SHE Changes Climate
Elise Buckle
Antoinette Vermilye
Bianca Pitt
Co-founders of SHEChangesClimate
THE campaign to support this year, SHEChangesClimate was founded in 2020 by Antoinette Vermilye, Bianca Pitt and Elise Buckle with the aim to bring diversity and inclusiveness, transparency and accountability to the COP26 negotiations on Climate Change. The UK will be hosting the COP26 in Glasgow in November of this year which aims to bring parties together to accelerate actions towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. With just 15% of the UK COP26 Leadership Team identifying as women back in November 2020 when the campaign was first started, it became clear to the founders that we needed to address the compositions of the delegations and set clear targets and an international standard for all future COPs, starting with COP26.
Campaigning for a 50:50 split of men and women at the top levels of the COP26 UK Leadership Team, SHEChangesClimate emphasises the value of listening to the voices of experienced and capable women within the environmental space. With diverse boards and leadership teams at the helm, we will be able to draw on a wider pool of knowledge and experience, including the experience of women! Bianca Pitt’s recent article for World War Zero highlights the European Journal of Political Economy’s findings that female parliamentarians lead better climate policy with fewer emissions. Bianca also highlights the success of charismatic female climate leaders in previous conferences such as Laurence Tubiana and Christiana Figueres who were key architects of the groundbreaking Paris Agreement back in 2015.
The campaign’s open letter to the UK Government in December 2020 was signed by over 400 female climate leaders in politics, science, business and the arts including Mary Robinson, Laurence Tubiana and Katharine Wilkinson. Since then, the founders have launched a number of social media campaigns including a Twitterstorm on International Women’s day, engaged in a dialogue with Alok Sharma and the COP26 Leadership Team, compiled a list of women with experience in climate to be selected for the UK COP26 Leadership Team and submitted a list of solutions to COP26 to bring more women into the leadership team.
With COP26 fast approaching, SHEChangesClimate’s most recent campaign around the G7 Summit in June highlighted the importance of women in leadership vis-à-vis the G7 leaders. With only one female leader in the G7, the campaign continues to push for the SHEChangesClimate 50:50 vision.
I had a chance to catch up with one of the amazing co-founders, Antoinette Vermilye, to talk more about the importance of the SHEChangesClimate campaign:
Can you tell us how the SHEChangesClimate Campaign began and what inspired you to take action?
I was inspired to take action when I learned last October that the UK COP26 Leadership Team was entirely male. This appeared in an article in the Guardian newspaper by Fiona Harvey. Considering that any agreement that comes out of the COP26 will have a downstream effect on most areas of our lives, such as food, ocean, agriculture, energy, nature-based solutions, transportation, technology, finance, investments, health, and above all, gender. With only the perspectives of half the planet represented at the COP26 how can we trust the output will be as robust as it could be. Women are on the frontline of climate change, often portrayed as victims, usually due to socioeconomic conditions that are defined by a patriarchy. However, they show amazing resilience and creativity in resolving obstacles. And yet women are not being given a chance to speak or show their ideas.
SHEChangesClimate is campaigning for a 50:50 split of men and women at the top levels of the COP26 UK Leadership Team. What steps has the campaign taken so far to achieve this goal?
We believe that for women to be truly heard and to be able to display attributes of empathy, compassion, and kindness (which are key elements to successful negotiations); as opposed to confrontational ultimatums, we have a better chance of achieving climate progress on key agreements. However, research shows that with less than 50% women in a room, males tend to interrupt or mansplain way more than in all male groups - even when women are the recognised experts.
We have already submitted a long list of 30 women that we have personally spoken to and are known experts in their fields of climate science, politics and/or negotiations. So far, not one has been selected. We have also explored and submitted several tangible but creative ways in which the UK Government could circumvent its rigid entrenched hierarchical civil service system in order to bring more women into the top of the team. Apparently, this is also beyond their imagination. We have also asked that more women are seen at the negotiating table - not just standing in the background. In the last few weeks, we have seen a more concerted effort to show women in the communications about COP26. This is a small step in the right direction in our view. But it does not go far enough.
SHEChangesClimate champions women's voices across the globe who are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis. Can you tell us more about how the climate crisis has exacerbated existing inequalities?
Many women have been disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, on the socio-economic scale, women are usually at the sharp end. This may translate as women having to travel further to get water as wells dry up, potential drowning when floods and storms hit coastal towns and villages because they are not taught to swim, and above all, not addressing their needs for climate mitigation or adaptation. COVID has only exacerbated these inequalities and can be seen as a side-effect of the environmental crisis we are currently facing. The last year and a half has shown that women are more likely to lose their jobs, bare the load of home-schooling and housework and are far more likely to be subject to domestic violence by partners.
However, what is overlooked is that many of these women are also incredibly resourceful and resilient but their insights or experiences are not included upstream or mainstream. Because their voices are not heard. Men are the default, women are the exception. This has to change.
SHEChangesClimate emphasises that diverse leadership teams improve governance, negotiation and balanced decision-making as they draw on a range of experience and knowledge. Tell us more about the importance of the female perspective in helping to shape the narrative at COP26?
At the Paris COP21 in 2015, the team was very gender balanced with the two main architects of the Paris Agreements being Laurence Tubiana and Christiana Figueres. Laurence had had painful operation on operation on her foot from which she was recovering. However, she gave it her all to draw up what are known as the NDCs [nationally determined contributions]. On the last day she called in the petroleum producing countries who had the most to lose and explained what she had drawn up and how it would affect them. Of course, they were not happy and they rejected it. She was exhausted and suddenly burst into tears. She took off her glasses and she said “Gentlemen, I have done everything I can for you but I can do no more”. It inspired compassion from everyone present and they hugged her and said “we know you have done your best and we trust you”. This human moment is far less likely to have happened with a male negotiating. Bringing kindness, compassion and empathy into negotiations allow for solution-driven negotiations not combative. We need more of this more than ever today where everything is so polarised.
There are a significant number of women who work within the environmental space, particularly at the grassroots level, yet women continue to be shut out from important high-level conversations around climate. How can we empower young women and girls to fight for their seat at the table?
Interestingly enough, the truth is that the COP26 team does reflect this proportion: more women at the bottom and men at the top. I have seen so many women doing the frontline work at the grassroots level yet the decisions are made predominantly by men. What we really need to see is a mixture all the way through. We have come across situations where many women are in the minority in decision-making groups and so tend to feel obliged to behave and act like a man to be taken seriously. This is counterproductive to all the qualities that women bring, in addition to their perspectives. Empowering women and girls to fight for their seat at the table requires training, proactive selection of women in all their diversity for equal representation – and this leads onto your next question
We all know that empowering women within the environmental space will also benefit men! What role does male allyship play within the environmental space in support of gender parity?
While our approach seems binary right now, it is only because it has to be. We have waited for an organic evolution for over 100 years and nothing has happened. We now have to take proactive steps and that is going to start with males making a concerted effort to bring women into leadership teams along the way. This could be by a male recognising that there are not enough women on a team and therefore actively asking that a woman or women join to balance representation. Insisting on co-directors or co-partners on task forces, or even stepping aside for a woman. And this has been done. Research shows that women in climate negotiations are much more successful. It seems foolish to ignore this fact when we are dealing with an existential crisis right now for our planet and for our future. Wouldn't it be nice to get to the point where there is such balance that really we only choose the right person for the job? Nowadays, it is all about who has the same background, network, and basically looks like me. We need to change that default reaction to include more diversity.
Thanks to the campaign, there has already been a shift in the make-up of the COP26 Leadership Team since November 2020 with three women now at director level out of twelve positions. Have there been any updates on whether the COP26 leadership team intend to appoint more women at a senior level?
After our talks with the UK COP26 Leadership Team in early January, we were promised there would be changes. Despite many promises, sadly we have not seen or heard of any intentions. We need to be clear that the government thinks that a 45/55% representation of its team is adequate. However, that figure refers to the entire makeup of the team, with more women at the bottom and only three women at the top (just go to the UK COP26 website and scroll down the team to see this is blatantly obvious). This is not good enough, and we have made that point very clear. In recent weeks we have been heartened to see more women from the COP26 team on social media describing the COP processes, which implies more engagement by women. However, while this begins to fulfil one of our asks, that more women are seen talking about COP – it is still clearly not in the area where women should be providing their perspectives into the framing and narrative of the agenda. We would very much like to see and hear from more women in negotiation positions from the UK COP26 Leadership Team. Despite having offered a list of 30 names, and even outlining very specific creative and tangential solutions to work around the structural hierarchy to incorporate more women at the top, unfortunately this seems to have proven too difficult. To be clear, without women's perspectives, the whole world is going to lose out. This is not a drill.
What's next for SHEChangesClimate?
Our aim is to be an amplifier of all the other great work on gender and environment that is being done out there. We have a unique position in that we are more free to say it as we see it. This is probably why we have been fed a lot of information from different sources - because we have the voice that others need to negotiate more diplomatically. As a messaging instrument, we can keep that going so this does not get conveniently forgotten or pushed aside during all climate negotiations from henceforth. Therefore, we see our role as the tip of a large umbrella action, channelling and highlighting all the great work and research of other organisations pointing to the same message: without equal representation of women at negotiations, it will be an ineffective result.
