Gender & climate investment

This Community of Practice mobilises the collective influence of our community to unlock capital with a gender lens within mainstream climate finance, providing opportunities for shared learning, collaboration, shared deal flow, and examples, tools, frameworks. Together, peers unlock and share useful insights about investment strategy, value creation, measurement, and metrics, producing reports and resources.

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Why should investors care?

There is an ever-growing body of evidence that identifies the critical role women have to play in climate change mitigation and adaptation - women are innovators, leaders, entrepreneurs, workers and customers in climate related fields. Whether at a global, national or local level, within a political, business or social context, many are already leading the fight in the climate crisis. But they remain underrepresented, both in key decision-making positions and as users of capital. Moreover, women and girls, and especially women of colour, will suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change due to a variety of social, cultural and economic factors. 

We believe that merging the gender and climate investment agendas has the power to help create more resilient and equitable societies; whether one leads with climate or one leads with gender, and across many sectors. Failing to address inequality while undertaking system change at the scale required to meet our climate emergency wouldn’t just be fighting with one hand tied behind our back - it would also mean missing a huge opportunity to drive financial returns and positive outcomes for women and the world.

Data highlights

  • Pilot studies of SMEs and clean energy value chains, found that implementing a holistic gender inclusion strategy could impact sales by up to 85%

  • Refugee women (who make up the majority of climate refugees) could generate up to $1.4 trillion to annual global GDP if employment and earnings gender gaps were closed to meet the national levels of hosting countries

  • Closing the financing gaps for girl’s education, leading to smaller family sizes, could draw down projected carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 102.96 gigatons, reports Project Drawdown

  • Companies with high numbers of female board members are more likely to improve their energy efficiency and reduce their environmental impact

  • Firms with gender diverse boards are more likely to consume higher proportions of renewable energy, which also correlates with improved financial performance and increased company value. Research published 2020, Journal of Corporate Finance

  • Women farmers lack the same access to resources as men which, if redressed, could increase on- farm yields by 20 – 30%.

Get involved

If you are just starting to engage in this area, there are several ways forward. Wherever you sit in the investment ecosystem: continue to be bold in ensuring justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion are always part of the conversation on climate finance.

COP27 Call to Action

GenderSmart, the Women in Finance Climate Action Group and the 2X Collaborative launched a call to action for the financial sector in advance of COP27. View the current signatories and read the letter here.

  • Investigate what your pension is invested in, explore investing in public and private market vehicles, engage in shareholder activism, engage with accelerators or incubators on climate/gender initiatives

  • Be intentional about advancing the gender and climate impacts of your products/services, measure this impact, and communicate about it

  • Learn about the opportunities in public and private markets, explore shareholder engagement

  • Set gender and climate targets in your portfolio, do climate and gender related TA for portfolio companies, communicate and report

  • Back climate/gender lens investing initiatives and programmes, bring a climate/gender lens to your due diligence and engagement models with start- ups, fund the development of tools, case studies, reports.

    Cover technical assistance on the climate/gender nexus for funds and companies.

    Support media amplification around this topic, fund convenings and opportunities to increase capacity in the sector

  • Engage in the boardroom and/or use your proxy votes to push funds and businesses to improve their gender and climate metrics, work with investment fund managers to pay more attention to the gender and climate impacts of businesses they invest in, invest in public and private market vehicles with a climate and gender lens.

  • Learn about the investment strategies in climate and in gender, mobilise to engage and represent the voice of the worker and customer and those affected by these investments. Bring your expertise and voice to the decision making table on investments, and share your data.

Tools & knowledge