Greta Thunberg will not be attending Cop27, she made it clear, claiming climate conferences are often just greenwashing. For many years, the activist has supported a different kind of struggle against the environmental crisis, taking into account many aspects that are still underestimated at the institutional level. One of them is the role of gender. The environmental crisis is not “gender neutral”, women, due to the way society works, suffer the most from global warming. Nonetheless at the Cop27 climate conference taking place these days in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, women leaders make up just 7 out of 110.

“The views of women, whose voices are underrepresented in the climate debate, are critical to addressing the climate crisis. fairer and more equitable and can make an important contribution to our understanding of climate action worldwide,” they argue in an editorial for Scientific American, Katherine McKenna, former Canadian Environment Minister and climate researcher Amy Myers Jaffe. More women’s participation in climate conferences is critical, experts say, as they discuss “how the countries of the global North, responsible for much of the world’s carbon production, should help the Global South deal with the effects of this ‘pollution’.” .

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According to the UN, 80% of people displaced by climate change are women. “A prime example is the floods in Pakistan earlier this year,” write McKenna and Jaffe, “huge numbers of rural women have lost their homes and livelihoods, and it is estimated that 650,000 women could now lose their lives.” . “The effects of climate change on women,” they add, “exacerbate the gendered conditions that exist in many places. This includes increasing income inequality and financial insecurity.” Globally, there are generally fewer women leaders than men, and this disparity is also seen at climate conferences. It’s a vicious circle, and so women’s representation is so sparse as to be almost irrelevant. “Women are leading the climate revolution,” McKenna and Jaffe argue, “give them the mic at COP27.”