Gender Equity and the Challenge of Climate Change

Climate change continues to exacerbate global hunger, migration, and conflict, with women and girls often bearing the brunt of these negative impacts.

When taken together, gender inequality and the climate crisis represent one of the greatest threats to society, amplifying inequalities that adversely affect the well-being, livelihood, and security of women and girls around the globe.

Accelerating Women’s Climate Innovation

As leaders, innovators, collaborators, and entrepreneurs, women are essential to solving the climate crisis and are powerful advocates at the forefront of finding climate solutions.

Despite this potential for impact, the gender gap persists in the climate finance ecosystem with women and girls facing significant hurdles and barriers to accessing financing for designing and scaling gender-responsive climate solutions.

In 2021, more than $600 billion was directed toward climate-related investments. However, gender-lens investing and investments focused on women-led solutions to climate change accounted for less than $20 billion. However, research and data shows that women-led businesses driven by social responsibility and a commitment to innovation—informed by their own life experience on the front lines of climate change—are likely to produce a better return on investment. Thus, reducing the gender disparity in access to climate finance is not only the right thing to do but also represents an immense opportunity for change and growth.

Impact

In an effort to tackle the challenge of gender equity in climate finance and spur women and girls’ climate innovation, Amazon partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help launch the Climate Gender Equity Fund (CGEF) at COP27 in November 2022, serving as the first private sector funding partner.

Amazon has committed a total of $53 million, including $3 million toward the USAID partnership, to reduce existing barriers for women and girls as they seek access to climate finance. As part of Amazon’s Climate Pledge—a commitment to becoming a net-zero company by 2040—the company allocated an additional $50 million to accelerate investment in women-founded and women-led climate tech companies through the Female Founder’s Initiative of The Climate Pledge Fund, which is Amazon’s corporate investment arm that invests in climate tech that can help Amazon decarbonize its operations.

Since announcing these commitments, Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund has invested in a woman-led climate tech called Genecis—which uses organic waste as an alternative to plastic packaging by creating a biodegradable bioplastic. Additionally, in January 2023 at the North American Leaders’ Summit in Mexico City, Amazon joined with the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) to launch a new public-private partnership in support of the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) program in Mexico and Brazil to promote gender equity. Advancing gender equality and equitable access to climate finance is a critical step toward solving climate change, and these investments will help ensure that women innovators and entrepreneurs have the resources they need to continue to innovate and scale climate solutions.