Addressing the Gender-Climate-Conflict Nexus
The 2024 Bonn Climate Change Conference, scheduled for June 3-13, presents a critical juncture for the global community to address the interlinkages between gender, climate change, and conflict. As the preparatory meeting for the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, this year’s Bonn session offers a unique opportunity to elevate the urgency of implementing gender-responsive climate policies and interventions.
The evidence is clear: climate change has profound gender-differentiated impacts, often exacerbating existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. Women and marginalized groups are disproportionately affected, facing heightened risks of gender-based violence, increased unpaid labor, and limited access to resources and decision-making processes. Furthermore, the intersections of climate change, conflict, and gender form a “triple nexus” that demands comprehensive, intersectional solutions.
Recognizing the Gender-Climate-Conflict Nexus
The UNFCCC secretariat’s 2022 report highlighted the critical linkages between gender-based violence, climate change, and conflict, noting that “gender-based violence is prevalent in areas of conflict that are also more at risk of experiencing extreme weather events.” Countries such as Colombia, Mali, and Yemen have seen women and girls particularly vulnerable to gender-based violence due to the compounding effects of climate impacts, environmental degradation, and ongoing conflicts.
Climate change phenomena create new risks and exacerbate existing social frictions within families, communities, and across national borders. The competition for scarce resources, the increasing frequency and intensity of droughts and floods, and the resulting social tensions from rural-urban migration all contribute to heightened human security threats. Crucially, these impacts are not gender-neutral, with women and marginalized groups facing disproportionate burdens.
Feminist research has shown that systems of oppression, such as patriarchy, not only make certain groups more vulnerable but also systematically silence their voices and needs, overlooking their valuable knowledge and potential agency. An intersectional understanding of these structural and systemic conditions is essential for informing effective and sustainable change processes.
Integrating Gender Perspectives in Climate Negotiations
While gender has become an established topic within the UN Climate Change Conferences, political practice has often lagged behind the state of research. Explicit references to gender in National Action Plans and communications, the appointment of gender focal points, and the dissemination of relevant reports and research have been instrumental in advancing this agenda. However, the translation of rhetoric and commitments into tangible action remains inconsistent.
The upcoming review of the Lima Work Programme on Gender and its Gender Action Plan (GAP) at the Bonn Conference presents a crucial opportunity to address the persistent deficiencies and shortcomings in putting these programs into practice. Ensuring gender-inclusive representation in climate governance, institutionalizing capacity-building and knowledge management, and securing sufficient financial resources for gender-transformative initiatives are essential steps forward.
Amplifying Marginalized Voices and Local Knowledge
Climate change adaptation strategies that adopt an intersectional gender lens are vital for furthering the agency of marginalized groups and Indigenous communities, whose knowledge and perspectives are often overlooked in policy negotiations and practice. Systematic efforts to acknowledge and address the underlying structures that drive both the climate crisis and rampant gender inequality are necessary to inform more sustainable and gender-just conflict resolution and climate change adaptation approaches.
By centering the needs and demands of those most vulnerable to climate change, the Bonn Conference can guide the translation of global policies into gender-transformative national and local practices. This includes recognizing gendered practices of climate protection and addressing the underlying structural and systemic power inequalities that perpetuate gender-based vulnerabilities.
Securing Ambitious Climate Action and Climate Finance
The 2024 Bonn Climate Change Conference takes place against the backdrop of a rapidly closing window of opportunity to limit global warming to 1.5°C. As the UN Secretary-General has emphasized, the battle for this critical temperature threshold will be won or lost in the 2020s, with the decisions taken by world leaders in the next 18 months being crucial.
Driving Emissions Reductions and a Just Energy Transition
To stay within the 1.5°C limit, global emissions must decline by 9% every year until 2030. However, current trends are headed in the wrong direction, with emissions rising by 1% in 2023. The Bonn Conference must catalyze ambitious commitments from the G20 countries, which are responsible for 80% of global emissions, to align their national climate action plans, energy strategies, and fossil fuel production and consumption plans with a 1.5°C future.
This includes pledges to reallocate subsidies from fossil fuels to renewables, storage, and grid modernization, as well as support for vulnerable communities. All countries must also commit to ending new coal projects and creating national climate action plans that put them on a path to phasing out coal power by 2040 (non-OECD countries) and 2030 (OECD countries).
Crucially, the Bonn Conference must encourage cities, regions, industries, financial institutions, and companies to present robust transition plans aligned with 1.5°C, with interim targets, transparent verification processes, and a move away from dubious carbon offsets.
Scaling Up Climate Finance and Adaptation Support
The current climate finance landscape is woefully inadequate, with the most vulnerable countries and communities struggling to access the resources needed to adapt to the impacts of climate change. The Bonn Conference must push for decisive action to bridge the adaptation finance gap, calling on developed countries to double their adaptation finance commitments to at least $40 billion per year by 2025.
Furthermore, the conference should urge the reform of the international financial architecture to enable a massive expansion of affordable public and private finance. This includes leveraging the influence of the G7 and G20 within Multilateral Development Banks to make them better equipped to mobilize the trillions needed for climate action in developing countries.
The establishment of the new Loss and Damage Fund, with clear commitments from countries to contribute, is another crucial outcome that the Bonn Conference should prioritize. Innovative sources of climate finance, such as solidarity levies on sectors like shipping, aviation, and fossil fuel extraction, should also be explored and implemented by early movers.
Confronting the Fossil Fuel Industry and Its Enablers
The Bonn Conference must also confront the fossil fuel industry and its enablers, who have long obstructed progress on climate action through disinformation, lobbying, and legal threats. Financial institutions, advertising and PR companies, and governments must be called upon to stop bankrolling and enabling the fossil fuel destruction of our planet.
Financial institutions should be required to present credible plans to transition funding from fossil fuels to clean energy, with clear targets for 2025 and 2030, as well as disclosing their climate-related risks. Governments should consider banning fossil fuel advertising, while news media and tech companies should refrain from accepting such advertising.
By tackling the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold on the global economy and political landscapes, the Bonn Conference can pave the way for a just and equitable energy transition, empowering marginalized communities and centering gender-responsive climate action.
Conclusion: Seizing the Moment for Transformative Change
The 2024 Bonn Climate Change Conference stands as a pivotal moment in the global effort to address the intertwined challenges of gender, climate change, and conflict. By elevating the gender-climate-conflict nexus, amplifying the voices of marginalized communities, securing ambitious emissions reductions and climate finance, and confronting the fossil fuel industry, the conference can catalyze the transformative action necessary to safeguard our shared future.
As the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis, the Bonn Conference offers a unique opportunity to forge a more just, equitable, and sustainable path forward. By embracing an intersectional, gender-responsive approach to climate governance and action, the global community can unlock the potential of all people, regardless of their gender, to become agents of positive change. Now is the time to seize this moment and deliver the bold, transformative solutions our planet so urgently needs.
