By Charlie Conchie
A group of top investors including Aviva and Legal & General Investment Management have called on governments to ramp up climate action today by enshrining the role of women within the fight against climate change.
In a letter published by campaign group GenderSmart to mark the start of the COP27 summit, the 15 signatories warn that “far too little progress” has been made to increase the role of women in climate activism in finance, and the scale and ambition of action had suffered as a result.
Aviva, the David Rockefeller Fund, the European Investment Bank and Legal and General Investment Management (LGIM) are among the firms to back the calls and warn that governments need to take action immediately or risk a faster slide into environmental breakdown.
Amanda Blanc, group chief of Aviva, said the fight against climate change was at a pivotal juncture and policymakers needed to act.
“The COP27 climate talks and the upcoming COP15 biodiversity talks are crucial moments that should enable directing trillions of dollars of capital towards tackling shared global threats,” said Amanda Blanc, group chief of Aviva.
“Governments, multilateral institutions and private sector organisations all need to consider how this private capital can better incorporate gender concerns in order to ensure that these trillions of dollars needed to meet our climate goals will flow in an equitable way.”
The firms, convened by campaign groups GenderSmart and the Women in Finance Climate Action Group, have demanded that governments now integrate gender into public and private climate policy frameworks, develop gender metrics and integrate them into climate reporting, as well as improve gender representation in decision making roles in climate finance.
Women are both “disproportionately affected by climate change and under-utilized agents of change”, the groups claimed, with more gender-diverse boards driving better performance in disclosure and decision-making on climate.
A report from non-profit BoardReady last year found that firms with higher female representation at board level outperformed on climate action.
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