Women’s Day special: Meet 15 Women leading the Fight Against Climate Change
Hexa Climate extends best wishes on International Women’s Day 2024 and salutes women leaders across the world that are making positive efforts in our fight towards climate change.
From sinking islands to drought-stricken savannas, women endure a disproportionate weight of the global warming crisis, owing to gender disparities. In many parts of the world, women have traditionally served as primary caregivers in families and communities, and as the primary sources of food and fuel, they are more vulnerable to flooding and drought; the United Nations estimates that 80% of individuals displaced by climate change are female.
Women are particularly positioned to be change agents in the fight against climate change, helping to identify strategies to decrease the causes of global warming and adapt to its consequences on the ground. The Paris Agreement recognized this fact, emphasizing the worldwide need to further empower women in climate decision-making. Today, women all over the world, from boardrooms and policy positions to small communities, from research to activism, are utilizing their voices to take leadership and advocate for climate action.
We’ve chosen 15 such women to showcase on International Women’s Day 2024.
1. Christiana Figueres
Diplomacy
After eight years leading a climate-change organization, Christiana Figueres took over leadership of the UNFCCC, the body in charge of international climate-change discussions, at the agency’s lowest point. Just five months before, the globe failed to reach an accord at the 2009 Copenhagen summit. She instilled a distinct sense of hope, seeking to elevate the discussions from what she refers to as “the political trash can.” It worked: Figueres successfully led world leaders toward the Paris Agreement in 2015. Figueres, along with a number of other female negotiators, was effective in shedding light on the gender dimension of climate change. She is currently writing a book about what the world has to do in the next ten years to address climate change.
2. Rhiana Gunn-Wright
Policy
While working in Detroit’s health department in the mid-2010s, Rhiana Gunn-Wright became aware of how the environment influences a wide range of social justice issues. The government urgently needed to address climate change, she reasoned, but “you weren’t going to solve the problem with just solar panels,” she adds. “People were being poisoned.” Gunn-Wright is now taking that comprehensive approach to the national level, working behind the scenes at New Consensus, a think tank with connections to progressive lawmakers. As the group’s Green New Deal policy head, she is in charge of thinking through the program’s nuts and bolts, as well as techniques for pitching the ambitious climate plan.
3. Hilda Heine
Governance
Climate change is directly on Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine’s doorstep. “Around my house, I have had to build a seawall,” she tells me, “because there is water coming over from the shoreline.” The sea is rapidly encroaching on President Heine’s low-lying Pacific island state, and over the last four years, the administration has had to implement adaptive measures such as coast-protection systems and seawalls, she claims. Heine has taken to the international platform to tell the narrative of her country and the terrible options her fellow citizens are facing, including the prospect of relocating. She leads the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of over 50 countries that are extremely vulnerable to climate change, although contributing very little to atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions. Heine is convinced that everyone should take action; she has committed the Marshall Islands to becoming carbon-neutral by 2050, and the country was the first to submit an emissions pledge under the Paris Agreement.
4. Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim
Indigenous Activism
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, from the Mbororo pastoralist community in Chad, has spent the past 10 years working to bridge the gap “between the international decisions [on climate change] with the reality on the ground,” she says. “I want to tell people what it is like in my country.”
Traveling the nation to meet with indigenous groups, she kept hearing how much the environment was changing. “Each year I am seeing resources shrinking, and my people are struggling for survival,” says Ibrahim. Leading up to the historic 2015 climate-change meetings in Paris, she was a key leader among indigenous groups that successfully lobbied to have their rights recognized, and she was selected to speak at the signing ceremony of the accords. Indigenous communities are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, but they can also offer solutions, says Ibrahim.
5. Tessa Khan
Law
Tessa Khan was living in northern Thailand and working for a women’s human-rights NGO when she became aware of a district-court case more than 5,000 miles distant. A court in the Hague found in favor of over 900 Dutch residents and the Urgenda Foundation, which had sued the Netherlands, demanding that the government reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions. Khan saw that the courts could be a significant instrument in combating climate change and, as a result, mitigating what she calls “one of the biggest systemic threats” to international human rights. She relocated to London and joined Urgenda, where she now gives legal support to people all around the world who wish to sue their governments over ineffective climate policy. She thinks the cases will raise attention to the steps governments must take to minimize the use of fossil fuels and demonstrate how regular people will be affected by climate change.
6. Rachel Kyte
Sustainability
Rachel Kyte has emerged as a go-to expert for heads of state and multinational CEOs seeking to shift away from fossil fuels. She has played a key role in the lead-up to the September 2019 U.N. Climate Change Summit, leading the U.N. Secretary General’s call for governments and companies to make additional commitments to accelerate the energy transition. As the World Bank’s climate program leader prior to the Paris Agreement negotiations, Kyte devised techniques to make hundreds of billions of dollars available to developing countries eager to confront climate change but missing the necessary resources. Kyte, who was recently chosen dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, presently leads a nonprofit organization called Sustainable Energy for All, which aims to offer energy to underdeveloped areas while simultaneously assisting them in transitioning away from fossil fuels.
7. Kate Marvel
Science
Kate Marvel uses storytelling to cut through climate change disinformation in her blog entries, tweets, and podcasts. “I don’t see doing science and talking about the science as mutually exclusive things,” she said. Marvel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, contributed to the discovery in 2013 that human activity had very certainly altered global rainfall patterns. She is now an associate research scientist at Columbia University’s NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where she recently collaborated with colleagues to investigate climate models and tree rings, revealing that dryness has been impacted by climate change since 1900. Her approach to climate change may be best summarized in her 2017 TED lecture on the currently unknown impact of clouds on global weather.
8. Sunita Narain
Advocacy
Sunita Narain, an environmental-policy researcher since 1982, has received accolades for her work on topics ranging from rainwater harvesting to tiger protection to air pollution mitigation. “The thing I feel good about is that we’ve always focused on the solutions,” she said. Today, she is concerned that minority voices from the Global South are being drowned out in the climate change debate. “[It] has to be a much more inclusive issue,” she said.
Narain believes Indian politicians and media are starting to take climate change more seriously now that floods and devastation have become a reality. Now they—and leaders from other developing countries—need to speak up at a global level to urgently reduce emissions, she says.
9. Ellen Page
Communication
Late last year, actress and activist Ellen Page read two books—Joan Baxter’s The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest and Ingrid Waldron’s There’s Something in the Water—that opened her eyes to the environmental racism that has plagued generations of indigenous and black communities in her home province of Nova Scotia, Canada. Page poured her rage into a new documentary based on Waldron’s work (and sharing its title), which investigates the health consequences of environmental racism and the resistance activities of affected communities. In the video, Page returns to Nova Scotia and interviews women who are spearheading the charge to repair their towns. They banded together, for example, to stop a corporation from establishing a natural-gas storage facility that would affect the Shubenacadie River, and to fight for the remediation of Boat Harbour, a former aquatic hub for the Pictou Landing First Nation that had been poisoned by wastewater from a neighboring pulp mill.
10. Anne Simpson
Finance
When it comes to shifting the world away from fossil fuels, “money talks,” says Anne Simpson, director of global governance at CalPERS, California’s public pension system. Simpson should know. Her company is one of the world’s largest public funds, and she has utilized the influence that comes with CalPERS’ more than $350 billion in investments to push for reform. Early achievements include convincing some of the world’s largest corporations to report the risk that climate change poses to their operations. To broaden her reach, Simpson co-leads Climate Action 100+, an investor-led movement that engages in behind-the-scenes talks to demand that the world’s top 100 greenhouse gas emitters change their ways. It has pushed mining company Glencore to limit coal production and oil-and-gas major Shell to agree to emission-reduction objectives. Simpson believes that investor activism makes good financial sense.
11. Greta Thunberg
Youth Activism
Greta Thunberg, then 15, began a school strike in Sweden in 2018 to raise awareness about the climate catastrophe, and her message has since spread—despite her avoidance of air travel due to its high carbon emissions. Young people all across the world have followed her lead, striking and marching to demonstrate to adults and decision-makers that this is a serious emergency. “We are children asking, ‘Why should we care about our future when no one else does? And why should we bother learning facts when they don’t matter in this society? “When youngsters say things like that, I believe adults feel terrible”. She arrived in the United States in late August following a 15-day sailing trip across the Atlantic, and she intends to explore the Americas for months while leaving no carbon impact. “This is an existential crisis that is going to affect our whole civilization, the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced,” she said.
12. Kotchakorn Voraakhom
Architecture
As a child, Kotchakorn Voraakhom liked to pry apart cracked pavement to let seedlings burst through Bangkok’s sprawl. Now, the landscape architect designs park-size cracks to help Southeast Asia’s megacities cope with climate change. Last year, her 11-acre project at Chulalongkorn University was Bangkok’s first new public park in 30 years and won awards for its innovative design, which adds much needed “green lungs” to a dense metropolis and absorbs and reuses excess water plaguing Thailand’s -capital—one of the locations most at risk from worsening storms, floods and sea-level rise. This year, she will open a 36-acre plot with the capability of storing more than 2.5 million gallons of water.
13. Miranda Wang
Invention
Miranda Wang went on a school field trip to a waste-management plant ten years ago and was astounded by the amount of plastic she saw there, all going for the dump. Wang, now 25, is the CEO and co-founder of BioCellection, a Silicon Valley firm that uses cutting-edge chemical technology to turn the most commonly used and non-recyclable plastics into new materials. “[Plastics] are just natural compounds and natural carbons tied together in an unnatural way, and once you disrupt that, you can use those natural building blocks to make anything,” Wang said. “We can make a product from plastic garbage that’s not only useful in new products, but it is biodegradable and can break down.”
14. Katharine Wilkinson
Education
Author, public speaker and teacher Katharine Wilkinson has been passionate about protecting the planet since she went on an outdoor retreat 20 years ago as a high school student in North Carolina. “I went from loving the outdoors … to feeling incredibly convicted about how much work there was to be done,” she says. In 2017, the book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming became a best seller. Wilkinson was the primary author. One of her guiding principles is the need to shift the climate-change discourse to “be more courageous and more emotionally intelligent,” she says, and the book is “about moving through what is hard and continuing to rise to the challenge.”
15. Wu Changhua
Business
When Wu Changhua began reporting environmental issues as a young photojournalist in Beijing in 1990, she assumed it was “all about planting trees and keeping the streets clean.” Few Chinese policymakers understood any better, emphasizing unfettered expansion at any cost. Wu learnt quickly as she went into business and campaigning, and her patient cajoling aided in the transformation of the world’s second largest economy from an environmental pariah to a global champion of green concerns. It required tact. While international institutions publicly chastised China for its polluting factories and hazardous rivers, Wu collaborated with officials behind the scenes to help instill global norms in industry and urban development. “For a long time we were ignored, marginalized, but now we’re pretty much mainstream,” Wu said.
Data credits and References
Open source internet and Time.com
