Executive Director attends COP21 Women’s Caucus

(From left to right) Bridget Burns, Women’s Environment and Development Organization; Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Women Executive Director; and Usha Nair, All India Women’s Conference, take part in the Women’s Caucus at COP 21, on 7 December 2015. Photo: UN Women/Sharon Grobeisen.

Starting the second week at COP21, UN Women Executive Director met with civil society, indigenous and women's group representatives at the Women's Caucus meeting on Monday morning. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Women's Caucus is a space to meet and discuss women's rights and gender issues.

During her opening remarks the Executive Director thanked the participants for their well-targeted efforts to take climate negotiations from being completely gender-blind to now including more than 50 decisions incorporating gender-specific references. She said thanks to their efforts, a diversity of women's voices that have traditionally been absent—such as young, indigenous and grass-roots women—are also being heard.

Civil society representatives at the Women’s Caucus meeting COP21. Photo: UN Women/Sharon Grobeisen.

The 7 December thematic focus for the Caucus is on indigenous women, their perspectives and solutions for climate justice. The Executive Director referred to the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, language, religion and class—in addition to gender—that indigenous women often experience, and called for these limiting factor to be addressed by any comprehensive climate agreement.

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In Focus: Women and climate change