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Lindsey Hall: I'm Lindsey Hall.

Esther Whieldon: And I'm Esther Whieldon.

Lindsey Hall: Welcome to All Things Sustainable. A podcast from S&P Global. As your hosts, we'll dive in to all the sustainability topics that are reshaping the business world.

Esther Whieldon: Join us every Friday for in depth analysis and interviews with leaders from around the globe. Together, we'll break down big sustainability headlines and cut through the jargon.

Lindsey Hall: We cover climate change quite a bit on this podcast. And we also cover gender equality. In today's episode we are exploring the intersection of these two topics.

Esther Whieldon: According to UN Women, the climate crisis is not gender neutral. Women and girls experience the greatest impacts of climate change which amplifies existing gender inequalities and poses unique threats to their livelihood, health and safety. UN Women is the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women.

We've heard a similar message from previous guests on this podcast. Climate change is disproportionately impacting women in part because they're traditionally responsible for securing food, water and fuel. We'll include a link in our shorts if you'd like to listen to a past episode on this topic.

Lindsey Hall: So how do you address climate and gender equality in tandem? Well, today, with about 1 week to go until International Women's Day on March 8, we're talking to a guest focused on just this topic. Rachel Vestergaard is Founder and CEO of Empower Co., a brokerage firm that's building a global voluntary market for women's empowerment as measured by the W+ standard.

As you'll hear in today's episode, the W+ standard measures 6 domains that are critical for women's empowerment, time savings, income and assets, health, leadership, education and knowledge and food security. I'll also note upfront that the W+ standard is hosted by the S&P Global Commodity Insights Environmental Registry. You'll also hear us mention SDGs. Those are the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals and SDG 5, in particular, is to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Okay. Here's Rachel to explain more.

Rachel Vestergaard: My company is using voluntary markets to catalyze private sector investment into women-led climate solutions and initiatives really investing in them as key community and climate caretakers.

Lindsey Hall: Why women and climate? What's the connection there that people should understand?

Rachel Vestergaard: It's a great question. Women are at the forefront of the climate crisis and many other issues, primarily because they are the ones who are most impacted by them, whether it be in their home life, with their families, health, food security. But really, they're also on the forefront of the solutions, and they are incredible at mitigating and adapting to the climate issues that we're facing at a very rapid rate to keep their communities and households safe. And so they're really the ones who I would say are the most undervalued when we look at how to adequately address the enormous climate crisis that we're facing.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. And talk to me about how Empower goes about doing this. What should our audience understand about the work that you do?

Rachel Vestergaard: So we're building actually the first global voluntary market for women-focused social impact. So kind of the way voluntary carbon markets have transformed our approach to lowering carbon emissions and making it possible for the private sector to invest in climate solutions. The market we're creating provides transparency and transforms how companies engage with gender equity.

And so we actually have something called W+ units, which are an offering of quantifiable third-party audited impact in the lives of women. And those credits are certified by the W+ standard, which is an international third-party audited standard, and we represent projects currently in India, Kenya, Nepal, Morocco and Brazil. So the standard has been around for many years, proven widely and allows the private sector to engage in this type of incredibly transformative work with very low to no risk in getting involved.

Lindsey Hall: Okay. And you're kind of like laughing as you're describing it. And I'm guessing it's partly because it is kind of a new concept for people to get their heads around. Is it fair to say that?

Rachel Vestergaard: It's very fair to say that. I think, especially in the private sector, we've been in primarily a sort of 1.0 offset mindset, as I like to put it, which has been great so far in pushing sustainability initiatives forward and making corporates more accountable around things like their carbon footprint.

But there's a next place for us to go, and that is when we think about net positive and wholly positive benefits. And that's where these credits lie. It's taking it a step further than just offsetting and thinking about how do we really have net positive impact in the world and how do we do that in a way that's transparent and credible.

Lindsey Hall: And for our listeners who might not be familiar, what do you mean by a 1.0 offset mindset? Can you unpack that a bit?

Rachel Vestergaard: Sure. Well, if we just think about sort of ESG, we're very comfortable, I think, at this point with addressing the E and ESG. We have plenty of ways for companies to address their environmental impacts, whether that be internally within their own supply chains or even with the part of their footprint that they cannot reduce with absolute reductions in terms of the voluntary or compliance offset markets.

And so there's been a sense that companies want to neutralize their impacts. They want to have no bad impact, but they also aren't looking at how necessarily they can have quantifiable positive impact. And so going beyond this way of thinking about things, which is really how do we neutralize our bad behavior and taking it a step further and saying, how do we ensure that the planet can be a sustainable thriving space for all of humanity going forward? And what is our role in that? And I think that, that has been less clear for corporates, and that's where these W+ credits that we sell from these certified projects all over the world can help.

Lindsey Hall: So Rachel, take me a little behind the scenes with these W+ credits. How do these work in practice and who is involved?

Rachel Vestergaard: So the way it works is different kinds of initiatives or projects can apply to be certified by the W+ standard, which is a globally recognized award-winning standard for measuring social impact on women. And without getting into too much details, this standard is far from a check-the-box exercise. It covers 6 key domains that impact women's lives.

And those domains are things like time, knowledge and education, income and assets, health, leadership and food security. And each one of those has its own methodology. And so a project could seek to be certified in one or more of those areas for the type of impact that they're having in women's lives. And each W+ credit represents a 10% improvement in the life of a woman from whatever the baseline is that's established in that particular domain.

And that measurement is third-party audited and similarly to how carbon offsets work, there's a unitization of that impact that becomes available after the audit to the private sector. And those credits live on S&P Global's market registry. So as a real example of one of our projects, we represent a project in Nepal working in rural villages in the Sindhuli districts, where women and girls traditionally prepare food for their families over wood fire, which is the story of many women all around the world.

The problem is that this requires them to spend hours of their day gathering, preparing firewood. It's a dangerous activity. It's grueling, time-consuming. And we know the environmental impacts on forest and the impacts on families' respiratory health is also a problem with this method. And so this project provides biogas-fueled clean burning cook stoves to women in the villages.

And what that results in, at least to the extent that it's measured currently under the standard, is that women are saving 2.26 hours per day, so about 16 hours per week. And you can imagine what that would mean to get 16 hours magically appear in your week of time that you didn't have before. And so that discretionary time, they use to care for family members, invest in their own education and betterment, et cetera.

And in particular, there's a woman who spoke about how this project has impacted her life at project level. And I will never be able to get this out of my head. She said, "I used to be known as someone's wife, now they know me by my name". And her name is Nima Doma Lama, and that is exactly the kind of impacts that these projects have. It's more than just what we can quantify through the methodologies, of course. It's the sense and ability that women have to change their lives and to have more agency over their lives and to be valued for that.

Lindsey Hall: So clearly, these projects have a real impact on people and on things like health and also knock-on effects like you talked about for even deforestation and other areas of sustainability. Can you help connect the dots for our listeners between those positive impacts and what's relevant for the business world? Like how should someone listening to this podcast, who's a member of the business community, what should they take away from this?

Rachel Vestergaard: Well, there are many organizations who have made statements, goals or in some form or another, commitments around social impact or in particular, around gender. But there are very few ways currently to quantifiably support those initiatives. As I mentioned before, we have plenty of ways to do that from an environmental standpoint that are measurable and quantifiable, less ways to do that around social impact.

And while social impact credits of different kinds are starting to become more available, these particular W+ credits and the standard behind them have been doing this longer than most other social impact organizations. And so there's a credibility here that companies can lean on to be able to live up to those statements or accomplish those goals that they have.

But really, another thing that is important to note here is that the primary way that companies have been contributing to social impact, to the advancement of women has been through philanthropy. And while that's wonderful, there is very little transparency in that. They often are signing up for a concept or a goal that an organization has.

And while there will always be an important place for philanthropy with the advancement of women and with climate solutions, we need to have more opportunities for companies to invest directly into things that we know are already working because I think that similarly to what happened in the environmental markets, when companies know that something is real, it's credible, it's been third-party audited, et cetera, they're more willing to invest into it and invest into it perhaps at a greater scale than they would have before. And that's really what these credits are offering companies.

And our clients are partnerships that we have with companies like Capri Holdings, which encompasses luxury brands like Jimmy Choo, Versace and Michael Kors. And they know that women are the drivers of their business on every level, from their supply chain to their C-suite and of course, their customers. So they've made an investment into a project we represent, which is ERA, Brazil's Agro Forestry project.

And that project enables women in the Cerrado region of Brazil to grow food forest systems that supplies their family with income, provides more food security and has other benefits environmentally. And so that's just one example of a company's inspiring leadership that is really starting to set the standard for the fashion industry as a whole.

Lindsey Hall: Taking a step back, can you talk to me about why you see women's empowerment as a climate solution?

Rachel Vestergaard: Sure. The simplest way I can say it is that it truly is a derisking activity to have women involved in climate solutions. They already are adapting and mitigating to the crises that they're facing due to our changing climate. But they're often talked about as vulnerable, the earliest victims of the climate crisis, which is all true.

But what we also know is that because women are on the front lines of the crisis, they're the experts. And that vulnerability actually makes expertise. So they're the first to come up with adaptive solutions to help their families and communities survive. They have unique insights into what works and needs to be done to mitigate climate change. And this is why we know that they must be at the forefront when developing and scaling climate solutions.

It's not enough to just have it be a check-the-box exercise where we say women were in the room when this decision was made, or they were consulted about the implementation of a certain activity. They actually need to be valued for their contributions and seen as a critical part of any long-term successful strategy, both from a social impact perspective and from an environmental one.

Lindsey Hall: What is the mechanism for achieving that goal that you've just laid out? How do you make sure that women-led climate solutions actually get that support that they need?

Rachel Vestergaard:One of the things we're seeing as most vital to scaling the advancement of women to meet the needs of the climate crisis and their unique offering that they have for that is through markets like this. Again, if we can quantify impact, if we can show investors in the private sector exactly what they're getting, that is one way to start moving funds. It's also clear that so many organizations have the ESG framework in place, and they have the E covered with lowering carbon emissions and doing all sorts of other environmental efforts, which is wonderful.

And with the G, they can pledge to have 50-50 women impact on the board, for example, around their governance. But most companies are quite lost when it comes to quantifying social impact, which means that even for corporates who want to do better on gender, they're making a good faith effort at impacting the lives of women, but they end up either reinventing the wheel or pinkwashing or supporting projects that don't yield tangible benefits.

And so we're really removing all of those barriers and hoping to get that sort of 2% number that's been hovering around that's going towards women-led organizations to be substantially larger, understanding that if we don't do that, we're all in trouble for solving nearly every SDG. SDG 5 is the one that's related to advancing women and girls. And the more studies and research that come out about the impacts of SDG 5, the more we learn that it underpins the success of every other SDG.

And so this is a much bigger mission that Empower Co. is on. It is to start a voluntary market to quantify this impact and to engage the private sector in greater investments meaningfully, but we also recognize that what will come of this is a ripple effect of women being seen as leaders across multiple spaces where they should be being valued in a more concrete and substantial way.

Lindsey Hall: What is the biggest hurdle you encounter when you're trying to build out the market for W+ credits?

Rachel Vestergaard: I think what we are finding is that it's more just about, again, having the private sector opened their mindset to realizing that what they have been doing and the progress they have made is awesome, high 5s all around. But we can't stop there. We need to be looking at how we meaningfully have net positive impacts on the planet, and that includes the social impact and environmentally. And that includes taking into account areas where you may not be able to perfectly calculate your footprint, but you know that you're having an impact either in a certain sector, so in women's health, for example, or regionally specific.

So for example, within the Cerrado region of Brazil because that's where part of your supply chain you know is sourcing its leather from, even if you don't know exactly which farm it's coming from. So I think companies becoming more proactive and having opportunities to do that with these quantifiable impacts is a really important thing, but it takes some time to kind of wrap their heads around this concept and also, in many cases, move what has traditionally been philanthropic or foundational funding over to fund these more quantifiable business transactions because that's what the voluntary market offers us. And it comes with all of the benefits of being able to trace each unit to specific communities, specific type of impact, et cetera, just like high-quality carbon offsets do.

Lindsey Hall: One thing we love to ask CEOs on this podcast is, how did you get to your current role? When I post this question to Rachel, I learned that her journey included some surprising twists and turns.

Rachel Vestergaard: It was not a linear path. That's for sure. I started in finance as the only female trader on my trading desk in New York City. And that was a thrilling time. That was a time with a lot of achievement, but I felt very unfulfilled, deep in my soul and knew that, that was not my life's work.

So I quit dramatically in front of all the guys one day and took a backpacking trip through the Borneo rainforest where I saw the devastation occurring to clear beautiful pristine rainforest for palm oil plantations and saw proboscis monkeys dead floating down the rivers in Borneo because they get driven out by the fires. They don't know how to swim and they jump in and they drown.

So it was a very visceral reaction that I had to basically the destruction of the planet for consumerism and for these companies who had no accountability in their supply chains. And I was very fortunate enough after that turning point to basically say that I was going to spend the remainder of my life protecting what was left of the natural world. I was able to join a team called Wildlife Works that at the time was developing the world's first UN RE+ project, which is a acronym for reducing emissions for forest degradation and deforestation.

But basically, what that means is protecting highly threatened forests and benefiting the communities within. And that was a new concept in 2011 when we started really developing this project at scale in Eastern Kenya and looking at how can people coexist with conservation efforts because up until that point, there wasn't a lot of value put on the human aspect of conservation.

So I was part of the team that sold the world's first RE+ offsites to companies like Coca-Cola, UPS, Microsoft and Hershey's. And after being with that team for a number of years and learning by doing on the ground with project development, I moved on to be the Senior Vice President of CBL Markets, which is now a large exchange throughout the world.

And I served as an adviser to the W+ standard for 8 years as well as a Board member to initiatives like project regeneration and others. And I founded Empower Co. when my son was 2 years old. It's been almost 3 years now since I founded the company. And I did it because I realized that in all of my work, working on the ground with RE+ project development in boardrooms, working with corporates on their sustainability and CSR strategies.

The biggest missing link to making the whole thing function and function in a way that where we can actually meet the challenges that we are being presented with is that the value and the contributions of women have to be seen as critical to these strategies. And that without that, we are completely fighting this climate crisis issue with one hand behind our back.

And to see women as a siloed separate issue or as a co-benefit to different projects or initiatives is no longer going to work, and it's no longer going to ensure the sustainability of these things that we all really want to achieve. So we're here to change that, and we're able to have these W+ credits exist on a very credible market registry, which is S&P Global's, and we're just so grateful for the opportunity to bring this forth into the world.

Lindsey Hall: So Rachel, I'd love to end this conversation on a forward-looking note by asking, what's next? What is on your road map for 2025? What are you hopeful for?

Rachel Vestergaard: Well, what I'm hopeful about is regardless of our current U.S. political climate, the climate crisis and gender equity issues are solvable issues. And we can't expect, however, to make meaningful advancements in those areas with the same old tools as we've been using.

So while we work on building this voluntary market, we're also looking at catalyzing other types of large investments that will go into women-led and women-powered climate solutions that we need now, not just to mitigate and adapt but to actually end the climate crisis.

And I think that with the upcoming COP 30 in Brazil, we're going to have an opportunity to really put that on the agenda in a more meaningful way than we ever have at any COP before. And I think that every organization that cares about climate solutions working on the ground, around nature-based solutions, carbon removals, you name it, needs to be thinking about what is their gender strategy and how are they going to include that in the negotiations and in the outcomes of COP 30 and beyond.

Lindsey Hall: Well, I look forward to continuing the conversation as this continues to play out. Thank you.

Rachel Vestergaard: Thank you so much, Lindsey.

Lindsey Hall: So today, we heard about the intersection of climate change and gender equality. Rachel talked about the key role women can play in finding solutions to the climate crisis. She said, failing to involve women is like fighting this issue with one hand tied behind our backs. She also said companies need opportunities to invest in credible projects that advance women in climate solutions. And we heard about the way that Empower Co. uses W+ credits to move beyond the philanthropic approaches many companies have traditionally taken.

Esther Whieldon: We'll continue to track how climate change, gender equality and the intersection of these 2 topics play out in the run-up to International Women's Day on March 8. As Rachel mentioned, we'll also be watching how these topics unfold at COP 30. That's the UN Climate Change Conference scheduled to take place in Brazil this November.

Lindsey Hall: Thanks for tuning in, to this episode of All Things Sustainable. If you like what you heard, please subscribe, share and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Esther Whieldon: And a special thanks to our agency partner, the 199. See you next time! 

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