Gender & Climate Investment: A strategy for unlocking a sustainable future

February 2021

Content Partner: Kite Insights

Climate change is set to cause unimaginable ecological, societal and economic disruption if its progress is not slowed. And these impacts will disproportionately affect women, low-income, and other disadvantaged groups. By the same token, gender equality and women’s leadership can jump-start climate action and climatesmart solutions, to build environmental sustainability and resilience.

While sustainable investing is no longer a new kid on the block, investment strategies that take an integrated gender and climate lens to investment decisions are still relatively new. Investment in climate action exceeded $500 billion in both 2017 and 2018, while in 2020 green bonds and green debt instruments crossed the cumulative $1 trillion mark. The field was helped by shortterm impacts synching well with funding cycles and being easier to measure than the typically longer-term impacts of gender-positive investing.

Gender lens investing as a phrase is only just over a decade old. The resulting lack of longitudinal data reduces the ability to perform predictive modelling in gender-lens investment. The two investment areas have tended to operate, as a result, in silos, but integration of the two can unlock huge untapped opportunities.