After a highly mediatised tour of Europe, highlighted by the 43rd edition of G7 summit that led to growing doubts on the engagement of the US in combatting climate change, Donald Trump finally announced the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement on June 1, 2017. As an organization that has been actively engaged in the issue of climate change for years, this disengagement comes as a disappointment to us.

Veronique Moreira, president of our French office, reacts to this decision in the following statement.

“As an NGO network engaged in the field for women and communities, we have collected many testimonies of the real impacts of climate change on people, especially on women, in their daily lives. We do not expect much from the President of the United States: his rude campaigning, his first adopted measures to limit women’s rights and their access to sexual and reproductive health has shown to the world his little sense of justice. Therefore Trump’s irresponsible decision last week to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, is only coherent with his criticized personality and his total lack of solidarity and vision for the future. The support that the United States should have allocated for the global fight against climate change will be badly missing in useful investments for future generations.”

Necessity of local climate action

This only reinforces the relevance and necessity of local climate action. (http://dev.climate-chance.org. We will not give up on our commitments: Our projects (http://www.wecf.eu/english/projects) in many countries, like Georgia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and the Ukraine, or Uganda, South Africa, and soon Morocco, contribute to reduce CO2 emissions while reinforcing gender equality and the local population’s resilience to climate change. Our alliances within climate coalitions and for gender equality give a voice for people who engage in implementing concrete solutions. Slowly but surely, our innovative models are being spread, our advocacy is being heard and recognised.

We still have a long way to go, but we progress one step after another, without failing, convinced that Trump’s positions are the remaining of a fossilised past that everyone aims at surpassing in order to build a fair and sustainable world. One of Trump’s supporters from the Republican Party said that no man could resolve the climate issue. We, on the contrary, are committed to demonstrate that women and men can act together to sustainably transform reality.