Gender equity and climate change have more in common than you think

Gender equity and climate change have more in common than you think

The links between climate change and gender are well-established.

It is also now clear that gender inequity is making the impacts of climate change worse.

Bringing more women's voices into our responses to climate change will help all of us - as well as the planet itself.



Gender equity is a lot like climate change. It's a horizontally-integrated issue that largely exists inside a vertically-integrated policy framework. Now is the time to change that.

Siloing today's most critical matters not only leads to policy blindspots; it also leads to abject policy failures that tarnish the effectiveness of our public, private and civil institutions. Whether you care about gender equity or not, the fact that it is horizontal in nature means that it impacts you - and the issues that matter to you - in one way or another.



The problem with today's dominant policy paradigms

Our dominant policy paradigms do not support the level of rigour needed to solve today's toughest issues such as gender equity and climate change. Mainstream approaches to policy creation instruct us to categorize issues and then neatly box them into policy solutions. While this approach keeps things simple, it also comes with a cost.