When college graduate Mona Kumari came across a pamphlet circulating in her neighbourhood about a government-sponsored solar training course, she quickly signed up, hopeful of finding work easily at the many solar parks dotting her home state of Rajasthan in northwestern India.
“I had heard about the solar boom, that solar was this big industry and that there would be many opportunities. I joined the course for that reason. I wanted to financially support my family,” the 23-year-old said ahead of the COP29 UN climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.
She lived her dream during the three-month course, which is being offered across more than 500 centres in the South Asian nation to feed an ever-growing demand for green skills.
“I loved the training. I learned how to install solar panels, where to place them – not in the shade but where the sun’s rays fall on them – how to connect the wires. I was even taken to a project site for installations during the training,” said Kumari, whose father works as a labourer in the local market and is the only earning member in her family of seven. “I was looking forward to starting work.”
But her parents did not allow her to take up work in the distant, remote places where solar projects are located without transport and washrooms. This constitutes a societal roadblock women face in joining India’s green energy workforce, according to officials overseeing India’s skilling programmes.
About 2,700 km away in Baku, Azerbaijan, which is hosting COP29, campaigners this week expressed despair over gender getting overlooked at the summit.
Negotiators have struggled to get agreement on renewing a programme to advance gender-responsive climate policies, as socially conservative countries stood in the way. Activists feared this would derail action to plug gender gaps like those already emerging in the green workforce as countries like India build their clean energy capacity.
The outside of the COP29 venue in Baku, Azerbaijan (Photo: Climate Home / Megan Rowling)
Green job roles not yet gendered
India is aiming for net-zero emissions by 2070 and a total shift to clean energy by 2050 – and has the potential to create 35 million green jobs by 2047, according to a government report on India’s green skills landscape.
But men make up 85% of all candidates who have undergone green skills training, data from the Skill Council for Green Jobs shows. Globally, women make up 32% of the clean energy workforce, according to a 2019 gender report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). In India, this figure stands at just 11%.
“In this green transition, job roles are not (yet) culturally determined as feminine or masculine and it is a great opportunity to bring both men and women at the same level,” said Lorena Aguilar, a gender expert who leads the Kaschak Institute for Social Justice for Women and Girls and has developed strategies and action plans to mainstream gender in U.N. initiatives.
About two-thirds of the nearly 14 million jobs globally in the renewable energy sector are in Asia, according to an International Renewable Agency annual review last year, with solar the fastest-growing sector.
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While solar has thrown up jobs for technicians and helpers post-installation, these roles require schooling up to twelfth and ninth grade respectively, which many girls don’t have in rural India.
“Many of them drop out of school to help in agriculture,” said Arpit Sharma, who heads India’s Skill Council for Green Jobs, which was launched by the Indian government less than a decade ago and acts as the interface between industry and candidates it trains for the green sector.
Sharma said reluctance among families to send their daughters to a “male-dominated site” and not having toilets at projects were key reasons for low numbers of women.
“Women are able to do this work, but the conditions are not conducive. We are speaking to industry about creating at least washrooms on site, and training centres to induct more women,” said Sharma, adding that his expectation from COP29 was for the industry to come forward with finance for green skills training.
Greater focus on and funding of green skills will need to be accompanied with more dialogue on women’s participation at this global climate summit to help overcome mindset barriers, analysts said.
More women at top level, fewer on the ground
In India, coordinators at centres offering green skills training said they tell women applicants that these jobs are in remote locations and may not be ideal for them, which has led to very few signing up for the programmes.
This despite initiatives that have garnered global attention over the years. At COP29, speakers have cited the barefoot engineers case study of women spearheading solar panel installations and maintenance in a Rajasthan village for years and training other women to do so. And in India’s electric vehicle sector, women dominate shop-floors.
“More women are taking up climate and environmental sciences for their higher studies. In discussions on climate issues, I see a roomful of women. They are developers, are in think-tanks and in research,” said Vibhuti Garg, director for South Asia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), who was at COP29 last week.
At the ground level, however, for women from some of India’s most marginalised communities, opportunities for learning and skilling are not always accessible.
“Creating a workforce from the community should be the goal. Industry needs to train students from the beginning. This would plug [the] demand-supply gap in skills. But that level of planning is not happening,” said Santosh Patnaik of Climate Action Network South Asia, adding that discussions at COP29 must focus on the needs of communities.
Green skills lag growing demand
A new LinkedIn report shows that by 2030, nearly one in five jobs requiring green skills could lack green talent to fill them, ballooning to one in two jobs by 2050 – a talking point at the ongoing COP29.
At multiple sessions on the demand-supply gap in green skills at the summit, industry leaders spoke of creating awareness and interest among young people for these jobs, through things like reality TV shows, and how a green future could see considerable labour workforce migration to plus these gaps.
“The demand for green skills is growing at twice the rate as supply. There is an intense competition for green skills… the intensity of competition will only grow,” said Allen Blue, co-founder of LinkedIn, speaking at a panel discussion on green skills in Baku last week.
LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue (centre) at a panel discussion on green skills at the Baku Olympic Stadium, the COP29 venue in Baku Azerbaijan, November 15, 2024. (Photo: Roli Srivastava)
“Solar for She” push
This year, India launched a massive decentralised rooftop solar project, with the aim of providing free electricity to 10 million households nationwide to improve energy access, build renewable capacity and create jobs. Vendors have been enlisted from across the country to train youth to install solar panels.
While large solar projects don’t create jobs at scale for both men or women, decentralised projects such as this can, said Ajay Mathur, director general of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), speaking at COP29, adding that past experiences have shown that women make for a better solar workforce.
“The industry realises that. Women stick to jobs. But preliminary numbers, by far and large, do not reflect that,” he said, adding that the ISA has a “Solar for She” initiative to bring in more women into solar globally.
Back in India, the rooftop solar installation work is underway, with youth being enlisted for a 15-day training course to carry out the work, in and around their villages, a perfect opportunity for skilled women seeking solar work not too far from their homes.
But two on-the-ground coordinators of the training told Climate Home they were taking men as there was use of heavy machinery, as well as lifting and installation of panels on rooftops – tasks they believed were difficult for women.
In Rajasthan, Kumari said she hadn’t heard of the rooftop solar project. “I can work all hours, I have no difficulty lifting heavy weights. I have done this. I know this work,” she said.
This article was produced as part of the COP29 Cross-Border Energy Transition Reporting Fellowship, a programme organised by Clean Energy Wire and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security.
The post Weak gender focus at COP29 risks leaving women behind in greener future appeared first on Climate Home News.
Weak gender focus at COP29 risks leaving women behind in greener future
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.
Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears.