WECF at the COP26 – Our key demands

Yesterday marked the first day of climate talks at COP26. The decisions made at COP26 will shape how governments respond (or not) to the climate crisis. Due to the pandemic we know that many voices from the Global South will be excluded from the climate table. Due to structural gender inequality women’s voices are not being equally heard in climate spaces. The Climate Change Conference takes place in Glasgow, Scotland from 31st of October till 12th of November.

We are there together with our feminist partners of the Women & Gender Constituency, advocating for stronger commitments to gender. We are also preparing for the Annual Gender Just Climate Solutions Award. As a member of the Women & Gender Constituency, we are part of a movement that is bringing climate justice to COP26. Climate justice recognises that all of our struggles lead back to the same unjust system – from climate, to covid, to racism, to gender inequality. To solve these problems, we have to solve them all together through system change.

Our Key Demands

As feminists, gender equality and women’s rights advocates from around the world—led by and accountable to the demands of frontlines, Indigenous and grassroots leaders— the Women and Gender Constituency have outlined below our key demands for the outcomes of COP26. We share these views in the reality of a world of ever-increasing climate impacts and disasters, where a global pandemic has worked to deepen gross inequities between and within countries and to further exacerbate inequalities and drive millions into greater poverty and instability, especially in the Global South.

While the science is clear on the devastating impacts of failing to keep warming below 1.5 degrees, countries current emissions reductions targets are woefully inadequate to meet the promises of Paris—nor are we close to the US$100 billion per year in climate finance promised from Copenhagen. At the same time, in 2020 and 2021 a record number of environmental human rights defenders working to protect the environment and marginalized people’s rights were murdered—losing their lives while trying to preserve the planet, other species and ourselves.

We call on COP26 to:

  1. Fulfill commitment to human rights in the Paris Agreement & keep 1.5 alive
  2. Deliver on finance and prioritise loss & damage
  3. Ensure human rights & ecosystem integrity in Article 6
  4. Advance the Gender Action Plan
  5. Reject false solutions & invest in gender-just climate action
  6. Facilitate gender-just transitions to a regenerative economy
  7. Invest in resilient, gender-transformative, climate justice education
  8. Promote health, including sexual and reproductive health and rights
  9. Ensure rights to water and sanitation in all climate action
  10. Protect the ocean, cryosphere, coastal ecosystems and local communities
  11. Ensure collective women’s land rights

You can download our key demands here