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Looking back at 10 years GenderCC - Women for Climate Justice

At the Anniversary, founding member of GenderCC Ulrike Röhr guided the guests through highlights of the past 10 years fighting for gender and climate justice and shared anecdotes. We shortend and translated her speech, to offer you insights into GenderCCs history. "A very warm welcome, also on my behalf. I want to take you on journey to the beginnings of GenderCC and I will concentrate on selected highlights and successes that resulted from our activities in the past years. The first Spotlight is on Bali, in 2007: For the first time in history we managed - thanks to the support of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) – to bring a group of women from all over the world to the climate negotiations (COPS 13), to offer a gender perspective and formulate corresponding positions. An important point of the negotiation was the climate regime – to which we contributed the most important steps from a gender perspective. Those are as relevant as 11 years ago. Other topics we positioned ourselves to were climate finance, forests, agrofuels and nuclear power. The demands were presented at the first press conference on gender and climate and the high level event “Integrating Gender into climate Policy”, organised in cooperation with UNDP, attend, among others by the Minister for Women and the wife of the Prime Minister. In spring 2009 GenderCC and Live e.V. applied for the registration of the Women & Gender Constituency (WGC) at the UN climate secretariat and had been preliminarily accepted by ty the end of the year for COP 15 in Copenhagen. For the following two years we had to prove we would obey the rules and contribute according to our possibilities, e.g. by making statements in plena, conducting lobbying activities and by making our positions visible and spreading them. This was the start of a balancing act between contributing to and critiquing a process and its positions. We, for active organisations at the time, successfully managed two years of provisional admission. (…) I am jumping to the presence: Today, 28 Women and Gender organisations form the WGC, many of which are networks, bringing representatives of other organisations to the conferences. Successes got more frequent and more significant: While we didn`t really know what to make out of the rather weak “Gender Decision” at COP 18 in Doha (2012), the WGC manged to shape the “Gender and Work Program” that has been decided upon at the COP 20 in Lima (2014). For now, the most recent highlight is the “Gender Action Plan” from COP 23 in Bonn (2017). Parallel to participating in the conferences, GenderCC organised and coordinated projects, that have been carried out our partners in their respective home countries: in South Africa, in Bangladesh and the pacific islands, in Indonesia, in India and soon in Mexico. (…) The first project GenderCC carried out in Germany together with the University of Bremen, “GenderNetCLIM”, was successful in conveying our messages. Our tedious efforts in politics and environmental NGOs did bear fruit and lead to a research project on gender and climate developed by the Federal Environmental Agency, we are involved in, as cooperation with two other organisations. (…)"