LONDON: Britain’s Queen Elizabeth said she was irritated by world leaders who talk about climate change but do nothing to address global warming.
She added it was still unclear who would turn up at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
The queen’s rare public foray into big power climate politics came as worries grew that Chinese President Xi Jinping, leader of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, would not attend the Oct. 31-Nov. 12 summit.
Western leaders such as US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have repeatedly warned that the world must change to slow climate change, but many environmental activists say leaders talk too much and do too little.
The queen, who is due to attend the 26th United Nations climate change conference, COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland, appeared to agree in a conversation that was picked up by a microphone while visiting the Welsh assembly in Cardiff.
“Extraordinary isn’t it. I’ve been hearing all about COP,” the 95-year-old monarch told Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, the wife of her son, Charles, Prince of Wales, and the presiding officer of the Welsh assembly. “Still don’t know who is coming.”
“We only know about people who are not coming... It’s really irritating when they talk, but they don’t do,” Elizabeth said.
She became the third member of the royal family to accuse world leaders of inaction this week, with both Charles and his son William saying COP needed to produce action, not words.
Johnson, as host of the summit, has cast the summit as one of the last major chances to cool down the planet, and had hoped it would showcase his attempt at global leadership.
World leaders, he has said, need to come up with deeds, not just “hot air.”
Biden and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison will attend the summit. The Kremlin has not yet said whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has said he aims to attend COP26 remotely, though he has called an election for Oct. 31. The Times newspaper has reported that Johnson was told that China’s Xi would not attend in person.
Xi, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, has not left the People’s Republic since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, though he has joined video calls with global leaders.
Xi’s absence from discussions — either in person or via video calls — would mark a setback for Johnson’s hopes of getting world leaders to agree a significant climate deal.
On a trip to a school in Bristol, southwest England, Johnson told baffled schoolchildren: “I promise to get world leaders to cut greenhouse gases and save the planet.”
He later held up a signed, leaf-shaped piece of paper on which he had written his pledge.
Don’t just talk — act on climate, Queen Elizabeth signals to world leaders
https://arab.news/2k3zy
Don’t just talk — act on climate, Queen Elizabeth signals to world leaders
- The queen's rare public foray into big power climate politics came as worries grew that Chinese President Xi Jinping would not attend the Oct. 31-Nov. 12 summit
- Western leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have repeatedly warned that the world must change to slow climate change
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
