Women’s Forum has launched a toolkit to promote women to key positions and take the lead in shaping climate-change strategies.
The Women’s Forum is ready to engage with businesses and institutions that want to learn and share best practices. This toolkit has been created based on the experience of their partners and over three years of ongoing research by the Women4ClimateAction Daring Circle.
The Daring Circle is led by BNP Paribas, in collaboration with Bouygues, Colas, Engie, and Microsoft as Global Partners. The Circle is supported by KPMG as Knowledge Partner, with contributions from CARE France, ClimateSeed, Ministère de la transition écologique, OECD, R20, SEforAll, Société pour l’encouragement de l’industrie nationale, and Syntec Numérique ; and HEC as Academic Partner.
Whether you are a business or private sector leader, this toolkit serves as a resource to organizations who are ready to act today. It contains:
- recommendations of actions
- case studies and best practices
- indicators to monitor on progress
- online resources and references
5 levers are activated, based on the 5 pillars of the Charter of Engagement on Women Leading Action that the Women4ClimateAction Daring Circle released in 2019, which has been signed by over 500 businesses, civil society institutions, public authorities and individual leaders:
- Leadership and representation: Diverse leadership in businesses and in communities makes for better and more inclusive decision-making on climate action and other issues. Businesses should set targets for women’s representation in their own sustainability teams. Leadership development and mentorship programmes for women and other groups should have climate change and sustainability as core components.
- Education: Education is essential to women’s ability to fully participate in climate action and should be a key area of support for businesses’ philanthropic investments. Within businesses, awareness of climate change and how it intersects with gender and human rights is also essential to organisation’s ability to innovate for climate action and reduce emissions. Businesses must ensure that their reskilling and upskilling activities related to climate change are equally accessible to women.
- Access to means of action: including energy, legal rights, property ownership, finance, mobility, and health. Increasing the access to means of action for women is essential to the societies’ ability to combat climate change and build resilience at the pace and scale required. By using gendered analysis and applying principles such as the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles, businesses can identity the specific needs of their stakeholders in supply chains and elsewhere to increase their access to resources and rights that enable women to play their full role in climate mitigation and adaptation.
- Data: Collecting and utilising gender-disaggregated data is the vital foundation on which all gender-responsive climate action is built. Businesses should prioritise the collection of this data and working with partners and other institutions to do so. This data should be shared with other organisations and become a key component of wider industry benchmarks and measures of sustainability performance.
- Finance: Increasing the deployment of gender-responsive financing and spending is critical to scaling climate action of all types. Businesses can establish gender-based criteria and principles to guide gender-responsive investment and procurement, leveraging a growing number of tools and standards to guide their actions.