Congress President Sonia Gandhi says most of the climate debate so far has been "gender-blind" as she voiced concern over women's voices and concerns hardly figuring in global climate negotiations.
Gandhi also felt there is a need for "climate justice" not only between countries but also between genders.
"Among all the challenges facing humankind in the twenty-first century, few are more pressing than climate change and global warming. Unfortunately most of the climate debate so far has been gender-blind ignoring the role played by women in raising environmental consciousness," she said.
"We need climate justice not only between countries, but also between genders," she said, delivering the Commonwealth lecture 2011 on 'Women as Agents of Change' at the Royal Commonwealth Society here last night.
Gandhi also reminded the Commonwealth that "investing in women is the highest-return venture",and said that "if urbanisation is the world's future, we must design urban environments and services in ways that will give women greater security in rapid urbanisation."
Gandhi, also the chairperson of ruling UPA on a five-day "private visit" here, was given a standing ovation as she walked to the podium to deliver the lecture as a packed hall which comprised High Commissioners, Ambassadors and British lawmakers.
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She said that she sometimes wondered whether women's greater empathy with nature and concern for their children's future might not help the world to find a new, more sustainable, less consumerist path of development.
"In 1989, the Commonwealth became the first major international organisation to publish a landmark scientific study on the devastating effects of climate change. Commonwealth Heads of Government also agreed on a Climate Change Action Plan in 2007, where, among other things, they called upon the support of women to ensure effective action.
"How can such support be extended if women's voices and concerns hardly figure in the global climate negotiations, or in national and local climate management plans?" she asked.
"Perhaps it is time for a fresh initiative to help the world bridge this gap. Such an initiative could suggest ways to bring women's participation and perspectives more squarely into the global negotiations. We need climate justice not only between countries, but also between genders," she said.
She said enhancing the role of women in protecting the environment is necessary.
"But what about protecting women themselves? Economic growth is leading to mass migration to cities. Disturbingly, this is being accompanied by growing violence against women.
If urbanisation is the world's future, we must design urban environments and services in ways that will give women greater security, and educate and involve citizens in this cause. A Commonwealth initiative bringing together our great cities to collaborate on this issue would be timely," she said.
In her lecture, Gandhi set out five areas in which women have emerged as "agents of change" in India.
They included Self-Help Groups pooling savings and securing loans for local projects; elected roles for women in rural self-government; social activism through the establishment of the language of human rights for women; the establishment of local enterprise collectives, some of which have been replicated elsewhere in Asia; and the setting up of village information centres and IT kiosks.
She said that women's enterprise also played a role in regions ravaged by violence and conflict, and within India, these groups had taken the lead in mediating, peace-building and reconciliation in areas of strife.
"Today, women in India are becoming agents of change through their own initiative, their energy and enterprise. Through individual and collective action, they are transforming their own situations and indeed transforming the broader social context itself.
"India is at the cusp of a 'demographic dividend', due to its young and increasingly educated and skilled population by a 'gender dividend'. It will, I believe, yield enormous economic gain and lead to profound social transformation," Gandhi said.
She highlighted the "powerful" role of technology in reducing gender inequalities through the creation of IT sector jobs allowing women to live independently, and the proliferation of knowledge-based enterprises run by women in rural areas, allowing them to access government services.
The UPA chairperson said it could be argued that the progressive victories of the women's movement, their achievement of the right to vote and other rights, were the 20th century's seminal contribution to human advancement.
"It has been a long journey. I fervently hope that the 21st century will take this to its logical conclusion. May this be, not the century of any particular country, but the century when women finally come into their own, the century when representative democracy is re-imagined to give women their due share, the century when the vocabulary of politics and culture is re-engineered fully to include that other half of mankind."
The Commonwealth Lecture, now in its 14th year, aims to stimulate understanding and debate on the Commonwealth and its role in world affairs.
Previous Lecturers have included the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Mary Robinson, Professor Muhammed Yunus and Terry Waite.
Gandhi noted that the modern Commonwealth owed much to India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who envisaged that the Commonwealth could be a bridge between the dying world of Empire and the new post-colonial world being born.
"Nehru, the statesman, saw merit in an institution that sought to build bridges at many levels between countries and peoples. She said Mrs Indira Gandhi valued the Commonwealth in a less idealised way than her father. She shared a personal bond with the leading Commonwealth figures of her time and brought to it a special focus on the development needs of its members," she said.
The Congress President said she accompanied her husband Rajiv Gandhi to successive Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings and "remember some of the colourful episodes that took place behind the scenes."
She said "although the women's movement has already transformed the way in which we look at society in each of our countries, the search for equality is far from finished.
"History, culture and economics still remain weighted against women. In my own country, most worrying of all is the declining sex ratio of females to males. The age-old preference for sons, coupled with the development of sex-selection technologies, has given an alarming demographic twist to gender bias. That this is happening in regions of substantial economic prosperity within the country is even more disturbing."
At the same time, she pointed out that in the recent Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, young women from these very regions won the most number of medals.
"In a poignant interview, one of them recalled that her parents had wished her to be a boy - but reconciled themselves after she developed her sporting prowess."
She said the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of a number of outstanding social reforms.
"But it was Mahatma Gandhi who brought about the first real and nation-wide wave of emancipation through his mass mobilisation of women into the freedom movement.
"Unusually for his time, he believed that India's economic and moral salvation lay in women's hands. He condemned the traditions of child marriage, female seclusion, dowry, enforced widowhood, and the lack of education that had shackled Indian women for so long," she said.
"Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation, can perhaps also be called the Mother of Indian feminism," she said.