More and more investors are waking up to the urgency of the climate crisis, using their capital to invest in climate mitigation, adaptation, resilience and biodiversity.
But too much of this investment continues to address climate in isolation, separate to and distinct from the world around it. The truth is that the climate crisis is a human crisis: both in the sense that humans created it, and that its impacts mirror and reinforce existing patterns of inequality.
Already, 3.6 billion people around the world live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change, with low-income people in the Global South, along with Indigenous communities and low-income communities of color in developed markets, hit first and worst. Gender is a key factor in how the impacts of climate change are distributed, too, with women comprising 80 percent of climate refugees, and Indigenous women, in particular, playing a vital role as stewards and solution-creators in the natural environments in which they work and live.
Despite this, frontline communities have been underrepresented and underserved in climate resiliency efforts to date, mirroring their underinvestment in the investment field as a whole.
If we want to effectively address the climate crisis, we need the insights and intelligence of the people most affected: as community leaders, decision makers, entrepreneurs, customers, investors and investees. To do this, we need to start bringing a more sophisticated and inclusive lens to climate investment — one that fuses together climate with gender and a broader justice, equity, diversity and inclusion lens.
Getting inclusive
In February, 2X Global, a new global membership and field-building organization for investors across the capital spectrum, formed out of GenderSmart and 2X Collaborative, released a guide illustrating how investing in this way can look in practice. The guide highlights the urgency and opportunity of investing in what we call "inclusive gender and climate finance," as well as offering concrete examples of how different types of investors are applying this set of lenses, and resources you can use to bring this approach to your own investment portfolio.
To identify inclusive gender and climate finance opportunities, we looked for investments that met criteria across three umbrellas: gender (entrepreneurship, leadership, employment, consumption and investing in financial intermediaries); climate (mitigation, adaptation, resilience and biodiversity); and justice (repairs existing social injustices, provides voice, agency and ownership of solutions, contributes to a just transition, and addresses racial and ethnic inequity at the intersection of gender and climate).
Although this criteria is extensive, we found a number of forward-thinking vehicles and businesses that are approaching these lenses in different ways, spanning debt finance, angel funding, private markets investments, grant making and direct investments across both developed and emerging markets.
Addressing root causes
The Matriarch Revolutionary Fund, for example, is an Indigenous-owned integrated capital investment fund managed by and for Indigenous women across the United States. The fund invests in Native women entrepreneurs by providing access to patient capital in ways that align with the fund’s five Rs: relational, rooted, restorative, regenerative and revolutionary.
Current investees include Itality Plant Based Foods, a woman-owned restaurant that provides sustainable plant-based, locally sourced food to underserved communities. Owner Tina Archuleta understands the challenges of living in a food desert and has been determined to increase food sovereignty while addressing nutritional deficiencies and disease caused by a modern food diet and an inefficient food supply chain system to rural and tribal communities.
Family foundation KL Felicitas (KLF) has made gender, climate and social justice considerations central to its portfolio since its inception. KLF’s investees include Aruwa, a Lagos-based, Black female-f
Read More
