Women in Sustainability: Singapore edition.
At the end of 2020, I hosted a panel discussion, on behalf of the New Zealand Chamber of Commerce, with six of Singapore’s women corporate sustainability leaders to discuss what had called them to leadership and to their work in sustainability.
H. E. Jo Tyndall, the New Zealand High Commissioner in Singapore and former Climate Change Ambassador introduced the panel. The panelists included Stella Saris (Head of Sustainable Finance, ANZ), Priya Gopalan (Director, Risk Governance, UBS), Sumi Dhanarajan (Associate Director, Forum for the Future), Deborah Ho (Country head Singapore and Head of SE Asia, Blackrock), Anita Neville (Senior Vice President, Golden Agri-Resources Ltd), and Malavika Bambawale (Managing Director, Head of APAC, Sustainability Solutions at ENGIE Impact). I hosted the panel with Melanie Levine (Manager, Global Agribusiness, WBCSD).
Women are natural systems thinkers, and I was curious about the moment when the panelists knew they had to dedicate their lives to working in sustainability. For all panelists, that moment happened in their youth, perhaps because at that age people are less constrained by old narratives and energized by the possibility of change. Youth movements can quickly become powerful, as we have seen with the global protests for climate action initiated by Greta Thunberg, and in democracy movements in Hong Kong and Thailand. Dhanarajan expanded on these observations, explaining that those in current leadership positions should provide young people, especially girls, with the support, encouragement, and scaffolding they need to catalyse the change they want to see in the world.
While young people act without the weight of the past, understanding and evaluating historical events and trends can help predict the future. Panelists Bambawale and Saris observed past and changing trends, predicting the renewable energy boom and the coming increase in energy accessibility across Asia. Ten years ago, the region had 400MW of renewable energy generation capacity with 2–3 wind projects in Taiwan, and only 69% of Indonesians had access to electricity. Corporations have partnered and leveraged their influence with governments to scale up the deployment of renewables in the grids suppliers with which they operate, improve energy accessibility and efficiency, and tackle legacy issues such as decommissioning the least-efficient coal plants. Today Asia has over 6.8GW of renewable energy capacity, hosts thousands of wind projects, and 99% of Indonesians have access to electricity.
The world will continue to move faster than we can imagine, and we no longer have the luxury to focus on a particular crisis. Governments must promote green growth through stimulus packages to address multiple factors, such as climate change and the just transition. A just transition ensures environmental sustainability as well as decent work, social inclusion, and poverty eradication. Ho spoke about how governments can help de-risk long term projects on climate change through public private partnerships. In these relationships, the private sector brings innovation and capital, and policies and frameworks to create more certainty and encourage investors. The scale and scope of government action on climate change will define the speed that the world can move to a low-carbon economy and mitigates profound shocks to our global systems. However, this requires a coordinated, international response from governments, aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
As the speed of global disruption and volatility increases, it will be even more important to communicate complex technical information in a language that multiple audiences can understand. Neville stated that while the “No Deforestation” campaign achieved widespread acknowledgment that the underlying causes of deforestation must be investigated and fixed (land use change, poverty, land tenure, food security, and corporate behaviour), it failed to stop it. “No” is an effective tagline but is set on strict, absolute metrics. Tackling deforestation requires effective messaging and smart early investment in forest positive supply chains.
2020 has shown us that companies who focused on stakeholder value by being more resource efficient or attentive to their employees navigated the crisis better. Although companies were aware of the risk from pandemics, Gopalan stated that many were unprepared for the disruption. This is a prime time to learn about resiliency; business should focus on how to adapt to scenarios as they emerge, not solely predicting how they will happen. Ho stated that the rise of stakeholder capitalism is not just about consumer or climate concerns but is a force for long-term resilience and profitability; this was also mentioned by Blackrock’s CEO Larry Fink in his letter to CEOs and clients.
No one can predict the full scope of climate change and the broader sustainability challenges to come. But we’ve seen some outstanding leadership in response to the pandemic from women around the world in Germany, New Zealand, Denmark, Taiwan and Finland. Yet, there are still many direct and indirect obstacles to true equal participation. It is a stereotype that women are not as qualified as men and the climb to leadership is even more fraught for women of colour, even in political systems which have made it easier for women to succeed. We must rapidly evolve from the days of broad, generic commitments as we are facing mass inequality, ecosystem collapse, and the rise of global migration.
In the words of Christiana Figueres, internationally recognized leader on global climate change and author of The Future We Choose, “We can no longer afford to assume that addressing climate change is the sole responsibility of national or local governments, or corporations or individuals. This is an everyone-everywhere mission in which we all must individually and collectively assume responsibility.”
Special thanks to the panellists, and the New Zealand Chamber of Commerce in Singapore for hosting the discussion.
The panel was hosted by Oriana Brine, who is a Senior Sustainability Strategist at Forum for the Future’s Singapore Office. She works alongside business to drive corporate sustainability strategies and implementation in Asia-Pacific.
