Please join the Center on Global Energy Policy for a Women in Energy dinner and roundtable discussion with Caroline Angoorly, Chief Operating Officer, and Sarah Davidson, External Affairs, NY Green Bank. Ms. Angoorly and Ms. Davidson will discuss their job history, career paths, and perspectives on what it means to be a female leader in the energy industry.   This event is only open to current female grad students. Since space is limited, RSVPs will be accepted on a first-come basis until capacity is reached. Please only RSVP if you can commit to attending. Lunch will be provided.   For more information contact: jem2245@sipa.columbia.edu *** Biography Caroline Angoorly is a senior energy and environmental industry executive with more than 20 years of domestic and international experience in business building, strategy, operations, project and asset management, investment, project finance, and mergers and acquisitions. She knows the energy, resources and environmental sectors, especially power and fuels markets and projects across generating technologies and clean tech, as well as environmental instruments, markets, regulation, and policy, with particular expertise in project development and finance. As COO, Ms. Angoorly is responsible for all aspects of strategy, finance and operations, and supports investment activities. Before joining NY Green Bank, Ms. Angoorly led GreenTao LLC, a specialized business growth, project development, financing, strategy and execution firm. She was also previously head of environmental markets for North America at J.P. Morgan, held several senior executive roles at NRG Energy including SVP & Head of Development, Northeast, was vice president and general counsel at EnelGreenPower, and a partner in the Global Project Finance Group at Milbank, Tweed. Through all these roles, Ms. Angoorly has been involved in originating, structuring, negotiating, closing and managing billions of dollars of energy and infrastructure projects across the globe. Ms. Angoorly holds geology and law honors degrees from Monash University and a Master of Business Administration degree from Melbourne Business School in Australia (partly undertaken at Columbia University in New York). She has lived and worked in the United States, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. She has also done business in various countries in Central and South America, Asia, and Western Europe. Sarah Davidson manages External Affairs for NY Green Bank, where she provides investment, portfolio management, and operations support while leading the organization’s communications, stakeholder engagement, partnership development and public relations efforts. Prior to NY Green Bank, Ms. Davidson was a special assistant to Richard Kauffman, Chairman of Energy and Finance for the State of New York. She supported the Chairman in developing and implementing a strategic plan to scale up clean energy, enhance New York’s competitiveness for clean energy business, and make the State’s energy systems more resilient and reliable. Ms. Davidson was previously the sales and business development coordinator for AGRION, a global network for energy and sustainability professionals. She was also a development associate for the Carbon War Room, an international nonprofit organization working to accelerate the adoption of business solutions that reduce emissions at gigaton scale and advance a low-carbon economy. She also served as a vice president at the Coalition for Green Capital, an advocacy group in Washington, DC, supporting tax and finance policies to expand investment opportunities in clean energy generation and energy efficiency. Ms. Davidson holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Colorado College. She serves on the Board of Directors of Sense & Sustainability, the Adirondack North Country Association, and the S.S. Columbia Project, and the advisory board of the Environmental Film Festival.

Please join the Center on Global Energy Policy?s Women in Energy program for a public panel discussion on the future of clean transportation technology and innovation including smart mobility, electric vehicles, and battery technologies from the technological maturity, market readiness, and policy outlook perspectives. The panel will include the following speakers: Christina Lampe-Onnerud, CEO and Founder, Cadenza Innovation Robyn Marquis, Project Manager, Clean Transportation Program at NYSERDA Goksin Kavlak, Graduate researcher, Trancik Lab at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) at MIT Sharon Di, Assistant Professor, The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University Registration is required. This event is open to press. Please direct media inquiries to Jamie Shellenberger-Bessmann. It will also be livestreamed at: energypolicy.columbia.edu/watch A podcast of this event (in addition to other past Center events) will be available ~12 days after the date of the event through iTunes or via our website.

Please join the Center on Global Energy Policy’s Women in Energy program for a public panel discussion on the world of energy consulting. Whether you are a student looking to get into the field or an energy professional, come out to hear from experts in the field on the diverse range of energy consulting clients and projects, ranging from sustainability consulting for local governments to political risk consulting for corporations.? The panel will include the following consultants: Anita Demkiv, CEO, ADIN Energy Kim Dragoo, Principal, ICF Hilary Novik, Associate – Global Energy and Natural Resources, Eurasia Group Sigal Shemesh,Computational Analyst, BuroHappold Engineering Registration is required. This event is open to press. Please direct media inquiries to Jamie Shellenberger-Bessmann. It will also be livestreamed at: energypolicy.columbia.edu/watch? A podcast of this event (in addition to other past Center events) will be available ~12 days after the date of the event through iTunes or via our website.

Please join NYU’s Center for Global Affairs, Energy Policy International Club (EPIC), and the Center on Global Energy Policy’s Women in Energy program for a public panel focused on energy start-ups. We have experts working in companies that focus on energy efficiency, clean energy finance, and technology joining us to share their experience entering these fields, offer advice on the types of skills companies are looking for, providing insights on how the industry is evolving as well as the current state of women in the energy start-up sector.   The panel will include the following experts: Ali Adler, Director of Partnerships, Sealed Claire Johnson, ‎President, CBJ Energy; Founder, SunEdison Mouchka Heller, Trade Commissioner, Canadian Technology Accelerator, Infrastructure and Energy  Angela Ferrante, Chief Marketing Officer, SparkFund (moderator) LOCATION: New York University  Woolworth Building 15 Barclay Street, room: 430 New York, NY 10007 Registration is required. This event is open to press. It will also be livestreamed at: energypolicy.columbia.edu/watch  A podcast of this event (in addition to other past Center events) will be available ~12 days after the date of the event through iTunes or via our website.

This commentary represents the research and views of the author. It does not necessarily represent the views of the Center on Global Energy Policy. The piece may be subject to further revision. Contributions to SIPA for the benefit of CGEP are general use gifts, which gives the Center discretion in how it allocates these funds. More information is available at https://energypolicy.columbia.edu/about/partners. Rare cases of sponsored projects are clearly indicated.

Prominent women leaders have played a critical role in the success of global climate negotiations and have contributed to a fuller understanding of the gendered vulnerabilities linked to climate change. The adoption of gender perspectives on climate action ensures that such action not only addresses (rather than reinforces or worsens) gender inequality but also has the greatest possible positive impact on people and the planet.[1] If the 27th global climate Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022, is to produce policies that meet the scale of the climate crisis, attending nations must consider the gender balance of their delegations and hosted speakers.

Women’s political leadership is integral to climate change political awareness and government action.[2] In many societies around the world, women and girls disproportionately bear the impact of climate change. The United Nations (UN) estimates that around 80 percent of those displaced by climate change are women and girls.[3] This gendered differentiation has fostered women’s leading role in climate activism generally, as well as their prominent positioning in nongovernmental organizations focused on climate action.[4] Women have been involved in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process since its inception. While the number of women participants has fluctuated through the years, the quality of women’s participation has been notable.

Part of women’s contribution to global climate diplomacy has been their integration of a gender perspective, which has been shown to increase the efficiency and efficacy of climate policy by ensuring that it addresses rather than hinders gender equity.[5] If climate policies are to meet the moment, they will need to go beyond economic and technological considerations to address more holistic ones linked to human values, such as equity and the interests of underrepresented groups.

This commentary, part of the Women in Energy Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, analyzes the contribution of women to climate diplomacy and the important role of a gender framework in promoting successful climate action, now and going forward. It concludes with a set of policy recommendations for national governments and international bodies invested in resolving the climate crisis.

Recent Gains for Women in Diplomacy

Academic research on women’s participation in global negotiations highlights its positive impact on diplomatic outcomes. For example, women’s participation in peace negotiations contributes to more durable agreements.[6] Similarly, parties to peace and constitution draft negotiations since 1990 were more likely to reach an agreement when women’s groups were influential in the negotiations process than when women’s voices were not included.[7]

Women’s contributions to peacemaking have been linked to women’s greater willingness than men to organize across cultural and sectarian divides.[8] Women have also contributed to diplomatic efforts by staging mass protests and mobilizing public opinion campaigns that influence outcomes. For example, civic campaigns led by women in Northern Ireland were essential to the success of the 1998 public referendum on the Good Friday Agreement and pushed for inclusion of important local community priorities that have supported the postconflict recovery there.[9]

In recent years, a growing number of countries have begun to institutionalize gender equality as a foreign policy priority through the use of special envoys, action plans, and foreign aid targets.[10] In 2014, Sweden undertook a comprehensive plan to promote women’s leadership in foreign policy and commit explicitly to policies that advanced gender equality. Other major countries, including the United States, have followed suit. As of today, more than 100 United Nations member states, roughly half of all UN members, have adopted national action plans on women, peace, and security.[11]

The track record of women’s political leadership is significant to climate policy and policy making. There is a positive association between the level of women’s representation in a country’s legislative body and the stringency of its climate policies, directly resulting in lower carbon dioxide emissions.[12] Taking one example, in her capacity as German chancellor, Angela Merkel played a pivotal role in organizing the integration of scientific targets into climate agreements, starting with the G8 in 2007. Additionally, women’s political representation contributes to higher spending on international health and foreign aid, as well as expenditures more directly relevant to women’s needs.[13] That’s important for climate change deliberations where direct climate finance and aid from developed nations to the global south for adaptation and mitigation responses are essential to facilitating global agreements and implementation. Ultimately, women’s critical role in climate policy stems in large measure from the fact that women, on average, tend to care more about climate change than men.[14] Women leaders also tend to have and maintain better access to local community networks that can inform negotiating positions and broaden understanding of social issues that need to be resolved to promote successful accords.[15] This is particularly important for climate change policy where geographic impacts are unequal, and knowledge of localized effects is evolving. Higher participation from women in climate negotiations can boost the collective intelligence and broaden the perspective of the negotiating group, thus leading to more positive outcomes.[16]

There is a vast academic literature on how gender factors into climate vulnerability. In particular, studies show how existing inequality and power imbalances in various societies can inhibit the resilience of women and girls to climatic events and impacts.[17] Gendered patterns of adaptation to climate change events and challenges are related less to feminized intrinsic vulnerability of women to climate risks than to cultural and socioeconomic contexts in which resource scarcity and disaster response and planning might disadvantage women. In many locations, for instance, women are less likely to own land and other resources that might protect them in a climate-related disaster[18] or may have less access to institutional support and information than their male counterparts.[19] Gender-focused work in Bangladesh shows higher rates of mortality during natural disasters for women, who, in certain locales, are not allowed to participate in public meetings and therefore are less apt to receive disaster and emergency preparedness information or receive medical and food assistance in the aftermath of such an event.[20] Similarly, evidence from sub-Saharan Africa suggests the rising challenge of resource scarcity disproportionately harms women and girls, whose daily work is more homebound and highly dependent on access to water and wood fuel, making them less able to migrate for employment or food access.[21] Thus, some scholars argue that a rights-based approach to climate change policy is needed to ensure gender representation, equity, and empowerment.[22]

The differentiated gendered experiences and requirements related to climate change highlight the importance of elevating diverse women leaders—not only from different countries but also from different settings, such as cities and rural regions—in global climate negotiations. Drawing on their deep links to local communities, women leaders can provide a deeper understanding of needs related to climate finance and adaptation response, energy access and mitigation, and institutional capacity building. They have also tended to take a more activist role in demanding climate action by governments.[23]

Women in Climate Negotiations

Similar to foreign diplomacy, climate change diplomacy has benefited from the enormous contributions of women leaders. For example, Patricia Espinosa, former UN climate chief, was among those who catalyzed the $100 billion climate fund at the Cancun Agreements to aid the developing world’s climate response. Angela Merkel presided over the first UN climate conference in Berlin in 1995 as Germany’s environment minister, and then as chancellor she played a pivotal role in convincing the G8 to agree to the necessity of carbon emissions-reduction targets based on the science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. Laurence Tubiana, special representative of France to COP21 in 2015, played a key role in negotiating the Paris Agreement, among other important women leaders, including Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the UNFCCC.

More broadly, women’s participation in climate negotiations has grown since the first COP in 1995, though not necessarily in linear fashion.

Women Heads of Delegations

Since the UNFCCC began tracking women’s participation in climate negotiations, the percentage of women heads of delegations has been continuously low (see Figure 1). Between 2008 and 2011, for instance, it remained below 20 percent. The peak was only 26 percent at COP23 in Bonn in 2017, and the three COPs since then have followed a downward trend.

Figure 1: Percentage of female heads of delegation, 2008-2021

Women Delegates

At the first COP in 1995, only 18 percent[24] of the delegates in attendance were women. Between 2008 and 2012, an average of 32 percent of UNFCCC delegates were women, thus marking an improvement.[25] As mentioned previously, however, this progress was not linear (see Figure 2). Given that women make up 50 percent of the global population, it was also insufficient. At COP23 in Bonn, women made up 37 percent[26] of the climate delegates present. Among the 11,306 national delegates at COP24 the following year, 38 percent[27] were women, increasing by only 1 percent despite increased policy commitments and activities meant to promote equal gender participation. Most recently, at COP26, only 35 percent of attending delegates were women. At the meeting, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley stated that “both ambition and needed faces are not present in Glasgow.”[28] Despite increased initiatives and efforts toward gender equity, the gender balance is still lopsided.

Figure 2: Percentage of female party delegates, 2008-2021

Women’s Participation in Constituent Bodies

The UNFCCC’s gender composition report has two components: the gender breakdown of national delegations to COP meetings, which was previously discussed, and the gender breakdown of technical and decision-making bodies, which are known as constituted bodies. Although the changes to the gender balance in the latter bodies are inconsistent, often fluctuating from year to year, several of them reached over 50 percent women’s participation: in 2018, the Adaptation Committee had 56 percent women’s membership, and the Paris Committee on Capacity-Building had 58 percent. In 2021, the Adaptation Committee reached 63 percent women’s membership,[29] though the Clean Development Mechanism Executive Board saw only 10 percent, highlighting the aforementioned inconsistency.[30]

Positive trends in women’s participation at constituted body meetings were reported in 2019 but reversed a year later. In 2019, 8 out of 13 constituted bodies had women’s representation surpassing 38 percent.[31] In 2020, however, only 5 out of 15 constituted bodies met that threshold.[32] In 2019, 2020, and 2021, women governmental delegates occupied 33 percent of all positions in constituted bodies, showing that women’s participation has not progressed substantially since 2018. In some cases, women’s membership in constituted bodies decreased.[33] Nevertheless, at the virtual May/June Subsidiary Body for Implementation meetings in 2021, there was equal registration of male and female government delegates. At plenary meetings in the same year, which are meetings attended by all delegates, men made up 60 percent of active speakers and spoke 74 percent[34] of the time in the plenary, showing that there is a difference between equal registration and equal participation.

As part of their leadership work, women have injected an integral gender perspective into climate action at the highest levels. At the first COP in Berlin in 1995, an international women’s forum—Solidarity in the Greenhouse—was convened in parallel to the official meeting and presented a letter of requests to the chair of the COP, Angela Merkel. The goal was to integrate gender perspectives, viewpoints, and considerations into policies to be endorsed through the UN COP processes. At COP6 in The Hague, Netherlands in 2000, a side event on “feminine values” related to climate change brought increased attention to the role of women in the negotiations. The next COP in Marrakech, Morocco, included a formal endorsement in which, going forward, the UN Secretariat should determine the gender composition of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol bodies and promote more nominations of women. At COP13 in Bali in 2007, a worldwide network of women for climate justice was established. The president of the Bali conference, Indonesian Minister of Environment Rachmat Witoelar, declared a commitment to mainstream gender equality into COP processes and outcomes.

By COP21 in Paris in 2015, gender-specific references were incorporated into the Preamble, Purpose, Adaptation, Finance, and Capacity-Building sections of the draft agreement, building on work developed at plenary meetings at the Lima Work Program on Gender in 2014. COP decision 1/CP21, which annexes the Paris Agreement, explicitly mentions gender equality and empowerment of women as fundamental to climate action. At COP25, parties agreed to a five-year enhanced Lima work program (36.CP7) regarding gender participation and a related gender action plan.

These efforts are a good starting point, but more can be done to elevate gender analysis and integrate inclusive perspectives into diplomatic discourse and solution building for the global climate crisis. As this commentary lays out, drawing more women diplomatic leaders and activists into global climate policy work not only enables them to contribute more robustly to climate processes and frameworks but also offers opportunities to fashion solutions that will be more sustainable and just.

Recommendations: COP27 and Beyond

The following policy recommendations can help to achieve this important outcome.

The United Nations, in its Women Watch fact sheet on climate change and gender, calls on governments to “incorporate gender perspectives into their national policies, actions plans, and other measures on sustainable development and climate.”[35] If governments wish to heed this call, they will need to carry out systematic gender analysis, including for nationally determined contributions and national adaptation plans, and establish gender-sensitive benchmarks, including for climate negotiation roles. Countries should also work to ensure women are equally included on the docket for plenary speeches at the COPs to increase visibility of diverse perspectives and give women leaders equal access to this important element of the negotiating process.

As influential geopolitical actors in climate negotiations, the United States, China, and the European Union are well positioned to take a bolder stance on promoting women’s leadership in global climate talks, including by ensuring equal representation in climate change bodies. The United States took the important step of establishing an ambassador-at-large position at the US Department of State with a singular focus on global women’s issues, including women’s economic empowerment and women’s roles in disaster responses, health, and climate adaptation. Other governments should follow suit, and the ambassadors at large should be included in national delegations to COP meetings. Governments should also incorporate training on gender equality and climate change for all delegates attending UNFCCC meetings and workshops and monitor their officially sponsored side events to ensure gender equality on panels and among presenters.

Particular care must be given to the inclusion and equal participation of indigenous women. Although making up only 6.2 percent of the worldwide population, indigenous people protect 80 percent of remaining biodiversity and 25 percent of land surface worldwide. Indigenous women have been leading the resistance against natural resource exploitation and climate change, from the Kainai women’s blockade against Murphy Oil in 2011 in Southern Alberta to Aleta Baun and the Mollo peoples’ protests against mining in 2007 on Timor Island, which eventually forced all mining companies to leave the area. The voices and perspectives of indigenous women on the front line of the fight against climate change can help sharpen the policy proposals of the United States and other governments and widen their impact.

Similarly, the perspectives and knowledge bases of young women climate activists must be incorporated into policy action and applied by policy makers. One idea is to give young women climate activists and groups a platform at international negotiations, where they can also receive formal training and preparation for serving as delegates. For instance, youth women forums could be run in parallel to COP, giving participants the chance to debate and formulate policy proposals that can then be incorporated into official COP meetings.

To ensure that women are adequately prepared to participate fully in international climate deliberations, the United Nations should expand training programs for women delegates, especially those from least developed countries where resources may be constrained, including virtual or hybrid programming. The United Nations should also consider providing travel support for women to attend and speak at official events as well as side events at COPs. For their part, major donors to the United Nations’ system should ensure that sufficient finance has been targeted toward achieving gender equality in official global climate meetings, both for COP and for constituted bodies. Such funding could be used to target training and travel assistance to support the mission of reaching 50 percent participation in climate-related activities.

Most pointedly, given that COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022 is expected to have a significant focus on climate adaptation and climate adaptation finance, as well as women’s proportionally high participation in disaster recovery, small-scale agriculture, and social care roles, women’s voices should be featured at the meeting in all aspects, including as delegates, plenary speakers, participants, and speakers in the many side events that will be associated with the climate meetings.

Notes

[1] Rebecca Pearse, “Gender and Climate Change,” WIREs Climate Change 8 (2017): 451, https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.451.

[2] Astghik Mavisakalyan and Yashar Tarverdi, “Gender and Climate Change: Do Female Parliamentarians Make Difference?” European Journal of Political Economy 56 (2019): 151–164, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2018.08.001.

[3] Emily Chan, “Why We Desperately Need More Female Leaders Making Decisions on Climate Change,” Vogue, November 10, 2021, https://www.vogue.com/article/female-leaders-cop26-decisions-on-climate-change.

[4] Somini Sengupta, “Young Women Are Leading Climate Protests. Guess Who Runs Global Talks,” New York Times, November 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/climate/climate-activists-glasgow-summit.html.

[5] Minu Hemmati and Ulrike Röhr, “Engendering the Climate Change Negotiations: Experiences, Challenges, and Steps Forward,” Gender & Development 17, no. 1 (2009): 19–32, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13552070802696870.

[6] Jana Krause, Werner Krause, and Piia Bränfors, “Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations and the Durability of Peace,” International Interactions 44, no. 6 (2018): 985–1016, 10.1080/03050629.2018.1492386.

[7] Marie O’Reilly, Andrea Ó. Suilleabháin, and Thania Paffenholz, “Reimaging Peacemaking: Women’s Roles in Peace Processes,” International Peace Institute, June 2015, https://cve-kenya.org/media/library/Reilly_et_al_2015_Reimagining_Peacemaking_Womens_Roles_in_Peace_Processes.pdf.

[8] Council on Foreign Relations, “Women’s Participation in Peace Processes: Why It Matters,” website interactive, accessed August 22, 2022, https://www.cfr.org/womens-participation-in-peace-processes/why-it-matters.

[9] Council on Foreign Relations, “Women’s Participation in Peace Processes: Northern Ireland Case Study,” website interactive, June 2020, https://www.cfr.org/womens-participation-in-peace-processes/northern-ireland.

[10] Jamille Bigio and Rachel Vogelstein, “Understanding Gender Equality in Foreign Policy,” discussion paper, Council on Foreign Relations, June 2020, https://www.cfr.org/report/understanding-gender-equality-foreign-policy.

[11] Women Peace and Security Programme, “1325 National Action Plans,” http://1325naps.peacewomen.org/.

[12] Mavisakalyan and Tarverdi, “Gender and Climate Change.”

[13] Ibid.

[14] Chan, “Why We Desperately Need More Female Leaders.”

[15] Council on Foreign Relations, “Women’s Participation in Peace Processes: Why It Matters.”

[16] Susan Buckingham, “Call in the Women,” Nature 468 (2010): 502, https://doi.org/10.1038/468502a.

[17] Pearse, “Gender and Climate Change.”

[18] Margaret Alston and Kerri Whittenbury, eds., Research, Action, Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change (Dordecht: Springer, 2013).

[19] Ibid.

[20] Khurshed Alam and Md. Habibur Rahman, “Women in Natural Disasters: A Case Study from Southern Coastal Region of Bangladesh,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 8 (2014): 68–82, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2014.01.003.

[21] Tasokawa Kakota, Dickson Nyariki, David Mkwambisi, and Wambui Kogi-Makau, “Gender Vulnerability to Climate Variability and Household Food Insecurity,” Climate Development 3 (2011): 298–309, https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2011.627419.

[22] Beth Bee, Maureen Biermann, and Petra Tschakert, “Gender, Development, and Rights-Based Approaches: Lessons for Climate Change Adaptation and Adaptive Social Protection,” in Research, Action, and Policy, Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change, eds. Margaret Alston and Kerri Whittenbury, (Dordecht: Springer, 2013), 95–108.

[23] Sengupta, “Young Women Are Leading Protests.”

[24] George Carter and Elise Howard, “Pacific Women in Climate Change Negotiations,” Policy Forum, March 9, 2021, https://www.policyforum.net/pacific-women-in-climate-change-negotiations/.

[25] Katharina Höne, “The ‘Doha Miracle’? Where Are the Women in Climate Change Negotiations?” E-International Relations, January 18, 2013, https://www.e-ir.info/2013/01/18/the-doha-miracle-where-are-the-women-in-climate-change-negotiations/.

[26] Brianna Craft and Samantha McCraine, “Women in the UN Climate Negotiations: Are We Tipping the Balance?” International Institute for Environment and Development, March 7, 2019, https://www.iied.org/women-un-climate-negotiations-are-we-tipping-balance.

[27] UNFCCC, “Women Still Underrepresented in Decision-Making on Climate Issues under the UN,” November 27, 2019, https://unfccc.int/news/women-still-underrepresented-in-decision-making-on-climate-issues-under-the-un.

[28] Maria Tanyag, “We Need More Female Leaders in the Fight against Climate Change,” The Guardian, November 11, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/11/female-leaders-climate-crisis-cop26-diverse.

[29] UNFCCC, “Overrepresentation of Men in UN Climate Process Persists,” October 12, 2021, https://unfccc.int/news/overrepresentation-of-men-in-un-climate-process-persists.

[30] Ibid.

[31] UNFCCC, “Women Still Underrepresented.”

[32] Ibid.

[33] UNFCCC, “Overrepresentation of Men in UN Climate Process Persists.”

[34] Ibid.

How can the US and Canada cooperate to meet international and domestic climate targets? 

To try and answer that question, host Jason Bordoff spoke with Catherine McKenna – the former Canadian Minister of Infrastructure and Communities and former Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change. 

McKenna, who recently joined the Center on Global Energy Policy as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow, was a lead negotiator of the Paris Agreement before introducing and successfully defending landmark legislation that established a carbon price across Canada. 

In this conversation, the pair discuss Canada’s decarbonization strategy, misogyny in climate politics, building US-Canadian partnerships in tackling climate change, and her hopes for this new, exciting stage in her career. 

The Biden Administration recently released a blueprint for how the U.S. could get nearly half of its electricity from the sun by 2050 called, “The Solar Futures Study.” But reaching that 50% will require an expansive, multi-sector investment of money and resources toward the clean electricity source that meets only about 4% of the nation’s power demand now.

Host Bill Loveless dug into the hows of deploying solar widely and effectively with Mary Powell, the recently-appointed CEO of Sunrun, a leading residential solar company in the U.S. 

Mary previously headed up the Vermont-based electric utility, Green Mountain Power. 

While there, Mary was known for being a disruptor in the utility space in her embrace of clean energy reforms. 

Bill and Mary spoke about the tricky nature of the residential solar market, how solar is figuring into congressional legislation and how electric utilities can work with the clean energy transition instead of fighting it.

This episode originally aired on October 20th, 2020.

From California wildfires and Gulf Coast hurricanes to flooding in China and Pakistan, the impacts of climate change have grown increasingly evident. And whether it is agricultural workers, low-income and minority communities, or the world’s poorest in the Global South, the severe inequities in who bears the burden of climate change as well as in air and water pollution is also receiving growing recognition. 

In this episode of Columbia Energy Exchange, host Jason Bordoff is joined by one of the leading reporters today writing about the links between a warming planet and such issues as race, conflict, natural disasters, and big tech: Somini Sengupta. 

Somini is the international climate reporter for The New York Times. A George Polk Award-winning foreign correspondent, she previously worked in other capacities at The New York Times as its United Nations correspondent, West Africa Bureau Chief, and South Asia Bureau Chief.

She spoke about the critical role journalists play in telling the stories that help illuminate how climate change affects families and workers around the world. 

The Biden Administration has promised that 40% of its investments in clean energy will go into disadvantaged communities that experience the worst impacts of the changing climate. But as they work to make good on these promises, there are questions about how Biden’s team will execute.

In this episode, host Jason Bordoff speaks with Heather McTeer Toney about what true climate justice should look like. She’s a former Mississippi Mayor, Obama EPA Regional Administrator and now a Climate Justice Liaison for the Environmental Defense Fund and Senior Advisor to Moms Clean Air Force.

They spoke about what it will take to elevate black and brown voices in climate policy. The conversation also touched on the massive infrastructure bill making its way through Congress, which will have a material impact on how energy systems, industry, roads, and transit are built in frontline communities.