as the climate crisis gets worse. More conversations about their worsened working conditions because of the changing climate, and whether or not the jobs they do, like unpaid care work, gets recognized enough as the job gets harder, but ever more important.
Unpaid care work is done by nearly 708 million women worldwide–and the job will change alongside the climate. Right now, there seems to be a disconnect. This work is important, life saving, and yet it is widely unrecognized by women’s families and even the U.N.
As the planet’s crisis hastens and gets more severe, the need for this kind of care will increase. Care extends far and wide, from the elderly, to children to the sick and injured. In 2023, there were 399 natural disasters worldwide, compared to the global average of 369 between 2003 to 2022. As disasters become more frequent, so will the need for care.
The monetary value of unpaid care work is equivalent to $11 trillion, according to Fleur Newman, a lawyer and unit lead at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “These undervalued or invisible systems, that include the care economy, … [are] largely performed by women around the world. It is … absolutely essential work for the functioning of our economies and societies,” Newman said.
“Women carry around 12.5 billion [hours] of the care work daily,” Najib said. “We cannot move from one extractive economy that is built on the backs of women to another, and that is why we need a gender[ed] just transition that recognizes unpaid and unrecognized care work.”
The just transitions Najib spoke about have been in discussion since 1980 and weave together a green economy with equal job opportunities. Only until recently, as the planet warms and more countries are being harmed by climate change, are nations considering this idea more seriously and adding just transition principles into their climate plans.
The just transition principles outlined by the United States Department of Labor currently state that the government will use the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act to create more green jobs, invest in clean energies and implement protections for disadvantaged communities. However, with the termination of the Green New Deal under President Donald Trump’s executive order, Unleashing American Energy, and the gutting of the IRA with the administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, these principles seem far in the country’s rearview mirror.
Awaiting COP30
On June 20, André Aranha Correa do Lago, Brazilian climate diplomat and COP30’s president, wrote his fourth letter from the presidency, calling for a just and equitable energy transition. Within the letter, Corrêa do Lago outlined the “six axes” of the agenda for COP30:
- transitioning energy,
- becoming stewards for life on land and sea,
- innovating agriculture,
- building longer lasting infrastructure,
- nurturing social development, and
- enabling and accelerating finance and technology.
There’s a single mention of gender in his letter, but with more women seated around the tables at COP meetings, the more voices will and can be heard. Rita Uwaka, social and gender rights activist based in Nigeria, works to grow awareness about women’s issues caused by the climate crisis. With a lack of gender diverse leadership across the globe, Uwaka said women’s engagement in governance will be crucial to fixing how humans respond to climate change.
“We need to build our solutions … through agroecological means,” Uwaka said. “Promoting agroecological mentors, promoting community forest space management mentors, where we put the management of our forests into the hands of the people will go a long way in mitigating [the] climate crisis.”
The green transition is necessary to mitigating global climate change. However, world leaders must understand the price women pay for it. The panelists discussed a green and just transition is one for all, not all for one.
“Women and girls are being pushed to the front lines of a crisis they did not start,” Lake said. “Climate injustice is a legacy of colonialism, of exploitation of greed stitched into the seams of a global community built on extraction …. [A]uthoritarianism and imperialism are polluting and desecrating our lives.”
Great Job Vivian Rose & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
