How Women Are Leading Climate Action Across Sectors

Around the world, women are tackling climate change across sectors, turning the climate crisis narrative to one of climate optimism. Author and climate activist Anne Therese Gennari defines this as a mindset shift that sparks hope, creativity and solutions thinking while keeping a fact-based approach to climate change. 

Whether it’s helping corporate clients reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by forging partnerships with nature initiatives like Marissa Pierratt does at APCO Worldwide, or it’s investing in carbon dioxide removal technology (poised to be a trillion-dollar industry) like Lisa Mangertseder does with the venture capital firm, Carbon Removal Partners, or it’s producing global activations for climate leaders like Sierra Quitiquit does with her team at the climate communications agency, Time for Better, opportunities for intersecting business and climate action abound.   

Converging these different areas of expertise calls for a power with approach — a term I learned from Heather McGeory, head of sustainability for Fifth Wall, which invests in companies decreasing carbon emissions in the buildings and transportation sectors.

The ‘Power With’ Approach

As McGeory shared with me, power with means collaboration, systems thinking and empathy — the opposite of the power over, which is rooted in patriarchy that has encouraged overusing the Earth’s resources, particularly during the last 150 years.

Deep sea mining activist and Caribbean regional representative for the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, Khadija Stewart, believes that addressing environmental issues requires creativity and inclusivity and that strategies can’t be just about nature; they need to include people.  

When businesses begin looking at ways they can be more environmentally conscious, spotlighting human stories and partnering with local communities that are navigating climate change can mean the difference between unintentional greenwashing and leading with cooperation and a well-informed strategy. 

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Educating Individuals and Corporations 

To keep corporations and individuals informed, Michelle Li built the carbon literacy platform, Clever Carbon, which features a two-minute quiz to help people learn what their carbon footprint is compared to the average in their country. 

Clever Carbon holds workshops for corporations and creates regular social media content to help people understand the impact of their daily choices, whether it’s what they eat, how they commute, how much they fly or how much energy they use. Li also runs Women and Climate, an international community bringing women together to discuss climate, share resources and create solutions. 

Driving Accountability and Transparency

Real climate action for brands means accountability — something Catherine Atkin knows well. As an attorney and the director of the nonprofit, Carbon Accountable, she spent three years developing the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, a policy requiring the largest U.S. public and private companies to publicly disclose the full scope of their greenhouse gas emissions. In October, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law for which Atkin is the main legal and technical advisor. 

This policy is ushering in a new era of transparency, a core value Sarah Braverman helps organizations implement. As a policy analyst at Carbon Direct, she helps companies understand climate policies, while they develop strategies to reach their climate pledge goals. 

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Sarah Kjellberg, chief growth officer of the carbon removal and storage startup, Arbor, which uses rocket engine technology to create carbon-negative power and permanently remove it from the atmosphere, believes that in order to reach CO2 emissions removal at gigaton scale — which is what’s needed for the world to reach net zero — carbon removal needs to become ubiquitous through policy. 

Regenerating Finance 

Transparency is a core value of the ReFi (regenerative finance) movement, which uses decentralized finance to invest in sustainability. Hania Othman, Director of Sustainable Impact for EMEA at the HBAR Foundation, which funds ReFi projects on the Hedera network, a decentralized public ledger, believes transparency will enable a premium on pricing for carbon credits, and that this can provide a positive incentive for markets to improve the distribution of the generated value.

ReFi tools are being used to support initiatives like Sandra Ponce de Leon’s plastic sequestration efforts in Tulum, Mexico, where she’s cultivating a values-driven economy that treats plastic as a resource rather than a waste. The goal is to incentivize citizens to “mine” for plastic in their environments, so that that plastic can be turned into new products and energy.

Speaking Business and Economics 

If we want to move the needle on climate action, we have to speak the language of business — and that language is economics. That’s why Sarabeth Brockley, NASDAQ’s head of carbon strategy, ESG Advisory and Capital Access Platforms, sees carbon markets as essential for corporate investment strategies.

By quantifying the cost of carbon emissions, an incentive is created for businesses to adopt more sustainable practices. This allows NASDAQ to leverage its team’s expertise in market infrastructure and create efficient, transparent and effective carbon markets, which assign a financial value to carbon offsetting. This ‘monetizes’ environmental stewardship, making it an integral part of business decision-making.

Tiffany Potter, Chief Carbon Officer of Bitgreen, sees carbon markets as a means of creating alternative financing opportunities for climate solutions that don’t get funded at local banks. Before working in carbon markets, she was in a snow cave working with threatened species in Yellowstone National Park Service, and her research was going into a drawer. Then she heard about environmental finance and thought if people could profit from the conservation of energy, water or forests, then more people would care. 

She was right. The global carbon market has been growing over the past few years, due to an increase in carbon offsetting by corporations, and is expected to reach $2.68 trillion by 2028. What’s good for the planet is good for business.

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Storytelling

In addition to investment strategies, climate tech, finance, policy and education, storytelling is vital for the climate action movement to reach the masses. I predict that storytellers like biodiversity scientist and filmmaker, Phoebe Barnard, who’s launching the documentary series, Back to Our Future: Climate Restoration and Survival, and Alice Heady, cofounder and CEO of the impact-driven media company, Earthrise Studio, will inspire more production houses and climate professionals of all kinds to tell their stories and inspire climate optimism.

More brands will lean toward adopting the sustainability ethos of Patagonia. Along with creating branded content about regeneration and environmentalism, Patagonia is working to radically reduce its carbon emissions and has made addressing the climate crisis a core part of its business. Additionally, more corporations will expand their ESG teams and begin prioritizing carbon offsetting projects as part of their strategy — not simply because they made a pledge, but because consumers will demand it.