Women are driving climate solutions today and tomorrow
As we confront the grave effects of climate change on ecosystems and humankind, we also acknowledge the disproportionate strain that climate change places on women. Global warming exacerbates economic and social inequalities within communities, which in turn has deleterious effects on women’s participation and empowerment. Already, 80% of those displaced by climate change are women.
But women are not just disproportionately affected by environmental crises — they have proven to be leaders in forging solutions. They are early adopters of new agricultural techniques, first responders in crises and green energy entrepreneurs. They also wield their economic power as consumers and decision-makers. Women have been the architects of multilateral agreements like COP21 and the concrete global frameworks to attack the problem have been shepherded by women. Just to name of few of these leaders: Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC); Laurence Tubiana, French ambassador for international climate negotiations at COP21; and Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa, the UNFCC’s current executive secretary, among many others.
If women’s leadership on climate is crucial for both local communities and the global community, how do we best activate it to drive faster and better solutions?
The complex interaction of equality and climate
This week’s Global Climate Action Summit (#GCAS2018) in San Francisco reminds us of the urgent need for accelerated action — that a ‘bending down’ of carbon emissions by 2020 will be required to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Maintaining the target of a 1.5 °C rise set in the Paris Agreement will require a major step up in our efforts. And the prospective consequences of a +2 or 3 °C rise call us to demand further, faster action to slow this warming and a greater diversity of approaches to respond to the likely effects. More women leaders can draw new attention to women’s particular experience of climate change, and the outsize impact women can have on combating it. In doing so, they can amplify the work and impact of governments, institutions and communities.
With so many variables and decisions at play, it is sometimes paralysing when we try to forge a way forward. It will take stakeholders of all kinds to build a common understanding of the different future scenarios and drivers of change.
This includes not only scenarios for global warming — under 2 °C or above 4 °C. It also means understanding the multiple variables that will have an effect on how humanity will experience this change. This includes growing or shrinking gender equality at a grassroots and global leadership level. Or whether business further embraces its leadership role or hangs back. Or whether energy systems grow more decentralised or consolidate. The drivers are as varied as human experience itself, and they are all interconnected.
With these multiple, independent variables at work, it will be critical to articulate how each might interact with the others. The private sector and other organisations and institutions will play a crucial role in understanding these scenarios, how they affect the people who live through them and evaluating what actions to take.
The Women’s Forum — a platform for global leaders, both women and men, to collaborate on pressing social and economic issues (#WFGM18) — is bringing a gendered lens to this scenario analysis as a means of unlocking the power of women’s leadership to prepare and respond effectively to different climate outcomes.
The path forward, no matter the outcome
To come up with solutions that measure up to this impact, we must envision and understand the future under different scenarios — both in relation to climate change and how our societies will change economically, technologically, sociologically and politically. Several partners of the Women’s Forum are coming together in a Daring Circle of leading organisations — including confirmed global strategic members BNP Paribas and L’Oréal, along with a range of global and institutional partners from diverse sectors — with the goal of uncovering and profiling the actions needed to understand and mitigate the effects of climate change upon women, and to enable women’s leadership in these efforts.
At the Women’s Forum, we have come to understand that you can only find global solutions to global problems by working together. Gender has the potential to drive companies, governments and other institutions into silos. It can just as readily be harnessed to drive us to better solutions.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on 14 September 2018
