Today marks the start of the COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Members of the WEDO team have joined our allies and partners in the Women and Gender Constituency on the ground to deliver a broad advocacy agenda and set of feminist demands.

We have spent the last several months — and years;

1. driving up ambition for a strong outcome on gender equality as Parties negotiate the next iteration of the Convention’s gender work program;
2. demanding a needs-based, grant-based public financing goal under the NCQG that meets the urgent needs of developing countries to mitigate, adapt and respond to loss and damage;
3. urging Parties to use the mandated ratcheting up of ambition on NDCs over the coming months and years to center an inclusive and participatory process for building these plans; and
4. fighting for human rights protections across all decisions of the negotiations, including those around precarious carbon markets.

We start this COP in the wake of the election results here in the United States, where we are headquartered. The rising threats we all face — to our communities, our bodies, our planet — stand in stark clarity. In recent years, we have watched the U.S. remain the world’s largest oil producer and fail to alter its course as the largest contributor to the climate crisis. We have watched the U.S. government fund violence and genocide. We have watched politicians and the courts erode bodily autonomy rights, civil rights, labor rights, Indigenous Peoples rights, and environmental protection. We have watched the climate crisis unfold in disasters and inequitable impacts around the world, and seen the U.S. continually fail to pay up for the problem it has disproportionately caused. We know that a second Trump presidency is likely to worsen all of these trends, significantly and irreversibly.

As feminists in community, coalition, and deep solidarity with those impacted globally by U.S. policy, we know that the triumph of anti-rights forces represented by/inherent in Trump’s win means we must be ever more creative, strategic, powerful and caring in our resistance. We must hold the line on defending the hard-won rights fought for by human rights activists, and we must protect the land, water, reproductive justice and women’s rights defenders on the frontlines of struggle and state violence. 

We must and will care for each other fiercely.

We heed the leadership of feminists past and present who charted the way, fighting for transformation towards a better world.

In solidarity,

Bridget Burns,

Executive Director at WEDO