We’re phasing out fossil fuels — Here’s what we’re phasing in.
By Bridget Burns, Executive Director, WEDO
This week, world leaders are gathered at the largest ever UN climate conference. On the heels of the latest IPCC report highlighting the imperative for climate action, this summit is taking place amid climate impacts that are worse than ever. And — under the leadership of the oil CEO-turned-COP-President Dr. Sultan Al Jaber of the UAE — global demands for the phase-out of fossil fuels are louder than ever.
As the head of a global organization that was founded with the intention of bringing diverse women’s voices into global environmental decision-making spaces, I know how important these multilateral spaces are. It is crucial to have global agreed-upon targets. But to make real progress, we need to think and act locally as well as globally. And too often, the innovative solutions that are truly transforming communities and our relationship with the environment are almost completely absent in global policy spaces.
Almost a decade ago, as part of the 2014 Climate Ambition Summit, there was an open invitation from Ban Ki-Moon for civil society partners to submit our climate solutions. We worked with our partners to put forward five genuinely transformative projects. We deemed them “gender just climate solutions,” not because they were women-led — though many of them were — but because they represented efforts to ensure environmental integrity while also shifting power in ways that advance gender equality. One of them was a network of women-led solar cooperatives across 500 households and six different countries — a model that was really working and was ready for recognition and investment. Other solutions we wanted to showcase were new models for agroecology, and women working to build collective land rights.
However, upon meeting with UN officials organizing the Summit, our solutions were dismissed as “too small” to be showcased on the global stage. A decade later, we know through evidence and experience the opposite to be true: locally led projects are where transformation is possible, if we scale, replicate, and invest in them.
Instead of being dissuaded in 2014, we — WEDO and our allies in the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) — doubled down on building a program to demonstrate what gender just climate solutions look like at a diversity of scale, and challenging existing modalities in their failure to deliver that funding and investment. In this years-long work to build an evidence base of solutions, I’ve witnessed the incredible and outsized impact they’re having across the world.
One of the solutions I have been continually inspired by is Bhungroo systems in India. This year, Trupti Jain, one of the founders, joined us in September for New York Climate Week to share updates with partners and decision-makers on how Bhungroo’s innovative water irrigation system is helping thousands of farmers. Because the project relies on trained rural Women Climate Leaders (WCLs) who promote the technology and deliver fee-based agriculture expert advice, it promotes women’s leadership and livelihoods while facilitating access to irrigation and farming facilities to smallholder farmers. Five years after first being uplifted as a key Gender Just Climate Solution by the WGC, the project — which had been working in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ghana — has now been scaled to Togo and Madagascar.
In another example from Cameroon, climate and gender activist Sevidzem Ernestine Leikeki co-founded an organization called CAMGEW that trains community members, particularly women and girls, to plant trees in the Kilum-Ijim forest. She found that pairing these efforts with training in bee farming — “equating honey to money” — revitalized degraded parts of the forests and reduced bushfires, while improving livelihoods.
Though these solutions span sectors and geographies, they hold things in common. They require a low input of resources. They promote more equitable access, including for women and girls, in decision-making. Above all, they are holistic in nature, providing a multiplicity of benefits for individuals and communities — from reduced workload to increased food security, to improved health and livelihoods.
Unfortunately, the story of Bhungroo and CAMGEW are outliers amid hundreds of solutions that fail to receive the necessary exposure and resources that would allow them to scale their work. Too often, climate finance does not flow to the local level, local organizations remain drastically underfunded, and current funding mechanisms are too restrictive to be accessible to community-led solutions. This means that the work we have been doing to support gender just climate solutions must be complemented by building a new ecosystem of funding that can move resources to communities at the scale required.
As countries and communities are mobilizing around the call for phasing out fossil fuels and phasing in a ‘just transition’ — fought for by our siblings in the labor movements around the world — we know there will be a transition. But by no means do we know that it will be just. We must continue to fight for the future we want.
This moment is an opportunity to redefine whose solutions matter. It’s an opportunity to acknowledge that while many local communities are resisting imposed ideas of ‘development,’ they are also reimagining new models based on care — for people and for the planet. And, it’s an obligation to move away from top-down approaches to lifting up organizations, grassroots groups, and coalitions on the frontlines who have always been doing this work.
Arundhati Roy — ‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.’
Bridget Burns is a feminist, environmental activist, and the Executive Director of WEDO. She specializes in policy advocacy, research and movement building at the intersection of gender equality, women’s rights and environment/climate justice. For several years, Bridget has been particularly focused on integrating gender equality into the decisions and outcomes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In addition, she serves as the co-Focal Point of the Women and Gender Constituency, which supports the political participation of women’s rights advocates into the climate process.
