By Marc Morano CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer December
06, 2005 Montreal (CNSNews.com) -
The debate over climate change evolved into a battle of
the sexes Monday at the 11th annual United Nations Climate
Change Conference in Montreal. The spokesman for a feminist-based
environmental group accused men of being the biggest contributors
to human-caused "global warming" and lamented that women are
bearing the brunt of the negative climate consequences created
by men.
"Women and men are differently affected by climate change
and they contribute differently to climate change," said Ulrike
Rohr, director of the German-based group called "Genanet-Focal
point gender, Environment, Sustainability." Rohr, who is demanding
"climate gender justice,"
left no doubt as to which gender she believes was the chief
culprit in emitting greenhouse gasses. "To give you an example
from Germany, it is mostly men who are going by car. Women
are going by public transport mostly," Rohr told Cybercast
News Service. Rohr was standing in front of her booth, which
featured a banner calling for "creative gender strategies"
from "rural households to global scientific bodies." "In most
parts of the world, women are contributing less [to greenhouse
gasses]," Rohr continued. But it is the women of the world
who will feel the most heat from catastrophic global warming,
she said. "At least in the developing countries, it is women
who are more affected because they are more vulnerable, so
they don't have access to money to go outside the country
or go somewhere else to earn money and they have to care for
their families," she said. "What we are calling for is to
take into account more of the social aspects of climate change,"
Rohr added.
When Cybercast News Service asked Rohr if men should feel
guilty for allegedly producing negative climate consequences
for women, she responded, "No, they should change. I think
[men do not] have to feel guilty, but it might help to take
these [gender] issues a little bit more into account." A
spokesman for a conservative group attending the conference
mocked the linking of gender to any potential climate change.
"Nature does not discriminate between the sexes. The issue
is absurd on its face," Peyton Knight, the director of
environmental and regulatory affairs at the Washington D.C.,
based conservative group, National Center for Public Policy
Research, told Cybercast News Service .
The National Center takes a skeptical view regarding the
scientific basis behind the theory of catastrophic human caused
climate change. "It's hardly surprising that in the same year
liberals tried to inject race into natural disasters and hurricane
issues that they are now trying to inject gender into global
warming issues," Knight said, referring to the politically
charged racial fallout surrounding the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina in New Orleans. "Feminists must be running out
of arenas in which to stage their issues," he added.
But the United Nations has already begun to take the issue
of "global warming" -- and the roles men and women play in
it -- seriously, according to the "Gender and Climate Change"
website. It is important for the U.N. "to integrate gender
sensitivity into all mechanisms, policies and measures, and
tools and guidelines within the climate debate," according
to the website. "In general, the Climate Change policy process
tends to be driven by a masculine view of the problem and
its solutions," the website explained. The website calls for
"a gender-sensitive criteria" for the Kyoto Protocol and for
"global and national studies on the gender-differentiated
impacts of global climate change, including a focus on gender
differences in capabilities to cope with climate change adaptation,
and mitigation are urgently required." But the U.N.'s attempts
to address gender and climate change have failed to impress
Rohr. She accused the U.N. meeting in Montreal of being male-dominated.
"As I am looking around the negotiations, it is really a male
discussion going around, [discussing] climate change with
a closed view to the people (women) that are being affected,"
she explained. "It's not [a meeting] that will really help
to mitigate climate change," she said. Rohr's exhibition booth
set up at the U.N. conference featured signs questioning,
"How to overcome the nearly uniform domination of men in leadership
structures?" "Women are frequently marginalized in a variety
of ways ... Initiatives addressing adaptation to climate change
require consideration of local customs while ensuring that
all concerns and perspectives are voiced and valued," read
signs at Rohr's booth. More than 8,000 government leaders,
environmentalists and scientists are attending the U.N. Climate
Change Conference. Organizers are calling the conference,
which runs until Dec. 9, the largest meeting since the Kyoto
Climate Conference in 1997.
