Tracy Kajumba is the director for the Least Developed Countries initiative for Effective Adaptation and Resilience (LIFE-AR) interim secretariat and a member of the climate change research group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
I’ve been working on gender equity since I joined the Ugandan civil service over 20 years ago. As a young woman I was never nominated for training even when I was qualified; male counterparts got those opportunities.
I was called a bully for having the guts to apply for a senior management role perceived as a man’s domain. When I reported for my first day, a senior male official offered to change my posting for fear I couldn’t manage the large division I’d been allocated, proposing to transfer me somewhere less busy.
Most professional women will have had experiences like these, which unfortunately are often downplayed or ignored. My stories aren’t from a UN COP climate summit, but they easily could have been. As recently as the past couple of years, women have reported being the targets of very similar prejudice at the UNFCCC’s flagship climate negotiations – in addition to bullying and sexual harassment.
That’s despite 2025 marking 30 years since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on women’s rights was adopted – and the existence of myriad initiatives and schemes designed to improve women’s representation at international events like COP.
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These efforts notwithstanding, it’s clear women are dealing with the same challenges today as I faced two decades ago, and others faced in the decades before I entered the workforce.
At COP29, hosts Azerbaijan had an all-male team of 28 before criticism forced them to add 12 women. Only eight of the 78 world leaders who attended were women.
Overall, women made up little more than a third of COP29 delegates, suggesting there are barriers to their participation not just within the UNFCCC process but at national level around the world.
Recent research by the International Institute for Environment and Development bears this out. We surveyed delegates and other COP attendees – men and women – from the Least Developed Countries group (LDCs) to understand these barriers at a level of detail top-line global statistics just can’t provide.
High costs, low expectations
Travel emerged as a huge issue. Attending COP and its preparatory meetings in Bonn is expensive for low-income countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. With limited travel budgets, senior officials get priority. As a result many women – who are often in junior roles – are excluded or must find funding elsewhere.
This year’s Bonn meetings are just around the corner and observers will be watching closely to see whether talk of improving women’s representation is being translated into action.
The divide also raised the question for our survey respondents about whether they felt their participation at COP was meaningful. They noted that women were more likely to occupy logistical, note-taking or report-writing roles while male counterparts engaged more prominently in negotiations.
COP officially lasts two weeks but preparations and post-summit debriefing add another fortnight to the schedule, so this support work can be onerous. Adding to this challenge are social expectations on women not to stay away from their families for too long.
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Unsurprisingly, deeply entrenched gender norms and patriarchal views still influence the structuring of jobs and power. Women told us they were frequently considered incapable of managing complex negotiations. One male interviewee said he thought women found COP “hectic”, especially in their high heels, which put them off attending future summits.
As a mother of two and a frequent traveller, I know what it’s like to leave young children behind – and to wish you could bring them with you only to realise there’s no support system to enable that. Mothers told us they faced higher travel costs and that accreditation and visas for their babies were difficult to obtain, often being processed in different countries. There are no childcare services at COP.
Time for a COP creche
So what’s to be done? Quotas and other gender-responsive policies are often counted as a metric of success. But if they’re not actually deployed, they don’t work. While many LDCs have policies that support gender equity, we found their implementation at scale appeared to be weak.
There are some bright spots where LDCs are addressing this problem. Rwanda has a gender monitoring office tracking how policies and laws are put into effect. Mozambique is developing criteria to support female participation with experienced women negotiators mentoring up-and-coming officials, while Sierra Leone is creating a transparent nomination process that builds on its national gender and empowerment act, which stipulates 30% female representation.
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It’s important to say these issues affect women globally. IIED supports the LDCs at COP and hosts the interim secretariat for the group’s initiative on climate change adaptation, called LIFE-AR. This partnership enabled our research, which we hope will inform efforts to improve women’s representation worldwide.
Imagine if there was a COP creche where children from around the globe could play and learn about each other, while watching their parents work to secure their future. Simple solutions can coexist with the hard daily grind of challenging power dynamics and patriarchy, while more formal schemes like a mentor system give intentional support to the next generation of negotiators.
COP29 last year was rattled when former leaders declared the negotiations “not fit for purpose” and called for a major rethink. Such large-scale reform will involve painful geopolitical wrangling. There are less complicated changes we can and should implement now that will make UNFCCC summits more relevant and representative for everyone, ensuring COP lives up to the UN’s 2030 goal of “leaving no one behind”.
