Rebecka Hagman (in the middle) talking about gender and climate change at Stockholm's Culture Festival. Photo: Helene Mårtenson.
This past week I have fully enjoyed Stockhom’s Culture Festival. Somehow I think that the mere fact of so many people getting together, enjoying free concerts and theatre, dancing and discussing, is an important ingredient in a truly sustainable society. But this year’s festival also had a lot of items specifically about sustainability and climate change on the programme.
For example I heard the feminist climate debator Rebecka Hagman talk about her experiences in the work to bring women’s perspective into the global negotiations about climate change in Copenhagen last year.
As an intern with the Swedish Mission to the UN in New York, she was asked to formulate a proposal for a gender paragraph to be included in the resolution.
So in what sense is climate change an issue that touches gender roles? Well, explained Rebecka Hagman, until now climate change has often been discussed in a technocratic and scientific sense. But it’s also important to see that men and women – as groups – actually have different climate impacts (according to studies men drive more, eat more meat and consume more energy intensive things, while women for example are more likely to use public transport).
Furthermore men and women are affected by a warmer climate in different ways. For example women in many parts of the world bear the main responsibility to provide the family with water and food. In times of more serious droughts this can mean that women all of a sudden have to spend much more hours fetching water and firewood than before. This in turn means less time for studying, participating in democratic and political processes or getting a paid job.
Because of all this, Rebecka Hagman concluded, it’s enormously important to bring all aspects into the climate change work.
– It’s not a gender neutral issue. We need different solutions, and we need voices from south and north, east and west, women and men – all groups in society, she said.
And what happened to the paragraph she wrote? Making more than 190 countries agree is a tough job, Rebecka Hagman admitted. After political horse-trading and struggles about commas and full stops, a watered down version finally made its way into the document. But a document that did not take strong action on emission reductions, which is after all its main purpose, said Rebecka Hagman. So: there is still a lot of work to be done.
Read Rebecka Hagman’s full master thesis “On a gendered road to Copenhagen”.
