Article

Climate

Comment

Politics

22 September 2024

5 min read

Climate meets politics at UN summits, so who will save us?

It's that time of year when commitments to change are sought. Is there a different way to power the energy transition?

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A fallen statute with tyre tracks over it lies on the steps to a government building, in a form of protest.

Climate protest, Berlin.

Nico Roicke on Unsplash.

We’re coming up to a tipping point: the autumn equinox, when the balance of light and dark shifts. For some, this season change still carries the possibility of September – new term, fresh notebook; for others, myself included, there’s more a feeling of ‘here we go again’ with the nights closing in and the hurtle to the end of another year.

On the global scale, it also kicks off the pattern of international summits and negotiations to drive progress on making this world, our world, a bit fairer, safer, and more hopeful. World leaders gather in New York for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly; then it won’t be long until the next UN Climate Summit (COP29) in Baku, swiftly followed by discussions in Busan to create a new UN Treaty to end plastic pollution. Perhaps that draws another sigh; here we go again.

But there’s something new this time on the agenda in New York: the UN’s Summit of the Future on 22-23 September. It is being touted as a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to forge a better way forward. Will this be the moment that saves not just us, but future generations and the natural world too?

A few years ago, I was involved in organising an event that brought together experts in sustainable development from science, government and civil society. To get the conversation going, we wrote this question on a flipchart: What will save us over the next decade? We asked people to cast their vote with a sticker, giving them just three options: government; society; technology.

As people gathered around, we noticed a general pattern emerging:

the scientists voted for government
the civil servants voted for society
people from civil society voted for technology

There seemed to be subtext to all this:

‘Who will save us?

Not me.’

I wonder if in that moment, the people voting – knowledgeable and connected, experts in their industries – were feeling the limits of their power.

When we brush up against our own limitations, it can be tempting to look elsewhere for reassurance. I find hope in a too-little-known story of change, a kind of David and Goliath story , that cuts across government, society and technology. A story that has seen leaders held to account, voices heard and literally billions of dollars shifted out of fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence.

People said it was impossible, because no one had ever done it before. For decades, the UK and other wealthy nations provided billions in taxpayers’ money for fossil fuel projects in other countries around the world. People’s taxes were spent on a gas plant in Mozambique, oil fields in Brazil, thereby fuelling the climate crisis and risking locking low-income countries into using fossil fuels for decades to come instead of investing in the clean energy transition.

This is a transition that has begun. In most places around the world, solar and wind are cheaper and more easily accessible than oil, gas or coal. Power is transformational; it fuels homes, schools and hospitals, it unlocks jobs, education and healthcare. And it’s getting to the point where there’s little reason it can’t be renewable.

With the technology getting there, it became time for the political will to shift too. So, a few years ago, a small group of campaigners came together to push for an end to this funding in the UK. They built relationships with MPs and civil servants, they got the media interested in this fairly niche issue, and they worked with the communities affected by UK-funded projects, coming with a straight-forward message that got to the heart of the injustice: stop funding fossil fuels overseas.

And it worked. In December 2020, the UK announced an end to all taxpayer support for overseas fossil fuel projects, the first high-income country to do this. But not the last. In the run up to the 2021 UN Climate Summit, campaigners and civil servants worked to get 38 more countries and large banks to make the same commitment to end funding for fossil fuels and shift it into renewable energy projects. With Norway and Australia joining at COP28 last year, that group now numbers 41, and represents over $28 billion a year that could be shifted from fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It’s not been plain sailing, and it’s not fully in the bag. For a few years, I got work alongside the incredible advocates at the frontline of this work. A few weeks ago, some of them published a new report which found good progress on the fossil fuels part of the pledge but much more work needed from governments on getting that money into the renewable energy projects that could be transformative for the 685 million people who currently don’t have access to electricity.

This story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years.

One of the hot topics at the Summit for the Future, is whether the leaders can agree to transition away from fossil fuels in a new ‘Pact for the Future’, echoing language that was fought for, weakened, then mostly put back into the final commitment made at COP28 last year. (This counts as a high stakes drama in the climate policy world). It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence. For nearly 80 years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been protecting people – or showing the gap when their rights are being violated.

And really, this isn’t just about words, it’s about power.

Part of the problem with our question on that flipchart was that it divorced people and opportunities, rather than bringing them together. The best way of driving change is to build collective power, holding each other and our decision-makers to account.

Perhaps thinking of the future brings more fear than hope. But this story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years. And lived out with God. This is a partnership that he invites us into: to join in his work of seeing a world full of potential being nurtured and restored. We might not see the whole change we hope for, but sometimes we’ll get to see the scales tip.

The energy transition has begun – but it’ll take the collective influence of a movement of people to ensure that it’s fast, fair and serves those who need it most. With a big gap remaining between the finance needed and the finance pledged, all eyes are on this year's COP29 in Baku to see tangible progress.

Here we go again.

Article

Comment

Football

Justice

29 July 2025

5 min read

The 50-year injustice at the heart of women’s football

Now we need to do these two things to put right decades of disparity

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A victorious women's football team celeberate.

It came home.

The Football Association.

I don’t normally like men’s international football. I spend all season wishing Bukayo Saka and Jordan Pickford nothing but misfortune and now, suddenly, I’m expected to cheer them on? Not for me, thanks. I’ll stick to revelling in scouse Schadenfreude when football, inevitably, does not come home.

By contrast, I find the Lionesses much easier to support. That’s probably because, to my shame, I don’t really follow the Women’s Super League as much as I should. I don’t watch them with any petty grudges lingering in my mind. It does mean, however, that I can happily join the 12.2 million other people tuning in to watch Chloe Kelly hop, skip, and volley England to another European Championship.

It also helps that they seem to keep winning in the most implausible ways possible. There’s a stat going round social media at the moment that, across all the knock-out games of this Euros, England were only ahead for 4 minutes and 52 seconds. Incredible.

The Lionesses have – yet again – managed to show their nation the joy and drama of football and look set to inspire yet more women and girls to get involved in grass roots football. Women’s football, it would seem, is in rude health. But, look beneath the surface a little, and there are still significant disparities between the women’s game and the men’s game.

In May, Chelsea effectively sold their women’s team to themselves: they sold the team to BlueCo (Chelsea’s parent company) for a reported £198.7m. This is not the first time Chelsea have engaged creative accounting. In April. 2024, the club revealed it had sold two hotels it owned to one of BlueCo’s sister companies (a move later upheld by the Premier League itself). A whole women’s football team – a good one, at that! – being leveraged for accounting purposes.

Elsewhere, Liverpool Women’s Team sold their star player – Canadian forward Olivia Smith – to Arsenal for a world record fee of … £1m. To put that into context, Liverpool’s men’s team have already bought Florian Wirtz for roughly £116m this summer. They may add to that by buying Alexander Isak for anywhere up to £150m. And that’s to ignore the purchases Hugo Ekitike (£69m), Milos Kerkez (£40.8m), or Jeremie Frimpong (£35m). Moreover, the first male player to be sold by an English club was Trevor Francis, sold by Birmingham City to Nottingham Forrest. The year? 1979. 46 years ago.

In purely financial terms, then, the women’s game seems to be about 50 years behind the men’s. And yet, there are the Lionesses. They have just retained the European Championship. They have made three finals in a row, winning the Euros twice and narrowly losing the World Cup final in 2023. By contrast, the men’s team famously haven’t won a major trophy since 1966.

And so why does women’s football exist in an alternative financial universe about 50 years behind the men’s game? Well, I think a big part of it is making up for lost time.

The FA banned women from playing at FA-affiliated grounds between 1921 and 1971. Did you know that? It’s one of the UK’s greatest sporting shames and yet it’s hardly common knowledge. How like this country to front up to its institutional mistakes with silence.

For 50 years women were effectively unable to participate in the sport in any meaningful and professional way. 50 years. Where have we heard that number before?

Prior to this, women’s football had been rather popular. Dick, Kerr Ladies FC regularly attracted matchday audiences of thousands. In 1920, the year before the FA ban, 53,000 fans went to Goodison Park to watch they play against St. Helens. For context, this is a crowd so big the vast majority of Premier League stadiums would not be able to accommodate it. It would fill Brentford’s stadium three times over, and there would still be people queuing up outside.

For 50 years, men’s football was able to accelerate and grow while women’s football matches simply weren’t possible. Who knows where women’s football would be now, if it had been allowed to continue with the successes it had won for itself.

The success of the men’s game is built, in part, upon the enforced stagnation of the women’s game. People watched men’s football because it was the only football it was possible to watch. Men’s football owes its success in part to this. I don’t see how we can say otherwise. In response to this, I wonder if there are two things the sport might do to attempt to rectify this somewhat: one big, one small.

First, the big change. I wonder if there does need to be some form of reparations instituted to restore parity and to right the wrongs of the past? I know this won’t be popular. I love football, and I love it when my football club spends loads of money on players. I love that Liverpool (men’s team) might spend over £100m on two separate players this summer. I probably shouldn't be rubbing my hands at this, but if I’m honest, I am.

But at least some of this money ought to be diverted away from the men’s game and funnelled towards the women’s game. If men’s football is built in no small part on the enforced cessation of women’s football, then this seems only to be right. It’s not about punishing men’s football or paying a penalty for wrongdoing. It’s simply about restoring back to women’s football that which rightfully belongs to it.

Second, the small change. We should start calling men’s football teams ‘Men’s Football Teams’. When I talk about Liverpool Men’s Team, I just say ‘Liverpool’. I know, and anyone listening to me knows, that I mean the men’s team. I then add ‘Women’s’ when I’m talking about the Women’s Team.

The effect of this is that the ‘Men’s Team’ becomes the ‘default’ way of thinking about football. It is the ‘normal’ way of engaging with the sport, and this is then qualified or relativised by my talking about ‘Women’s football’ elsewhere. ‘Women’s Football’ becomes a smaller sub-category of the bigger category of ‘football’ as a whole, which is implicitly linked to ‘Men’s football’ specifically.

By taking the time to specify ‘Men’s Football’, we remind one another that football needn’t be played by men at all. That it, too, is just one way in which the sport might be engaged with or played. Not the ‘default’ or ‘correct’ way the sport exists. It’s a small change that, with time, may have a big effect on the way the sport as a whole of perceived.

50 years of injustice cannot be repaired overnight. There is a lot of work to be done to undo the wrongs of football’s historic treatment of women. But the sooner men’s football starts, the sooner justice will be restored.

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