The Intersection of Equity and the Environment

Mil Niepold:
What really set me off on this course that I'm on now is the fact that when women's empowerment and educating girls, because that has a huge carbon reduction power, when those solutions were put side by side, they ranked number one. But everyone wants to talk about electric vehicles and porous pavements and packaging innovations and green buildings and carbon capture and all of these things. I call those the male-dominated solutions. The one solution we're not talking about is the one right in front of us, which is women's empowerment.
Michael Torrance:
Welcome to Sustainability Leaders. I'm Michael Torrance, Chief Sustainability Officer at BMO. On this show, we will talk with leading sustainability practitioners from the corporate, investor, academic and NGO communities to explore how this rapidly evolving field of sustainability is impacting global investment, business practices and our world.
Speaker 3:
The views expressed here are those of the participants and not those of Bank of Montreal, its affiliates or subsidiaries.
Melissa Fifield:
Thanks for joining us. I'm Melissa Fifield, Head of the BMO Climate Institute, and today I'm joined by Mil Niepold, Founder and President of The Mara Partners, a strategic advisory company working at the intersection of equity and the environment. Welcome to our podcast, Mil.
Mil Niepold:
Thank you, Melissa. I'm happy to be here with you.
Melissa Fifield:
You describe your work occurring at the intersection of equity and the environment. Why is this intersection so important?
Mil Niepold:
Yes, and that is, in fact, you put your finger on it. The intersection of equity and the environment is so important because it is in fact what I often call the best-kept secret in all of our efforts to address climate change. Many people have many solutions. Some organizations have even documented the solutions, but the solutions that have been proven to be the most effective are often the ones we use the least. I'm excited to be here today to talk to you about how we can change that.
Melissa Fifield:
Maybe you can describe for our listeners a little bit more about The Mara Partners work and describe the integrated gender and climate framework that you've developed.
Mil Niepold:
So first of all, I founded The Mara Partners in 2011 after decades of work in the human rights space, notably in what is normally known as ESG consulting or global social compliance. I worked with a very laudable and amazing organization called Verite, and many people joked that that would be it. I would be there forever and ever because I was one of the pioneers of the ESG field and why not? We were doing amazing work, and I think the why not is because of climate change.
Two things happened. One, I realized that as much as I've been working in human rights since I was even in middle school, human rights in many ways is taking a backseat to climate change. The reason for that, and the reason why I say everybody's in the climate change business now whether you like it or not, is because all progress on human rights and progress on women's rights and all the other issues we work on and care about are getting eroded by climate change.
So as such, if we want to be effective, and if we want programs to end child labor or end deforestation or so on and so on to be effective, we have to really look at them in the context of climate change. There are no human rights programs that can sort of operate over on the side in a vacuum. So about seven years ago, I developed something known as the IGCF, which is the Integrated Gender and Climate Framework. This is a proprietary tool that is used within companies. The first company to begin using this was Mondelez, the global food and snack company. I can't give you the details on a company by company basis on how it plays out, but I can absolutely give you a sense of what it is, and I'll give you a specific example.
So the IGCF basically takes the first step in the framework is to take a very broad brush look at every aspect of a company's supply chain. How is procurement handled? How are supplier partnerships handled? Work with the legal departments, all the departments that you might expect in a traditional sustainability approach, and look at them through a gender lens and say, "To what degree are women included in every process?" And look at the metrics. Start with the most basic things. Is sex disaggregated data even collected? Are systems talking to one another to make sure that that data is collected? Because without that, there is no way to know what's really going on around gender.
So the first step is really a hard look at the way things are done," and then the next step is to say, "Okay, great. We're doing this work," let's say on women, gender, women's empowerment, things like that. That can happen both at headquarters from a human resource perspective or it can happen overseas with suppliers, community engagement committees, that kind of thing.
The next step is to say, "What are we doing on the environmental front?" Many companies today have programs that are on the, if you will, the social side, the E, the S, and the G. So they have the S, and then on the other side, they have the environmental work being done. The environmental work has to have a gender lens, and the women's empowerment work has to have a climate lens. My favorite example of this intersectionality, and then I'll explain why this matters so much ... Later we're going to talk about cake. Happy to say on a Friday afternoon there will be cake, but we'll get to that in a minute ... The way intersectionality plays out in the traditional case of a women's livelihood project. Many companies work with what are known as Village Savings and Loan Association, VSLA, a model that was pioneered by CARE, the large global civil society organization. When you have women's livelihood programming, it is pretty typical that you might find that women are being trained on things like tailoring skills or soap making, candles, you name it, any sort of additional livelihoods that they might have.
Then on the other hand, you'll have the raw material inputs that companies require, so let's say cocoa or palm oil or any of the raw material inputs that you might expect. Those commodities are struggling because of climate change, things like drought, extreme weather events. So the perfect idea of this intersectionality, which I often call the pink and the green, is to take a traditional livelihoods program and shift it into a green livelihood program. So what that would mean is that instead of tailoring, what would happen is that the women would be trained to raise shade tree nurseries, so develop and raise shade trees. Those shade trees are then taken over and planted in the local community to protect the crop. So that is a perfect example of the type of futuristic investments that we want to see coming out of this framework.
Melissa Fifield:
You've written a really interesting paper on this transformative role of the role of women and girls in addressing climate change. Can you share with our listeners some of the main ways that including women and girls can help drive solutions? You've talked about the framework and the intersectionality. Are there some examples of what that looks like?
Mil Niepold:
Yes. So thanks, this is actually my favorite question because this is where we get to the part where we get to talk about what I call the multilayer cake. Some days I say that the cake has about five or six layers, and in preparing for this podcast, I realized, you know what? The research is unequivocal. This layer cake would not stand because it has about 10 layers.
So I'm going to just quickly take you through all the benefits that a company can expect to find from having an intersectional approach to gender and climate. Said another way, when you put women's empowerment at the heart of your climate solutions, here are the gains you can expect to see. They're all documented, and the research is found on The Mara Partners website, and it's found pretty much anywhere you look on the internet.
The first gain from having women involved in community meetings and team processes is innovation. As Iris Bohnet said at Harvard, "A heterogeneous team will outperform a homogeneous team." So having more women improves innovation.
The second. These teams are also shown to be, even when you control for IQ, these teams are shown to be more intelligent, and that is research that was done by Thomas Malone at MIT. The other thing that happens is that when women are empowered, often in fact and for example in the Mondelez case, about a third of them will run for office. What we know about women who run for office is that they pass more environmental and stronger environmental legislation.
The next gain is in governance. There's a lot of research that shows that issues that plague pretty much everyone and other companies around the world, issues like corruption, rule of law, the need for transparency, all of those also gain when more women are at the table.
There also has been research on improved leadership styles. It has been said that better leadership styles tend to come more naturally to women because women have what's called an improved theory of mind. Now, Melissa, you and I are both mothers, so we can kind of chuckle and say, "Oh, right, theory of mind. What is that?" Theory of mind is the ability to keep track of who's doing what when, what they're saying, what their mood is, and all of those other issues. Well, you can imagine that theory of mind is a really important part of running a global company.
Finally, there are a few more. It has also been shown that when women are involved in negotiations ... So take the Paris Climate Agreement ... There are a growing number of people who've documented that. What made that Paris Climate Meeting different was that seven of the 10 leaders were women, and that is going to be documented more and more as time goes by. But what we know about that is that when a negotiated agreement or an MOU or any of these manufacturing agreements, anything like that, when agreements are negotiated, if they're more durable over time, which has been shown when you have more women, they're less prone to renegotiation, and renegotiation is expensive and disruptive.
Then finally, countries that have more women involved in their processes and meetings and legislation have been shown to have higher ESG performance, and the same is true for companies. Then finally, there's been a great deal of research that companies that have more women on the board or in leadership position also have been shown to have better track records on ESG and better bottom line performance. So at last count, the layer cake has about 10 pieces.
Melissa Fifield:
I love that analogy. You've obviously done a great deal of research to document all of these benefits. I know that you have a long history and a long deep experience with many of these companies that are implementing the framework and looking at their own strategies. What have you seen as some of the main barriers to including and establishing a role for women and girls in climate solutions?
Mil Niepold:
You know, a part of me wants to say, unfortunately, one of the biggest barriers is the one that most people sort of throw up their hands and say is baked into human nature, and that bottom line cutting to the chase, one of the biggest barriers is gender bias. Gender bias, racial bias, ethnic bias, any of the biases, whether they're conscious or subconscious. Most human behaviorists, social scientists, psychologists would say that bias is baked into human nature.
I'm not going to let that stop us. Melissa, I've known you a long time. I know that doesn't stop you either. Here's the exciting news. While bias may be the barrier, I often say that because of the layer cake we just discussed, there is a sort of end run or a Trojan Horse that allows us to get away from the bias, and that is the following. If we know that we need to be innovative to succeed in the future, if we know that we need good governance, if we know that we're motivated by things like bottom line performance and being regulatorily compliant and all of those things that motivate companies, then we know that people will be willing to do whatever it takes to achieve those things.
So I don't let bias get in the way. I say, "Let's find the end run around it." What that literally means is getting everyone excited about those things like innovation and saying, "We know that this innovation matters to us. Therefore, what is that recipe for getting there?" Well, that recipe says that we're going to have to unpack the bias. We're going to have to dismantle it. We're going to take many small, medium and large steps to get there because we're motivated to improve. So the biggest barrier is bias, but in many ways there are very practical steps to get around that.
The second and final thing I would say in terms of a barrier is that in a way, one of the biggest barriers is the way we describe and sort of face this issue of women's empowerment. We often, many people will say things like, "Women are disproportionately the victims of climate change, therefore X." I call that the victim lens. I never use the victim lens. I would encourage you and everyone else, and I've known you a long time, I don't think you do use it. That's not the reason to do something. Because if that's your reason for doing it's because you, "Oh, poor women. They have it so bad." It becomes almost philanthropic when in fact, the reason women's rights matters is because it was ranked by Project Drawdown as one of the top solutions to climate change. So it is in everyone's self-interest, all humans on earth, all businesses, all governments. It's not about a women's rights argument. It's about all-hands-on-deck. We've got to get this done.
Melissa Fifield:
I think the good news is that the data and the research proves that out. So-
Mil Niepold:
Definitely.
Melissa Fifield:
That's working in our favor.
Mil Niepold:
Yes.
Melissa Fifield:
When many companies implement strategies to address their social impact as you touched on, we often see diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and separately climate focused initiatives. So how can companies ensure that they are applying a gender lens when they're developing their climate strategies? What are some of the steps they might take?
Mil Niepold:
Right. So the first step is also, I would say is I think the one we're beginning to see starting to take root, which is the following. We have to have a sort of triage when it comes to ES&G. They're not all created equal. As I said at the top of the show, the very first thing is the environment. The E in the ESG takes primacy. So if you find that your company is sort of siloed and running social programs and human rights programs over here and climate programs over there, the first step is to say, "No. Everything is about the environment and within the environment, we will take care of the social as we go along." But to put all of the emphasis on the environmental aspect, that's the first step.
But then the second step is to say, "Well, what do we know about solutions?" What I love about the Project Drawdown research is that they studied not the science of climate or carbon or anything like that. They studied the solutions, and they ranked them. What really set me off on this course that I'm on now is the fact that when women's empowerment and educating girls, because that has a huge carbon reduction power, when those solutions were put side by side, they ranked number one. But everyone wants to talk about electric vehicles and porous pavements and packaging innovations and green buildings and carbon capture and all of these things. I call those the male-dominated solutions.
The one solution we're not talking about is the one right in front of us, which is women's empowerment. So the next step for companies after really trying to break down silos is to be very granular about, first of all, understanding and accepting what the science says. The science, as you said a minute ago, the data is clear that women's empowerment and educating more girls matters absolutely enormously to climate change.
So then say, on a day-to-day basis, "How will that look in my company?" When this podcast is over and someone has finished listening to it, which I hope they do, I would encourage you to leave, go into a room into your next meeting and look around. If that room is not 30 and ideally 50% women and people of color and all forms of diversity, I would encourage you to actually postpone the meeting, go back to the drawing board and start again because we've already wasted enough time with meetings that are dominated by men. So what we need to do now is to break down every process and make sure that gender diversity is present in every meeting, in every procurement, in every partnership, collaboration, you name it. That is the next big step for everyone is to ensure that diversity happens for real.
Melissa Fifield:
I think what you're pointing to is the magic, if you will, is not ESG as silos, but rather what's material for your business and the gender lens being applied, no matter the program-
Mil Niepold:
Correct.
Melissa Fifield:
That is ultimately benefiting the company.
Mil Niepold:
Absolutely correct.
Melissa Fifield:
What are your recommendations for business leaders to ensure they're really making the most strategic choices when it comes to addressing the causes and impacts of climate change in their business? We just spoke about materiality, but what are your recommendations there?
Mil Niepold:
So I've worked my entire career with companies, and I am a huge fan of the ability that companies have and investors because companies and investors sort of are hand in glove with each other. Where you put your money matters. I always tell this story about the light bulbs at Walmart. You say, "Oh, it's only one light bulb." But when Walmart switches to the green alternative modern light bulb, it's billions and billions of light bulbs in one decision. So let's continue that metaphor all the way throughout and say the number one thing I would recommend that companies begin with is the degree to which they use their influence, and influence is usually tied up with investments. Which partners you choose, which suppliers you choose, what you ask of your suppliers, you have a voice and you have influence. The idea is to be incredibly granular about the way you use your voice, the way you use your investments and the partners you choose, the company you keep, no pun intended.
Let me give you this example. There is a new initiative spearheaded by the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, that was just started called the Climate and Gender Equity Fund. This fund has been very excellent at documenting the degree to which capital is not flowing to women entrepreneurs. You may, Melissa, you may have seen the statistic that something like two percent of venture capital flows to women entrepreneurs. In Africa, it's less than one percent. So whenever a company has the opportunity to invest in a new partnership, a new startup, setting up a new fund, joining a new initiative, I would recommend that you start with initiatives that invest in women.
That is my first top recommendation because the thing I love about that is that it's catalytic. Once you invest in women, the rest takes over from there. By the way, returns on investment are higher, and repayment rates are higher in these women-backed ventures, and the research is unequivocal on that. I encourage you all to look at the math, but this is a good business decision.
Melissa Fifield:
So you shared a few examples there. Are there any other examples of companies that are doing this really well?
Mil Niepold:
One or two just quick examples. So within the CGEF, there are a number of companies that are involved. Amazon is one, Reckitt, the British company, others are involved. And then also USAID started another initiative called WISE, W-I-S-E, which stands for Women in the Sustainable Economy. More and more companies are beginning to join, and they are in fact looking for more companies. So that's something else companies can do is look into becoming members of such organizations.
I also know the British government, FCDO, is beginning to aggregate and shine a light on this intersectionality between climate and gender. I would also say that many years ago, I would say probably going back as far as 10 years ago, L'Oreal, the cosmetic company, was also one of the very first to start looking at the power of an intersectional climate and gender lens. They have applied a very strong ethos around women's leadership and applied it to the issues of our day, which are in fact climate change, and they have had a very seamless marriage between climate and gender. I mentioned Mondelez at the top of the show. There are others as well, but those are some of the ones that come to mind.
Melissa Fifield:
It's really great to hear that this is being adopted and people are really thinking about how to integrate this thinking into our plans. The time is now, and so it's great to hear these different approaches being taken. Anything else you'd like to add before we close up?
Mil Niepold:
So yes, I think it's always ... A little storytelling goes a long way. I think it's important to put this what can seem like a dense topic into a really somewhat simplistic but useful analogy. So imagine if as a company or as a citizen, you were given the task of emptying the carbon bucket. So we've got CO2, we know it's a problem, we're going to empty that bucket. The way we do that, so we start, and we do all the things I mentioned earlier with technological solutions and innovations and carbon removal strategies of all kinds. Then because we love data and we love metrics, we stand back and we say, "Look, we've tried these," I mean Project Drawdown documented 80 solutions. "So we've tried 77 of them and we feel great, but we see that carbon is not going down." So we're scooping out of the bucket as fast as we can, but this bucket of carbon is not getting any better.
Reason for that is that as we're scooping the carbon out through these solutions, the carbon bucket is refilling behind our backs, and that's happening through the lack of reproductive health that comes from having girls that are not educated. So population growth is a major driver of carbon. But even if you set that aside, what we also know is remember what we said at the beginning and the layer cake about innovation and governance and good decision making and negotiation. Imagine that as we're emptying the carbon bucket, we didn't use the best solutions. We did the best we could, but we didn't have the best team around the table. Why? Because women weren't there.
So as we pat ourselves on the back and say, "We're so innovative," you're not. You're not that innovative. You don't have the best team around the table. You don't have the best decision making, you don't have the good governance and the so on and the so on. So what we have to do is while we're emptying the carbon bucket, we have to make sure we're not refilling it as fast as we go. That's why you need both sides of the equation. You need not only all the strategies to reduce carbon, you need strategies to prevent carbon.
Melissa Fifield:
Absolutely. Well, thanks for joining us, Mil. I appreciate the discussion and appreciate you sharing your perspectives and insights.
Mil Niepold:
Thank you, Melissa. It's been a pleasure to be here with you.
Michael Torrance:
Thanks for listening to Sustainability Leaders. This podcast is presented by BMO. You can find our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Press the follow button if you want to get notified when new episodes are published. We value your input, so please leave a rating, review and any feedback that you might have or visit us at bmo.com/sustainabilityleaders. Our show and resources are produced with support from BMO's Marketing Team and Puddle Creative. Until next time, thanks for listening and have a great week.
Speaker 5:
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