When former UN Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretary Christiana Figueres spent 20 days on a boat with 80 female scientists in Antarctica in January, she observed more than icebergs, whales and penguins.
She also saw how easily those women gravitated toward a shared purpose of saving the planet.
“It wasn’t about: ‘How do I improve my career, how do I get to the top of my ladder?’ It was: ‘How do I use my skills, my expertise, my knowledge and my practice to contribute to a global issue?’” said the former Costa Rican diplomat, who leads Mission 2020, an international campaign to cut carbon emissions.
Illustration: Mountain People
Figueres spoke to the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of International Women’s Day, which this year had a theme of promoting the role of women in innovation and technology.
While those areas offer “unprecedented opportunities,” women are held back by their under-representation in related professions and a growing digital divide along gender lines, according to UN Women.
Women on the “Homeward Bound” Antarctica expedition — all working in science, technology, engineering, maths or medicine — wanted to make sure their work would help address climate change, Figueres said.
“I do have the feeling that we women tend to be more collaborative, we tend to be more long-term, we tend to be more global in our thinking because of our innate stewardship role ... in society,” she said.
That sentiment is playing out back in her home country, which last month launched an ambitious economy-wide plan to decarbonize the country by 2050, aiming to show other nations what is possible in tackling climate change.
A key figurehead of that vision is Costa Rican first lady Claudia Dobles Camargo, an architect and urban planner who has coordinated many of the country’s “green” public transport initiatives, including an electric train project.
Andrea Meza, climate change director at the Costa Rican Ministry of Environment and Energy, said that women are spearheading her country’s push to produce no more emissions than it can offset through efforts such as protecting its extensive forests.
From the first female chief executive officer of the nation’s electricity utility to the planning minister and agriculture vice-minister, women in top government jobs are collaborating on a clean development vision for Costa Rica, she said.
“We are the ones with voices, and we want to demonstrate that women can lead in this area,” she said.
The same is happening at the local level too, she added, with women in rural communities driving efforts to fight climate change and improve lives.
Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that women are at the heart of that same struggle around the world.
Some of their efforts are gaining wider recognition through the UN Momentum for Change initiative, which recognizes successful climate projects run by and for women.
They range from a campaign to encourage women to cycle on the streets of war-torn Damascus to a “feminist electrification” drive in Haiti, and Indian women making compost from ceremonial flowers while cleaning up the Ganges.
“We must build smarter [and] we must build with the future in mind,” Espinosa said in e-mailed comments.
“Women must not only be a ‘voice at the table,’ but play a key role in planning, designing, building and managing how that infrastructure and those communities are built,” she said.
International Women’s Day this year aimed to explore, among other things, ways to build services and infrastructure to meet the needs of women and girls.
That is already happening at the world’s biggest furnishings retailer IKEA Group, where the typical customer is a woman and about half of top executives are female, said IKEA chief sustainability officer Pia Heidenmark Cook on the sidelines of a forum on climate-wise infrastructure in Barcelona, Spain, last this week.
A survey carried out by the Swedish company of public attitudes to climate change in 14 countries, published last September, showed younger people and women were more concerned and interested in acting on the issue than men, she added.
However, doing so does not require “something new and fancy” — rather it means simply acting to ensure it is safe to breathe the air, drink the water, and be secure and healthy, she said.
Younger women are increasingly aware of the threats global warming poses to those rights — a concern seen in their leadership of school strikes demanding climate action, many inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, observers say.
Kirsten Snow Spalding, programme director for the US-based Ceres Investor Network on Climate Risk and Sustainability, believes they might start to care more about how their money is invested. Her organisation is looking to work with wealth management firms whose prosperous clients include millennials.
“My guess is that there are many more women in that group than there were 20 years ago,” she said.
For some of them, sustainability is likely to be a higher investment priority and could lead them to accept larger risks to achieve it, she said.
For now in the US, there is anecdotal evidence of women stepping up their influence over infrastructure investment at the country’s biggest pension funds, said Snow Spalding, a priest and former chief deputy treasurer of California.
Espinosa said there is a need for more women to become involved to achieve equal participation and leadership in innovation, tech and sustainable infrastructure.
The change “must take place not only at the negotiations table, but in classrooms and communities throughout the world,” she said.
Father’s Day, as celebrated around the world, has its roots in the early 20th century US. In 1910, the state of Washington marked the world’s first official Father’s Day. Later, in 1972, then-US president Richard Nixon signed a proclamation establishing the third Sunday of June as a national holiday honoring fathers. Many countries have since followed suit, adopting the same date. In Taiwan, the celebration takes a different form — both in timing and meaning. Taiwan’s Father’s Day falls on Aug. 8, a date chosen not for historical events, but for the beauty of language. In Mandarin, “eight eight” is pronounced
In a recent essay, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, Christian Whiton, accuses Taiwan of diplomatic incompetence — claiming Taipei failed to reach out to Trump, botched trade negotiations and mishandled its defense posture. Whiton’s narrative overlooks a fundamental truth: Taiwan was never in a position to “win” Trump’s favor in the first place. The playing field was asymmetrical from the outset, dominated by a transactional US president on one side and the looming threat of Chinese coercion on the other. From the outset of his second term, which began in January, Trump reaffirmed his
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
It is difficult to think of an issue that has monopolized political commentary as intensely as the recall movement and the autopsy of the July 26 failures. These commentaries have come from diverse sources within Taiwan and abroad, from local Taiwanese members of the public and academics, foreign academics resident in Taiwan, and overseas Taiwanese working in US universities. There is a lack of consensus that Taiwan’s democracy is either dying in ashes or has become a phoenix rising from the ashes, nurtured into existence by civic groups and rational voters. There are narratives of extreme polarization and an alarming
RSS