Women in leadership are needed to fight climate change - The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on March 17, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast:
March is Women’s History Month, a celebration of women’s contribution to history, culture and society. Former Irish President Mary Robinson, current Chair of The Elders, has been at the forefront of the fight for gender equality, especially when it comes to the climate crisis. Today she joins The Excerpt to talk about why women need to lead the next phase of the climate justice movement to ensure a livable world in the future.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more Paste BN podcasts right here
Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, March 17th, 2024.
March is Women's History Month, a time to highlight and celebrate women's contributions to history, culture, and society. The National Women's History Alliance has designated this year's theme as women who advocate for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Former Irish President Mary Robinson, current chair of the elders has been at the forefront of the fight for gender equality, especially when it comes to the climate crisis.
Today she joins The Excerpt to talk about why women need to lead the next phase of the climate justice movement to ensure a livable world in the future. Thanks for joining us, Mary.
Mary Robinson:
Not at all Taylor. Nice to be here.
Dana Taylor:
You've said having more women in politics is crucial to the fight against climate change. Why is that?
Mary Robinson:
Because we do need different perspectives. We need the importance of diversity in decision-making. And frankly, if you look around our world today, which is pretty male dominated, look at the series of crises we have and look how poorly we're dealing with the existential threats which the elders have identified, the climate and nature crisis, the nuclear weapons crisis, and even the pandemic crisis. We didn't learn from Covid. It's because we don't have that balance of practical problem solving action that women bring to the table.
Dana Taylor:
How are women in leadership roles changing the way the climate justice battle is being waged?
Mary Robinson:
The experience of women exercising power has been that they tend to think more about those they serve. They tend to be more practical. They tend to be better on health, better on education. And during Covid, women-led countries managed better because they listened to the science, the medical science. They took the decisions, tough decisions when they needed to be taken, and there's been quite a lot written about that, that women actually performed better.
Dana Taylor:
At the Women Deliver Conference last year you said that the climate crisis was born out of patriarchal ideas. How so?
Mary Robinson:
For too long, the whole discussion of climate change wasn't about people at all. It was about science, which allowed a lot of disinformation and muddying the science. And we should have been more focused on who was causing the problem of heating the planet, global warming as we call it, and who was being most affected. I must admit that I was late enough coming to this myself. When I was president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, I spoke about the environment, but I didn't mention climate change because it wasn't affecting Ireland. And then I became UN high Commissioner for Human rights in 1997, and I did learn about the dangers of climate change, but another part of the UN was dealing with it, and I didn't see its relevance to my portfolio of human rights, gender equality, rights of people with disabilities, rights of indigenous peoples. I admit I missed it. I.
T was when I started a small NGO organization called Realizing Rights working in African countries, and I was already president of Oxfam International. And my eyes were opened in 2003, 2004. The reality was already affecting women, in particular in African countries that I was encountering. And they were even saying, "Is God punishing us? What's happening? The rainy seasons aren't coming. The drought goes on forever. We've had flooding, but we never had it...". All of these shocks were affecting them. So the injustice of climate change is something I really understood, which is why I believe a women-led movement now of climate justice is extremely important.
Dana Taylor:
So how can men who are involved in this fight best support the women leading it? What do you recommend here?
Mary Robinson:
Well, I think more and more men do describe themselves as feminists, and I'm glad they do because the feminist values are very important to our world. They are values of non-hierarchical, every voice should be heard, listening respectfully, understanding that people have different views and should be afforded the opportunity to express those views. And this is all really important in resolving the key problems that we have at our world today.
Dana Taylor:
You're part of a new collective called the Planetary Guardians. It was formed last year. What's the mission here and what does your role look like?
Mary Robinson:
Well, actually I spent two hours, from 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM this morning with all my fellow planetary guardians. It's a wonderful group. And we're trying to prioritize the planetary health. There are nine planetary boundaries, so it goes much beyond the climate change we talk about rather narrowly. It talks about nature, it talks about fresh water. It talks about all the things we put up into the air that are affecting us.
And one of the boundaries we've been successful in, and that is the ozone layer. Do you remember how worried we were about being fried and by the opening of the ozone layer a few decades ago. And we actually have managed to resolve that one. But for the other nine, we are beginning to be in a danger zone in six of them. So it tells us that we do need a planetary approach now to both climate and nature, to understand how dependent we are on nature.
We are nature, we are part of nature. The indigenous peoples have always reminded us of that, and I think we have to really feel it now. And we're endangering the life systems that sustain us, and it's as critical as that. That's why it's not just a political issue, it's an issue for everyone, and in particular, I believe for women because we nurture future generations and we care a great deal. I'm not saying men don't care either about their children and grandchildren, of course most of them do, but I think it's a particular aspect of the way women think. They do think about the future for their children and grandchildren.
Dana Taylor:
As I mentioned, you're also the chair of the Elders, an independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela. How is this impressive group of leaders engaging the climate justice movement?
Mary Robinson:
Well, actually, the Elders issued an open letter recently, which 150 other former leaders, and scientists, and academics joined us in. And we called for what we call long view leadership to deal with the problems in our world, the climate and nature crisis, but also the nuclear weapons crisis, and how to prepare well for a future pandemic. And what is the impact of AI on all three of those potential existential threats?
So what is long view leadership? It's leadership that wants to solve problems, resolve issues, not just try and manage them in some way. It's also leadership that's true to the science and the evidence, based on the right data, very much seeing the reality and not short term populism. And thirdly, it has the humility to listen to different voices, particularly the voices of those most affected.
Dana Taylor:
For many years now you've spoken about how the climate crisis is disproportionately affecting women. You've touched on this, but I wonder if you can walk us through more of that.
Mary Robinson:
It's absolutely unquestionable that women are more affected. They have different social roles in society. Take for example, in developing countries, a lot of the agriculture is by women. I mean 70% in Africa, of the farming is by women, but they don't own the land, most of them. They don't get agricultural training, they don't get grants. There are so many barriers. And then there are barriers to getting credit in so many different ways.
And then very, very little of the climate finance, I think it's something like 0.2% goes to women who are working on the ground to make the communities resilient. This should be a very large focus because the way women are working in communities is very often networking with other women, and having mini credit, doing all kinds of things to face the climate shocks which they've been having now for decades that are getting worse. And they're building resilience because they know their communities and yet they're not getting the support.
Somehow we always want mega projects and big things to try to support, some of which can be quite damaging. Even clean energy if it's the wrong way, if it's a mega dam or a mega solar project that takes land from indigenous peoples and doesn't provide any power to them, which happened in Kenya, for example, these are the problems that can be faced.
Dana Taylor:
Okay. I'd like to pivot to some solutions now. You've said that we're on the cusp of a clean energy world. Mary, where are you drawing your optimism?
Mary Robinson:
Well, I'm very passionate about this and I really believe it. We are on the cusp of a renewable energy, healthier, fairer, safer world, a wonderful world for developing countries because everybody will have access to electricity. The 600 million in Africa that never switched the switch or the 900 million women who cook, are dirty cooking. All of that should be dealt with very rapidly as part of this world that we're moving towards. And we are moving, we're moving more rapidly, but not nearly fast enough for the science. And of course, climate justice is always true to the science.
And what we have to do is switch the money. And I've learned from my participation in a B team of business leaders who are top CEOs of major companies like IKEA and many other companies. And they use a figure which is quite shocking, that we spend $1.8 trillion every year on what is harming us, subsidies to fossil fuel companies, tax breaks to fossil fuel, all kinds of things, investment treaties that give compensation to fossil fuel if governments decide to try and protect their people from climate shocks. I mean, it's madness, but it's the reality.
Dana Taylor:
What do you see as the biggest obstacles to our reaching the climate goals set by the UN?
Mary Robinson:
I think we need to recognize our power together, and this is what Dandelion, the Dandelion project... I wear the dandelion pin. It's using a nature-based icon, the dandelion, to bring together all of those who are moving in the right direction so we know our power. If we know our power, governments will have more confidence that they need to move more rapidly in their policies and they need to remove subsidies for fossil fuel. We need to transition out of fossil fuel as COP 28 said, very rapidly. And we shouldn't be listening to fossil fuel lobbies, which have always misrepresented the science, which know that fossil fuels have been harming us over the decades. And we have to have the courage now to really move forward.
Dana Taylor:
There's been a lot of discussion internationally in recent years about having richer polluting countries contribute more monies to poor countries so that they can adapt to radically different climates, more severe storms, et cetera. What are your thoughts there?
Mary Robinson:
Yeah, that's a very key issue. I only wish I was the special envoy of the UN Secretary General at the Paris Agreement in 2015. Immediately that agreement was signed. We should have been on the case of developing countries 100%. It took until Glasgow COP 26 to have the first real breakthrough of the JETP, the appropriate way of dealing with developing countries.
If you move out of coal, you've got to help the communities that were dependent on coal, and that means re-skilling, putting different industry into an area, all kinds of things that cost. So they have to be grant supported. We're learning. During COP 27 in Bali, Indonesia got a big grant to help them. Vietnam is now being helped. Senegal is now being helped, but we should have been doing this immediately after Paris. And we should be doing it far more by switching away from subsidizing for fossil fuel. If we're not short of money, the money's just been spent the wrong way.
Dana Taylor:
Our audience includes a lot of younger people, a generation that was simply born into this crisis, and all too often the messages they hear about the climate crisis are doom and gloom, that it's too late, that there's not enough political will.
Mary Robinson:
I agree. And they suffer from a kind of echo anxiety. There's a word for it now. I speak a lot to young people because we do a lot of intergenerational conversation. And quite honestly, the elders are very often inspired by what young people are doing. But I also pick up that they're really in despair about the lack of leadership at the political level. And they're right.
I mean, I describe myself now as an angry granny at times. I'm an angry granny because I don't see the crisis mentality of political leaders, and they need to be in crisis mode because the climate and nature crisis is a crisis, but it's a solvable crisis, as I keep saying. It's about switching the money. It's as simple as that. But actually, if we switch the money, we can change so rapidly. And young people should be and are increasingly demanding that we secure their future, which they're perfectly right about.
Dana Taylor:
Thank you for our wonderful conversation and for being on The Excerpt Mary.
Mary Robinson:
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty.
Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcast@usatoday.com.
Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson Will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.