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At this month’s 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16), civil society groups are pushing for countries to recognize the connection between women and the Earth’s biodiversity.
From women’s groups to Indigenous Peoples, working side by side with youth-led movements, these advocates are calling for gender rights to be enshrined in the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), agreed at COP15 in 2022.
That means addressing gender from a cross-cutting point of view that goes beyond Target 23 of the GBF, which states that parties need to “ensure gender equality and a gender-responsive approach for biodiversity action.”
But how are gender and biodiversity connected? How much progress are we seeing on the issue, and what are the challenges in implementing what was agreed two years ago?
Women’s role in conserving biodiversity is deeply rooted in Indigenous cosmology across the Americas, which underpins the demands of women’s organizations at COP16.
“It is necessary to protect women because Mother Earth is a woman, and when a woman is violated, Mother Earth is also violated,” says Carmen Cocoa, women’s coordinator at the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Colombia (OPIAC).
Cocoa also emphasizes the importance of women as guardians of spiritual wisdom and connection to the Earth through medicinal plants, rituals and as knowledge bearers in their communities.
OPIAC represents more than 4,000 Indigenous communities throughout Colombia, and more than half of the Indigenous people connected with the organization are women.
For Cocoa, Colombia’s hosting of COP16 offers an opportunity to reinforce the importance of women and Indigenous Peoples.
“We want people to recognize this ancient knowledge that women bear – and that we are these bearers,” explains Cocoa, who lives in the Putumayo Department in southwestern Colombia.
“This COP is very important so that people know we exist.”
As COP16 host, the Colombian government has brought many leaders of traditional communities to the event, including many from along the country’s Pacific coast, which is home to a large Afro-descendant population.
One of them is Derly Riascos, co-founder of Afromujer, an organization based in López de Micay, a conflict-affected town of 20,000 people in the Cauca Department, also in the country’s southwest.
López de Micay is only about 100 kilometers from Cali, the host city of COP16. But to get there, Riascos had to travel for more than 15 hours across multiple rivers and along winding roads.
This isolation makes the community particularly vulnerable to violence and armed conflict, and this vulnerability grew as the illegal gold mining industry expanded.
Mining has caused widespread environmental destruction, including deforestation and pollution to the Micay river, which is crucial for the survival and mobility of its population, as well as food insecurity.
So, its women decided to unite to bring back their ancestral practices.
“Our only alternative was rescuing plants that we identified with. So, we build food security in this mining context,” Riascos recalls.
In 2019, she and a group of local women co-founded Afromujer, which now has 11 members and is seeking to expand. The organization cultivates and industrializes plantain and produces plantain flour that it sells locally.
Riascos points out that women are rescuing the abundance that López de Micay once had before mining took hold.
“We want to seed these plants because it also gives us this gender empowerment,” she summarizes.
It’s her first time at a UN Biodiversity Conference. “Being here is an opportunity to get closer to this institutional space and to present my territory.”
“I want to go back to my community with more than just beautiful pins on my backpack, but with hope to my partners,” Riascos reflects.
Given this leading role that women play in conservation and restoration, women’s groups have come to COP16 with a clear statement: they want gender-responsive measures.
The Women’s Caucus is the official women’s group under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), gathering more than 600 members from over 100 countries.
The caucus is a self-organized global coalition of individuals, community-based organizations and civil society organizations advocating for and contributing to the implementation of the CBD in a gender-responsive manner.
The caucus’ main demands at COP16 are:
Edda Fernandez, a leading member of the caucus from Mexico, says its main goal is to include the Gender Plan of Action in gender discussions.
She says the discussions at COP16 can serve as guidelines for countries to develop their own measures to conserve biodiversity and guarantee women’s rights.
“Many people criticize the fact that the decisions made here aren’t binding, but they are binding because national public policies are designed based on international treaties,” she says.
But Fernandez recognizes the challenges of designing those policies, which is why she emphasizes the need for women to play leading political roles at the national level.
Both prior to and during COP16, youth, gender and Indigenous advocacy groups have worked together to pursue common goals.
Feby Nur Evitasari, a youth Thai activist, explains that this partnership often focuses on shared targets such as securing access to natural resources, protecting land rights and preserving cultural practices linked to biodiversity.
Evitasari is the focal point on gender for the Global Youth Biodiversity Network (GYBN), a network recognized and supported by the CBD that includes more than 340 youth-led organizations in 145 countries.
She emphasizes the need for more inclusive national plans – the documents each party will create after the negotiations to implement what is agreed.
“Overall, many national plans currently do not adequately address gender inequality in biodiversity governance,” she says.
“They frequently lack comprehensive integration of gender considerations and often exclude women and marginalized groups from decision making and implementation.”
“A holistic approach is necessary to incorporate gender at every stage of the policy process,” she says.
For Evitasari, it’s also important to underline the connection between children, girls and young women, and the conservation of biodiversity.
“Empowering girls and women is vital not just for equity but also for enhancing the effectiveness of conservation strategies, as they often hold the key to sustainable practices within their communities,” she explains.
In Brazil, a group of young people saw the need to create a new organization to join the dots between gender, biodiversity and the climate crisis.
Eight people – five women and three men – launched the Brazilian Biodiversity and Climate Network (RBBC) during COP16.
Its vice president, Larissa Silvestri, points to the need to act on the gender agenda in Brazil.
“We still don’t have a Brazilian gender focal point under the CBD”, she says.
The network will focus on advocacy, policy work with other institutions and the Brazilian government, and offering training to young people to make their voices heard at biodiversity-related debates.
Silvestri also indicates the need to connect discussions on biodiversity, climate, gender and young people.
“It’s important that people understand that if you harm the environment, you will trigger extreme climate events,” she says.
The discussions on gender and biodiversity poses another challenge. Gender is often discussed in binary terms, but how can we make biodiversity policy inclusive to people from across the gender spectrum?
Jarê Aikyry is a 25-year-old Indigenous transgender young leader. He works as director of Engajamundo, a Brazilian youth environmental organization, and coordinator of Miriã Mahsã, a collective of LGBTQIA+ Indigenous Peoples from the Brazilian state Amazonas.
Aikyry points out that trans people are among the most vulnerable to the climate crisis, while the climate and biodiversity crises are also closely connected.
“The UN frames the gender agenda from the perspective of women’s bodies,” he says.
“Most of the women in the debates have been white women. But for bodies that don’t fit that mold, the discussion hasn’t happened yet.”
He says it’s still a major challenge to bring this discussion not only during negotiations, but also at side events.
For example, Aikyry attended last year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, U.A.E. – a country that does not recognize trans people. Engajamundo had to take special measures to protect him from harm or even prison.
Nevertheless, he has seen improvements within the climate and biodiversity movements, and he makes sure to attend these conferences to make a powerful statement.
“Like women, we have always been connected to the defense of the territory and the preservation of our culture,” says Aikyry.
“We understand that our bodies are also part of nature, as they are as fluid as nature itself. We are in this process of transition, just like nature, and we see this constant process of change reflected in our bodies.”
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