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Lindsey Hall: I'm Lindsey Hall, Head of thought leadership at S&P Global Sustainable1.   

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon, a senior writer on the Sustainable1 Thought Leadership Team   

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to ESG Insider, a podcast hosted by S&P Global, where we explore environmental, social and governance issues that are shaping investor activity and company strategy. 

The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference, also known as COP28, will get underway at the end of November. Now COP stands for the conference of the parties, and each year brings together governments from around the world to negotiate on how countries are going to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement. As a reminder, the central goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement is to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees C relative to preindustrial levels, and ideally to 1.5 degrees C.

As we heard in last week’s episode, the United Arab Emirates, or UAE, holds the COP presidency this year, and it hosting this year’s gathering in Dubai. And they have created a thematic program to focus on different key topics on different days of COP.

Esther Whieldon: One of those themes is gender equality. Discussions will focus on topics such as why climate policy needs to consider gender equality and why women can be disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change. In today’s episode, we’re diving into this topic in detail. We want to understand how are climate and gender related?

In 2022, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC, released a report that cites women as more vulnerable to the impact of climate change on food systems, for example. Just for a bit of background for our listeners: IPCC reports have been highly influential in the sustainability space and often guide investor engagement and corporate decarbonization plans. The 2022 report said that mortality rates are higher for women and children during extreme weather events, and they are more likely to suffer mental health problems due to climate change impacts. 

Women are also less likely to play a key part in decision making on climate. According to the UN, men occupy 67% of climate-related decision-making roles.

Lindsey Hall: So in the run-up to COP28, our colleague Jennifer Laidlaw has been delving into the intersection of gender equality and climate. Jennifer is a member of the Thought Leadership team at S&P Global Sustainable1 and a regular contributor to this podcast. 

Jennifer, welcome back to the show. Who did you speak to? 

Jennifer Laidlaw: Thanks, glad to be back. First up, I talked to Shruti Sharma, senior policy advisor at the think tank International Institute for Sustainable Development, which is headquartered in Canada.  Shruti is based in India and has conducted research about the impact of fossil fuel subsidy reforms on women. I started by asking her to explain why women are disproportionately impacted by climate change.

Shruti Sharma: So climate change does impact everyone, but exactly coming to your question that it does not impact everyone equally. So the climate crisis is not gender neutral. And just like every other humanitarian all sort of development challenge, it is impacting women disproportionately more. 

So a major reason for that is that women are traditionally responsible for securing food, water and fuel. And so when a climate crisis or event occurs, that tends to exacerbate that disproportional burden on women even more. So for example, in the agricultural sector, which employs a lot of women, especially in lower and middle income countries, when we see periods of drought or erratic rainfall, women as agricultural workers will tend to bear more hardship in trying to secure income and resource for their families. And this then puts added pressure on young girls who then often have to leave school to help their mothers or other women. So that's increased burden on women. 

A lot of this also is happening because women's role in delivering care work is not accounted for with an economic value. And in simple terms, it just means that women are doing unpaid care work. And this can be often like 3x much more than men. So when climate disasters hit, this figure, again, like shoots up way much more and increase the word on women, who would take on additional burdens to not just rebuild their own households but also then help rebuild the community around them.

Jennifer Laidlaw: Shruti then went on to tell me that climate policies are not always gender inclusive, perpetuating the difficulties for women in managing the impacts of climate change.  

Shruti Sharma: Sometimes, energy policies can be more inclusive and often not. So for example, we saw with cooking fuel policies in India, and there's a cooking fuel called liquid petroleum gas, which is LPG, which is liquefied petroleum gas, which comes in a canister, and it's delivered to your house, those policies were not gender response agenda positive earlier. But then the government sort of rework the scheme a little bit and specifically targeted women from poorer households. And then we saw the policy to dreaming well, specifically removing the hardship and the time burden on women who had to then not spend hours trying to source biomass from forests around them. 

But not all energy policies directly target the ecosystem to make women's lives easier or inclusive. For example, there has to be an acknowledgment that there is a whole ecosystem that can work for women's lives. 

So for example, the banking system, the regulations, land ownership, they don't necessarily target women. So for example, any kind of agricultural irrigation policies. For them to be more accessible to women, they have to target the whole ecosystem. So for example, if you're trying to sell a solar irrigation pump and you want the women to be able to buy it, the bank has to give financing to them. 

But women farmers are not targeted, and women farmers do not find it easily accessible to get a loan from a bank. So this whole ecosystem is not necessarily acknowledged when a policy is being designed. 

Similarly, policies on just transition, particularly among coal mining communities. So we hear about the just transition energy partnership all the time. But they don't necessarily recognize the role of women in coal mining. Now typically, men take up the large majority of formal labor force involved directly in coal mining and a very small share of women are involved in the formal work, which is associated with coal production. 

So women end up typically taking lower wages and informal labor. And some of it is directed by the local laws, and these are responsible for excluding women from well-paid employment and sort of perpetuating these traditional gender roles that we see in coal mining. 

 So what this example is from a study in coal mining region in India, which estimated the overall production of men in the formal workforce is 2x that of women. And the gender bias in formal coal mining is resulting in the concentration of women in lower informal work such as manual, which is often very manual, it's often unsafe, it gives low wages and there's a lack of security for women. 

It's women who are the ones who go down dangerous slopes of old mines for gathering coal, pack that goal and then sell it in the market to make money. Now all of this is informal, but it's not registered. So any closure or redevelopment of mines will impact these women who are in the informal market. So climate policies in itself need to be more gender inclusive.

Jennifer Laidlaw: Right. And what steps do you think we need to take to make policies more gender inclusive?

Shruti Sharma: I think we need more data to support gender inclusive policy design. We don't understand or we have ad hoc stories about the role of women in any particular ecosystem. 

So if we take, for example, a clean cooking lens or the clean cooking sector, if we apply gender lens to understand these policies, we'll then see how a clean cooking fuel can empower men and women equally. 

When we conducted a study in Nigeria and Bangladesh to understand how Kerosene reforms impact then differently, we found very contrasting stories in both countries. When Kerosene prices were high and kerosene is subsidized in both the countries in both in Nigeria and Bangladesh. When Kerosene prices were hiked, we saw women in Nigeria experienced extreme hardship because this meant that they were not able to access the subsidized fuel. Prices went up. There were a lot of middlemen. There was lots of leakage, exploitation in the market. And we found that they had to often queue long hours losing days wages just to access the fuel at some kind of a price. 

But in Bangladesh, when prices increased, we saw men and women equally get impacted. It was not a disproportionate burden only on women. And that was because in Nigeria, women were responsible for purchasing Kerosene. But in Bangladesh, men were responsible for purchasing Kerosene. 

Now this kind of simple understanding of just gender disaggregated data on who is purchasing the fuel, who is consuming the fuel is really important to understand what kind of impact the policies are going to have when price changes. In the end, we did find similarities that when prices are increased, families will try to either increase income-generating activities to supplement their income and pay for the higher price of the kerosene or they'll try to reduce their kerosene consumption.

So identifying the whole role of women, especially like in the gold mining industry on what role formula informal role they're playing in, what kind of policy introduction can help mitigate the impacts of women or is exacerbating their hardships. So identifying this kind of gender disaggregated data is supremely important. 

Jennifer Laidlaw: You were saying that women work more the informal sector. So really, to get that data, we would need with more women to be working in the formal sector:? 

Shruti Sharma: No, not necessarily. I think each country's local settings are different. For example, in the global cell predominantly, that is more stronger informal economy as compared to the global North. So I'm not advocating for women to be in more in the formal sector. It may not allow in the country settings, but a formal economy setting, in general, provides much more social and progressive welfare.

So for example, you'll have better health insurance. You'll have paid leave. Those kind of welfare norms will come in with formal economy but will not necessarily be in the informal economy. That may not be immediately available for women in the global South and particularly from in countries with low economic settings. So I think what we need is stronger social welfare policies no matter the setting, whether it be formal or informal, we need stronger social welfare policies to be in place.

Jennifer Laidlaw: I also spoke to Michelle Li. She's the Founder and Executive Director of Women and Climate, a nonprofit networking group for women interested in climate change. She explained why gender equality plays an integral part in the transition to the green economy. 

You'll hear her mention DEI at one point. That stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Michelle Li: Women tend to be responsible for families and communities. And in many societies, women hold the budgets and they are responsible for purchasing and making decisions on behalf of the family. And so something like the rise of cost of rice, to fixing a basement from flooding because of climate change if we think about New York, this impacts women. And in turn, there's also a mental anxiety aspect or it. You're worrying about the budget, you're worrying about the longevity, the long-term positive longevity of your family, your children, your parents, that's definitely very mentally taxing. 

In areas where there is crises, where there's displacement, the first thing to go for women is education. And I think it applies to other genders as well, but women are less likely to be educated when there are crises taking place. And so all of this is really just exacerbating the inequality that already exists today. 

Gender inequality is just systemic. I think that currently, the power players and the really technical industries that are going to help us transition to a greener economy, so to speak, those are mainly led by men. So if we think about policy and government, energy, carbon removal, the built environment. All of those industries are very impactful when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. And today, most of them are led by men. 

And so we have to create space for women, and that takes time. But we've seen how the tech sector and the finance sector, how some of those transitions are being made when it comes to the quality and the workplace, diversity, et cetera. It will take time, but we need these changes to happen a little bit more quickly and we need to achieve gender equality more quickly in order for us to positively transition to a greener economy.

Jennifer Laidlaw: Can you think of some of the solutions that may actually help the situation? You mentioned the tech sector. Have you seen like any solutions within the industry or other industries to kind of speak to this intersection of women and climate?

Michelle Li: Yes. I mean looking at the tech sector, there's a few things that come to mind. One is transparency and data. So tech companies publish their DEI figures, and that's helpful, right? What gets measured, gets changed. Additionally, a lot of tech companies and actually some climate companies that are -- that I know were starting to exercise things like blind hiring. So you actually don't know anything about the candidate until they get to a stage where you interview them over video. 

So I think these are helpful as well. and companies and tech companies are also publishing the pay equity, which I think is helpful as well. So it's measuring, its transparency, and it's finding new solutions because we don't have all those solutions right now to even make tech gender equity comparable. It's a work in progress, but we have to continue to look for solutions and share them and be transparent about it. 

Jennifer Laidlaw: That importance of having women in climate decision-making, not only in business but all levels of society was something both Michelle and Shruti mentioned to me. Here's Michelle again. 

Michelle Li: I think it's not something that is going to be solved overnight. But I think what groups like Women and Climate are doing, what She Changes Climate, another nonprofit that is actually really focused on the policy piece are doing is they're creating a band in the community of women to voice what we -- what outcomes we want. And that is very powerful, and we need more of that. And in order to have more of that, we need to activate more women. 

We have the climate space, and we have women who are already in the climate space, but how do we expand that circle and activate more women, so we can increase the volume of our voice? And we also can't forget a really important ally, which is men. There are men out there who believe that we need more women in government, that we need more women's voices, and we need to bring them along with us and activate them and show them how they can support us.

 Jennifer Laidlaw: And Shruti told me women need to be involved in climate policymaking to ensure policies are tackling that gender lens in climate.  

 Shruti Sharma: So let me give you an example of what happened just before COP27. So I think just before COP27, there was a photograph of leaders of major economies, and all of them were men. And that is a classic example of lack of representation because there wasn't a single women in that photo. 

And it's not like women aren't leaders out there. So I think what we need is we need women in decision-making processes. We need women in policymaking processes, especially when they're going to be designed. 

And one classic way to sort of ensure that, that happens is by putting laws in place that ensures their representation. So many countries are, or have, these laws or are introducing them when they see a certain percentage of women — a certain percentage of women in parliament or a certain percentage of women in the workforce. So this kind of diversity entrenched in law ensures that women are well represented in the society in the formal workspace. It also ensures then or sort of sets the juggernaut in motion that when policies are going to be designed in the future, they will have representation for women, will be designed with women on the panel and will have a gender lens to them. 

We saw several examples of energy policies that are targeting women because the role of women is now acknowledged in the whole ecosystem. So for example, classic case of the clean cooking sector, when there are sample policies now specifically aiming women from low-income households to make sure that they are able to access affordable clean cooking fuels. Again, something to bear in mind is that we need stronger representation of women, or we need them to be included in the decision-making process? And why this is important is, again, like once we understand who is making the decision within households, it's important then how we set the policies.

Lindsey Hall: Shruti mentioned COP27, the UN conference that took place in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt in 2022. Did you have anything to say about what she expects from this year's conference, COP28?

Jennifer Laidlaw: Yes, she did. You hear her mention the NDCs. That stands for nationally determined contributions. These are the documents countries update every 5 years to outline their plans for lowering emissions in line with the goals of the Paris agreement.

Shruti Sharma: What we're hoping to hear is better representation like we spoke about a little earlier. And having a gender lens to several of the climate policies that we see coming out so frequently. So for example, when we talk about the heart of this whole gender inequity and climate policies, we find that there's a lack of gender data. We see that in the NDCs themselves. 

So what we really want to see better is we want to see better identification of gender data in the NDCs themselves. And we don't see a push for that particularly. So if there's anything amazing to come out from COP, we should really ask governments to do a better job in their NDCs with a gender lens. And we want to see like some kind of an ask from these international organizations for better gender disaggregated data as well to help us at better policies.

Jennifer Laidlaw: Michelle said she was hoping to hear more women speakers at this year’s conference and also more on funding for women-led climate ventures.  

Michelle Li: I think that's going to be a big topic this year, Jennifer, and I have had the opportunity to work with the presidency directly. Women in Climate has submitted their request for programming, which essentially means we have requested to host panels and sessions in the green zone of COP. And having connected with the presidency directly because of that, I have personally learned that the presidency really hold in high regard, having diversity on panels. 

And it doesn't stop at gender -- definitely want to include more youth voices, want to include more variety when it comes to geography, so having representation from the global South as well. And I think that, generally speaking, people understand that women need more opportunities to share their solutions. 

And so I know that organizers are going to be working very hard, definitely harder, to include gender equity at the very least and with the women in climate speaker database, which was actually created because of what we saw at COP27 and the opportunity we saw for more women to speak, there is a resource that event organizers can use to recruit high-quality speakers that are going to be at COP28. And women are actually very fiercely promoting this resource right now as we speak, Jennifer.

And as a result, I think we're going to see a huge improvement when it comes to gender diversity for speakers. And there will definitely be the intersectionality of climate and gender topics throughout.

Gender is actually part of the thematic programming, but it's also a layer that kind of goes through all the different days. There is Gender Day, which is December 4, but the topic of gender equity is overlying all the different thematic days of biodiversity and water, and health, et cetera, there will be a gender lens to all of those different topics. 

Jennifer Laidlaw: You mentioned that there will be public inverse with the gender lens. Is there anything specific that you think really needs to be discussed that can help this conversation move along? 

Michelle Li: We need to really empower women to step into the role of funding solutions, whether as a VC or Angel or other solution. And Women in Climate will actually be partnering with a group called 2x Global to focus on gender smart investing. If you've never heard of that term, look it up. It's an actual framework to help investors support women. 

And we'll be doing a joint session on women and finance, and we're definitely going to be having a deep dive conversation on the intersectionality of finance and gender and how women are positioned to help overcome some of the major challenges that we're seeing in funding. 

There is really, really strong data out there that shows that women received less than 3% of venture capital funding, which is not great. As a result, there's also less women founders and entrepreneurs, which is also not very great. 

But I think it's also important to look upstream and look at VCs and investors. How many of those are women? I actually think we need to start from the top. How do we get more women into VC into investing, whether it's Angel or partner, how do we activate their capital because when we have women VCs and investors, there will be more startups that will appease and aim to appease to the values of those investors who are women who may have different values than men. 

And instead of maybe having more women founders, which I would absolutely love to see, we could also have male-led start-ups that incorporate values into their startups that benefit and are important to women as well. So I think we need to look upstream. We need more women investors. 

Jennifer Laidlaw: So as you can hear, there's a packed schedule ahead at COC28 in terms of gender discussions related not just to climate but topics like biodiversity. 

Esther Whieldon: And the finance piece will be key as well. And by the way, as a heads up to our listeners, the ESG insider podcast is taking a break from a regular schedule and will be taking next week off for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. But we'll be back the following week. 

Lindsey Hall: We'll be continuing to track the big themes that are being covered at COP28, so please stay tuned. 

Lindsey Hall: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of ESG Insider and a special thanks to our producer, Kyle Cangialosi. Please be sure to subscribe to our podcast and sign up for our weekly newsletter, ESG Insider. See you next time.   

This piece was published by S&P Global Sustainable1, a part of S&P Global.     

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