Inspiring women in climate change

Lead Editor-Newsgathering

ryan.bachoo@cnc3.co.tt

Perhaps it was always her destiny to be someone who saves the environment. Long before she got into climate change, Rueanna Haynes was a child who loved watching Captain Planet.

On a Sunday, her family took walks as they often spent time in nature, and Haynes would sit and draw the trees. It would have a lasting effect on her. “I still feel happy being in nature,” she told the WE magazine in a sit-down interview last week.

She now travels the world speaking on behalf of small island states and their plight brought on by climate change. Since 2016, Haynes has been working with Climate Analytics, a global climate science and policy institute engaged around the world in driving and supporting climate action aligned to the 1.5°C warming limit.

With a commitment to helping the region stave off the effects of a warming world, she pushed for a Caribbean office. In 2021, that wish was granted. Climate Analytics Caribbean was launched with Haynes as its director.

Recently, she became the new head of the diplomacy team of Climate Analytics. Yet Haynes’ journey into the climate space started rather confusingly. In January 2009, she joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Multilateral Environmental Desk. It was a major year for multilateral diplomacy in this country. Trinidad hosted the Fifth Summit of the Americas before welcoming the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

As world leaders, including former US president Barack Obama and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy flew into T&T for the conference, all eyes were on the United Nations Climate Change Conference set to take place in Copenhagen mere weeks before Christmas that year.

“In 2009, it was a big year for multilateralism, diplomacy, and climate change. I entered the scene then. It was a big year for everything. I think it was one of the first times in the history of the climate process where, at a global level, there was this recognition of climate change as an issue for diplomacy. It had been seen before as a niche and environmental issue for scientists, but everything changed in that year,” Haynes recalled.

She would grow with that new diplomatic movement of which climate change had taken on. It was a vastly different career from what the San Fernando native had planned for herself. Having started studying history and French at the University of the West Indies, Haynes would switch her major to law at UWI and eventually attend Hugh Wooding Law School.

She would also go on to study environmental policy at Sciences Po University in Paris before heading to Georgetown University Law Centre in Washington, DC, to complete a Master’s degree in International Legal Studies. She speaks glowingly of her grandmother, whom she says had an outsized influence on her growing up.

“The home I grew up in was one that was very free to be exactly who we wanted to be. I never felt like I had some ceiling placed on me. We were free to dream as big as we liked,” she said when speaking of her grandmother, who helped raise her and her cousins as children.

Haynes was at COP26 in Glasgow when she received the news her grandmother had passed on. At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was still having its effects on air travel and funerals, and so she would take a day off the conference to deliver the eulogy of her grandmother Margot Gibbs virtually.

Despite her consistent climb in the climate change movement and her impressive academic CV, nothing could prepare her for the multilateral environment she was entering.

Haynes would encounter several challenges in her early years in the global climate change process. She was a woman. She was a black woman. And she was a black woman from a small island hardly anyone knew.

Almost immediately, Haynes was about to be a negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States.

The St Joseph’s Convent, San Fernando alumnus recalls, “It was very difficult to be taken seriously in those rooms. At the time, those rooms were dominated by white men, and climate change was generally seen as a more European priority, so me entering that space as a young black woman from a random country, I had challenges. I was asked which part of Africa I’m from. When I said I was from Trinidad and Tobago, they’d reply, ‘Yes, but where in Africa is that?’”

Haynes said she would describe the international process of climate change as “inherently male, white, and violent, so it’s a space where operating as a young woman of colour from a country considered to be marginalised and irrelevant economically was very intimidating.”

She said she has been shouted at on numerous occasions by her male counterparts and asked to stay quiet. “You’d be surprised at the kinds of things men usually feel free to say to you as a woman that they don’t consider an equal,” Haynes added.

She would battle through the challenges at the global negotiating table, and as she did that, a generation of young, black Caribbean women were watching her rise and being inspired by her.

She is somewhat oblivious to the admiration she receives from young women across the region, but when asked about it, she replies, “I live for this. All of my mentors have been men, and I am very grateful to them for mentoring me, for pushing me and helping me believe in myself. However, I did not have, when I was younger, a woman as an example of who I would want to be in this space. I created a space for myself, so for me it’s really important to be the person I didn’t have for other people.”

Since entering the climate space 15 years ago, Haynes was presented with the opportunity to work abroad on several occasions, but she had made a commitment to her country that she was not prepared to break.

“I decided to come back to do what I said I was going to do, which was to work at the regional level to try to bridge some of the gaps I see between what actually happens within the region and what’s said and agreed at the international level,” Haynes explained.

Her decision would ultimately redound to the benefit of the region, as Haynes has led numerous projects that have helped communities across the islands. As the Caribbean stands on the frontlines of the climate fight, Haynes had the option of travelling to safer pastures; instead, she chose to stay and fight for those living on small islands.

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