We are teetering on Wednesday and the start of official kick-off of the final round of Rio+20 negotiations. Participants have arrived, a mix of high level officials, NGOs, activists, students and negotiators. Twitter has been blazing with excitement, side events have been full with innovation and ideas, stories have been are shared and marches have been walked with energy.

At the start of the Future Women Want: Leaders Forum on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment for Sustainable Development, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland said that the single most important catalyst for change is mobilising and investing in women and ensuring women have equal access to land, capital, credit and markets. These components are vital for women's empowerment and participation as well as to build resistance and adaptation strategies against climate change and food insecurity. However Rio +20 must also illuminate women as agents of change with knowledge and expertise in their own contexts.

Reetu Sogani and her organisation the Community Awareness Centre (CAC) featured in BRIDGE's Gender and Climate Change Cutting Edge InBrief. CAC demonstrated how participatory processes have empowered local women in the area to utilise their expertise and manage natural resources resulting in dramatic improvements in their and their families lives.

For example the reduction in steady rainfall patterns has coincided with the increasing promotion of cash crops, which rely on fertilisers and pesticides, and require more water. CAC ran an experimental farm to explore the benefits of organic farming as an alternative to these non-traditional crops and resource-intensive farming techniques. The experimental farm showed that traditional crops not only tasted better, were more nutritious and lasted longer, but could be farmed organically and were more resilient to unpredictable weather conditions. With their confidence boosted through CAC’s empowerment activities, a number of local women led the way, persuading their households to change to these organic farming methods. The traditional crops now provide cattle feed and fodder that women would otherwise have to spend time searching for in the forest.

However whilst the last few days have been awash with excitement and perhaps hope, today's release of the final text to be negotiated is sobering. 

The Text: Future we want?

Yesterday Michelle Bachelet Executive Director of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) said “We cannot afford to leave women marginalized. This is not sustainable. This social exclusion of women is not only hurting women, it is hurting all of us." The Rio +20 Conference Twitter account maybe celebrating the text finalisation, however many in Rio and beyond are concerned and disappointed. Whilst promotion of a green economy has been a cornerstone of the UN Environment Programme for Rio +20, thousands of women and men demonstrated yesterday advocating that it relies on the exploitation of women and focuses only on what can be bought and sold, ignoring other issues like women's unpaid labour.

The text is extremely weak and there are substantial worries that further amendments will not be made. Issues such as Indigenous women's knowledge and women's unpaid labour is absent. Sexual and reproductive rights which have been and continue to be under attack by the G77 and the Holy See are missing from the final document.Further comment will be available on the next storify.