Minister for Women's Statement for CSW66 Ministerial Roundtable

Minister for Women Jan Tinetti delivered a pre-recorded statement at CSW66 in New York yesterday in a high-level roundtable discussion on the topic You can find more information on CSW66 here.

"E aku rangatira, tēnā koutou katoa, ka nui te honore, ki te mihi, ki a koutou.

[Translation: distinguished colleagues, it is my honour to greet you all]

Chair, esteemed colleagues, I am honoured and delighted to be addressing this discussion today.

Aotearoa New Zealand is committed to ensuring that women and girls are empowered to meaningfully participate in decision-making on climate change, environmental and disaster risk-reduction, at every level.

In particular, it is imperative that women who experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, including indigenous women, are represented and that their valuable perspective is heard. These women are some of those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and disasters, but they are also powerful agents of action, change and resilience.

An important mechanism to ensure this, involves working to mainstream gender analysis across all areas of government and decision-making. Aotearoa New Zealand is increasingly applying gender analysis and intersectional analysis to all government actions and decision-making, including action on climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction. One way that we in Aotearoa New Zealand are supporting this work is through promoting the use of an online tool, which guides users to apply gender analysis to the policy development process. It is publicly available on the Ministry for Women website and we welcome others to make to use of it.

We encourage all actors to ensure that gender is integrated in their decision-making processes and climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes. As an international community we all need to work together, including with civil society, towards achieving the goals set in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action and the 2030 Agenda.

This process of mainstreaming gender analysis has the related side-effect of exposing gaps and shortcomings in data collection. Gender-disaggregated data is vital to ensuring visibility of the gendered impacts of climate change and natural hazards, and tailoring our responses accordingly. This is why New Zealand has incorporated tangata whenua (indigenous) and gender perspectives in the National Disaster Resilience Strategy and is committed to reducing vulnerability to disasters for all in our communities.

Aotearoa New Zealand is also focusing on enabling an equitable climate transition to a low carbon economy. This includes consideration of outcomes for different groups in how we fund and finance our climate change policies and programmes. We have established a new fund that ring-fences funding for investment in climate action that demonstrates fair, inclusive and equitable outcomes for these groups. This facilitates the development and funding of programmes which target climate-action and equitable transition initiatives related to women and gender-diverse people.

I look forward to hearing more about the many initiatives that others present are undertaking.

No reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa.

[Translation: Therefore, Greetings, Greetings, Greetings to everyone]

Thank you all."