Civil society locked out

Changes to the entry arrangements to the UN conference meant I wasn't able to attend the women's caucus or any other events inside the conference centre today. Today and tomorrow, only 7,000 slots are being given to civil society organisations (CSOs). On Thursday, only 1,000 participants from CSOs will be accommodated, and the numbers will be further reduced on Friday as only 90 participants from CSOs will be granted entrance to the Bella Centre.

Gotelind Alber, the focal point of the Women and Gender Constituency expressed our concerns clearly: “This is quite a serious process and civil society is being marginalised. If people had known that they would not access the convention centre, they would have explored other ways to link up with this process. We are also worried for the small organisations that already had difficulty being here. It is likely that they would not be able to get in at all on Thursday and Friday.” This is a particular concern for participants from developing countries, for whom finding the resources to travel here and stay can be a huge challenge.

However, it looks like tomorrow there are enough passes for everyone from GenderCC, who WEN is accredited through, so I should be able to attend. However, there is no chance that I will be able to get into the conference centre on Thursday or Friday, when the numbers are even further limited.

So instead I spent today at Klimaforum, where there were plenty of interesting happenings. A group of feminist dancers, the Latin American Irate Panthers, performed several times during the day, with chants in their routine including "emissions down, women's rights up!" and "there is no climate justice without gender and social justice". Their performance was invigorating, and a great way of drawing attention to the gender issues around climate change which, even in the alternative summit, aren't getting that much attention. You can now see the action for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiR21BuBEck

This afternoon a "political salon" on gender and climate change, held in a participatory way so that anyone could contribute, resulted in some interesting debate, particularly around whether gender mainstreaming within the new agreement documents will be sufficient, or whether more fundamental change is required.

Finally, the winner of the Angry Mermaid Award (see photo above), for the big business which has done the best lobbying to block effective action to tackle climate change while also seeking to benefit from it, was announced. Monsanto came away with the award, for promoting its genetically modified (GM) crops as a solution to climate change and pushing for its crops to be used as biofuels (the expansion of GM soy in Latin America is contributing to major deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions), followed by Shell and the American Petroleum Institute.

Image: jodyecolabs (creative commons)