 You are listening to Make Change Happen, the podcast from IIED. To coincide with this year's International Women's Day on March 8th, this episode looks at women's leadership in climate and biodiversity. A panel of senior women leaders discuss what difference it makes to have women in leadership, what it looks like and what it means. The podcast is hosted by James Passat, IID's Director of Communications. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever you are in the world and welcome to the latest episode of the IIED podcast, Make Change Happen, episode 21. The topic is women's leadership in climate and biodiversity, timed to coincide with International Women's Day on March 8th. And what I'd like to do is invite a conversation on women's leadership in climate and biodiversity. What does it mean? What does it look like? What does it mean specifically for climate and biodiversity sectors? And what difference does it have to make women in leadership at all levels? It's a real privilege to welcome to the panel today three senior women demonstrating leadership in climate and biodiversity sectors. We have Ritu Baradwaj, Principal Researcher from IID's own Climate Change Research Group. Amira Balanios, Director of Latin America and Gender Justice Programs from the Rights and Resources Initiative. And we have Yvonne Higuero, Secretary-General of CITES. Welcome to you all and really looking forward to the conversation. What I might do is just ask you to introduce yourselves a bit more if I may. Hi, James, and it's great. Thanks so much for the invitation to be on this panel with these other great women leaders. So I'm very happy to be here. Let me just first spell out CITES because it's such a long name that some not always know what it stands for, but it's a convention. It's a legally binding agreement that deals with the international trade of endangered species of well fauna and flora. So we have listings of animals and plants. We call them CITES listed species where they have to be regulated for international trade. And I'm the Secretary-General of the Secretariat that manages the convention and services the parties to the convention. And yeah, first woman to be selected as head of the Secretariat. So an honor, but also a responsibility. And also the first woman, not only the first woman, but the first from a developing country. So yes, I feel that I fit into this discussion today. It's going to be very interesting, I'm sure. Thank you, Yvonne. Delighted to have you with us today. Amira, please can I ask you to introduce yourself and your organization, please? Thank you. My name is Omaida Bolaños. I'm originally from Colombia. Several years ago, I moved to the United States as a Resulter of the Internal Conflict in Colombia. Luckily, I ended up working with Rice and Resources Initiative. We are a global coalition of more than 150 organizations across the world that work together to advocate for the community to collect tenure rights for indigenous, Afro-descendant and local communities across the world. And I had been with the organization for 12 years and I had been in the leadership position and moving forward also not only in Latin America, but making and creating a program on gender justice around collective tenure rights. Thank you, Amira, and welcome to the panel. And last by no means least, Ritu, would you mind introducing yourself, please, and your work? Thanks so much, James. So I'm Ritu Bharadwaj and I work with the Climate Change Group at IAID. So I have close to 20 years of experience and these 20 years I've made the journey from one of the most underdeveloped part of India, Bihar. Not many people know about it. So that journey has been from there. Trying to create a space for myself and the people I work for, especially women, marginalized indigenous people in all these 20 years. And in whatever space that I have worked in, whether it was the developing agencies with government agencies, whether UK or India government, I've tried to do justice to this role and I do hope continue to do this through the loss and damage program, the social protection program. And most recently, an area I've been very close to my heart which is around looking at the impact that Climate Change creates on migrants and their families and the trafficking and human rights issues that it creates for them. So, yes, delighted to be in this panel, especially in the midst of two really great women. Thank you, Ritu. Delighted you can join us today and thank you for explaining the vital work that you are all doing. Looking forward to finding out more about that as the conversation progresses. First question is, what does women's leadership look like to you and why do we need women leaders across biodiversity and climate change spaces? Well, I think that thanks, James, for that question because I think it's especially interesting when we're talking about biodiversity and climate change where maybe it has been overlooked in terms of the responsibilities of women dealing with natural resources, dealing with nature, dealing with wildlife and we need to engage them more on these issues, especially when we see that we're in this triple planetary crisis, including pollution, climate change and biodiversity. And I think it, for us, it means that we have to pay more attention to women's issues and women and girls who are living close to nature, who are next to habitats that contain this wildlife and what their roles are. And it's amazing that in all this time only until this last meeting of the Conference of the Parties which is when our highest level governing body took a decision with 184 parties to agree that we should have a gender, a resolution on gender and international trade and well-founded flora as well as develop a plan of action for women. So as we see more women becoming leaders in their communities, especially in indigenous communities and local communities, we have to make sure that they are engaged because they're playing a critical role in making sure that wildlife is there for future generations, which is really the aim of CITES. And I'm hoping that in my, since I'm the first woman leader of the secretariat of this UN convention, I can play a big role in ensuring the recognition of the work that these women are doing and engaging them better as a stakeholder to the convention. Yeah, that point around recognition will come back to when we're wrapping up. But thank you for acknowledging that. How do you see the change in the importance of women's leadership playing out now? Amira? I think there has been a lot of changes. I wanted to give you some data from the standpoint of our work in securing collective tenure rights for communities. Indigenous Afro-descendant and community women across the world comprise more than half of the 2.5 billion people who relies on the community lands to support the livelihoods, food security, energy, traditional medicine and cultural and religion traditions. However, women from these groups legally own less than 20% of the world's agricultural lands. In that context, Indigenous Afro-descendant and local community across the world has been making efforts within their own communities to start breaking barriers that allow them to have a voice, to have a perspective on how to manage and how to benefit not only personally on their families, but communities. So several process that are coming from the ground is what is allowing us to see women in leadership position at our levels. And one of those issues that are coming on the ground has to do with women taking lead and ownership of processes of intergenerational leadership formations that allow continuation for making visible the roles, important roles that women are playing at all levels. In leadership in climate change, leadership and conservation and in development has to take into account the different type of voices that women has at all levels. And people like me and Yvonne and others that are in this leadership position is not to handle our jobs and responsibilities but are making sure that we open spaces for other women to bring their perspectives and put in the table the right base agenda for women. Yeah, talking of locally led leadership. Ritu, I wonder if you have any examples or give us the backstory to some of the projects that you're working on where that's been demonstrated, please. We've been talking about the top-down leadership and we should be talking about that bottom-up leadership. And when I, in fact, I was in the field yesterday and when I look around, I see women and girls being an active change agent in so many ways in almost every project that I'm working on. But I would particularly like to highlight the story of women leaders in Dumradi village in Jharkhand where they're ensuring that the poor and vulnerable families are identified, they're registered and they get access to social safety net during crisis. And these crisis have spanned from climate crisis like drought and floods, but also COVID crisis. And you can see when you go to these villages, you can see the women, the village elders, the poor seek their help in getting old age pension, livelihood access, food subsidy, access to health benefits and so on. And I would say that they are virtually acting as a help desk for these families in the village and this approach is also helping government functionaries get up-to-date data on poor and marginalized household. And when we went and met these government functionaries at the local level, they were publicly recognizing the value of these grassroots women leaders in enhancing outreach and effective delivery of their program. The empowerment of these grassroots women leaders have delivered change in so many ways. Firstly, I would say they lead differently. Now these women leaders are more forthcoming than their male leaders in sharing information, allowing everyone in the village to understand and benefit from these social protection schemes. Secondly, they're being very transformative. These women are gradually creating confidence and inspiring young girls to stand up for their rights and take charge of the issues that matter to them. And finally, and something which I really got inspired was the shifting, the gradual shifting of power balance in the village, the attitudes of elder and men in those villages who traditionally wanted women confined in their homes are changing. They recognize the value of bringing these women into the mainstream. So as Yvonne and Umaira have highlighted before me, we have to recognize, create space for them because when women lead, they don't just change themselves and their household, but the community at large. And we need to give them more prominence and make space or make effort to mainstream their leadership. Of course, Umaira and Yvonne are playing that role at the top level, but we need to create that space for them bottom up at every level. It's super interesting listening to you talking about the sort of ripple effects of impact it has beyond the household, beyond the village and into the wider community. Yvonne, I wonder if you have an example of women in the lead and taking leadership from your experience. Yes, and just coming back to what I mentioned originally about how long it took CITES to have this resolution on gender and international trade and wildlife, it's the 50th year anniversary for CITES this year. So that's quite significant. And I liked what Umaira said about making visible the roles of women. I think this is what is the intention of having this resolution. And this is the new initiative that the 184 parties have agreed to through the resolution and developing an action plan. And this is significant to be able to, again, recognize their roles, give them the visibility they need, open those spaces also, as was said, so that they can participate more fully in what is the wildlife trade, which at this point, a lot of the decisions that have been made over these years have been basically gender blind. And now there comes a realization that this is not the way to move forward. We have to think about gender when we're thinking about how to regulate the wildlife trade, and not only in the legal aspects, but also when we talk about illegal wildlife trade. If you think about these criminal organizations that are involved in illegal wildlife trade, and often women and girls are the ones who suffer with these criminal organizations when they're doing their different types of crimes, including wildlife crime. So I think all what we're trying to develop here is to think more carefully about what are the roles of women, how are they ensuring the sustainability of this legal trade when Omaira talks about food safety, et cetera. This is something that women are very much in charge of in many local communities and indigenous communities as well, is to ensure food safety. And so how is the wildlife trade, both when we talk about wildlife, we talk about plants and animals, how are they involved in this? And really going beyond only that they're there as caretakers, but also involved in the decision-making. And so this gender action plan that's going to be developed over the next few years will have to take a look at all these aspects when it comes to the legal trade, the illegal trade, and their roles in general, their roles in terms of sustainability and ensuring that these wildlife resources are there for the future. So we're very excited to be able to finally do something like this and ensure these women voices are heard and are participating in the decision-making. It's great to hear that there is a formal plan around gender equity and women's empowerment across SITES and beyond. Omaira, coming to you, do you have an example that you would like to share with our listeners today? Yes, over the past two years we have been engaging cross-regional peer learning and exchange of experience between indigenous and pro-descendant local community from Africa, Asia, and Latin America that as a result of that, we created a tool that we called the Call to Action and it's a call to the donor community, to the international allies to make effort to support directly women's organizations, women groups as associations from the global south. So based on that, they organized and created an alliance of women from the global south that is called Women in the Global South for Tenure and Climate. And this alliance was launched at the COP 27. As everybody has known, in the COP 27, many of the donors committed a $1.7 billion to support communities on the ground for climate change mitigations and adaptation. And then the women from the global south alliance is recognizing that this is a very good step but more effort needs to be done to ensure that women on the ground that are facing the majority of the effects of climate change and are bringing at the front in defense of lands and creating alternatives for climate change adaptation are also the target of this funding. So women in the global south alliance had demonstrated that finance at the global level for indigenous and for descendant women is very little and in some cases has not even been recorded. So they are defining a strategy for engaging directly with donor and international communities to bring and claiming that they have a voice and agenda for being a counterpart in decision making a counterpart in deciding where funding, international funding for conservation on climate change should be placed and what are the strategies that they are bringing. In late March, we will be having a meeting of the women's in global south alliance. We will be meeting in Panama. We will define a new strategy that will be shared with everybody and I am happy to respond to any questions if anybody is interested in knowing or support this strategy. That sounds great and three great examples there of women moving into and taking leadership roles in different ways, both at a local level and an international level. Just picking up a thread of the comment that you made Amir about finance being a barrier to women's leadership. I want to just sort of explore those barriers a bit more and what can be done to overcome them and Yvonne can I invite you to sort of describe some of the barriers that you're perceiving to women and girls moving into leadership roles. Absolutely and excellent point about the financial support that's needed. In fact, the resolution that was just adopted includes a call on donors in the international community to provide financial support on this resolution which includes financing women's participation. Some of the things that we've been trying to change over time is about participation of women in training, in sightings meetings. This is how they can be more involved in decision making including women in the delegations of the parties. When we invite the parties to participate in a training for example, we ensure now that we put something in there saying that we encourage that there is diversity in the representation of the party to these meetings and to these trainings because at the end of the day knowledge is power and if you're not able to participate, if you're not able to be taken into account included in learning and training and knowing better how to manage wildlife, how to manage nature then you miss out and you're not gonna be able to be part of the decision making at the national level either. I believe very strongly that women are much better or very good at sharing information and taking back that knowledge and information to their communities. But again, it's not as simple as that is it. I think we have to do better and I am sure that we will be looking at ways to do better through this gender action plan to ensure that it's not just a box ticking, is it that we just simply say, well, we have had so many, it was half and half there was equity in the representation in the meeting but that we really are including them in advance. We integrate gender when we're thinking about project proposals, I see barriers there that often we don't include them in project proposals to be able to understand how it is that women interact with nature. I think we're taking steps in the right direction but I think we do have to think more seriously about gender inclusion and I'm really happy to meet these women leaders in this panel because I know now that I can engage with them they have a lot of experience of taking women into account, gender into account when they're developing their programs. I just wanna give one how when we talk about including women and we have to really give it a lot of thoughts, it reminds me of an experience that I had when I was dealing with gender more fully in my previous post and just not having a thought about women traders and thinking about when they had to come to the government offices to get their permits for trading, the government offices were not open at the right time for women to be able to go get their permits. Women often have to take children to school. Women have to deal with the feeding of the children and the family. In some cases, if you were talking about women traders in small communities, they were dealing during the day and getting water and preparing again food, taking care of the children when they got out of school. And so just including that type of analytical thinking about what can make it easier for women to be in a certain space is something that we all need to work on. I completely agree, Yvonne has really brought in very practical insights on what really happens when we talk about implementing some of these gender strategies. We quite often see projects and programs take that very narrow approach of tracking numbers of women participation, but that does not often give you the true picture always. And I was recently carrying out an impact assessment of an adaptation project in Bangladesh where we saw high girl participation in community activities like green club, oxygen bank, et cetera. And the implementation agency was very quick to highlight this as success. But when we dug deeper and we found that there was an emerging gender stereotyping of these activities, which boys in those village considered as soft activities and did not participate. So in fact, with activities like these, we are doing a disservice. And because by doing this, we are brewing that gender imbalance in the minds of children at a very early age. And quite often, many of these monitoring assessment are like check boxes as Yvonne highlighted. And it does not really change the conditions on the ground, the things that we really want to change as a result of these efforts. And I'll just highlight another example from Jharkhand in India, where we saw that the state government reserved 50% seats for women to be worksite supervisors for a social protection program called MREX. Well, women were indeed hired in this program, but they were not provided any training to perform that role. So no enabling conditions, no mentoring, no hand-holding support. So in effect, they were being set up to fail. So in many sense, beyond these gender strategies and monitoring of these numbers, we really need that behavioral and society change, what Yvonne was highlighting, and genuinely create that enabling environment and conditions that allow for and encourage these women to participate more proactively. And we also need to understand that when women try to come up and change, there are people around them who collude and try to keep that status quo. And we need to make effort to change that status quo in order to bring about the real transformation in society that we are all been talking about in this panel. Amara, can I come to you please on the work that the Rights and Resources Initiative has been doing, pushing for women's inclusion and participation in your work? Yes. One of the big issues for us is the bottom-out approach to be able to build ideas, to build strategies and connect to the international agendas on climate change and conservation and development and food security and agricultural development to be able to respond really to what is on the ground. So that for us is very important. And the other part is I wanted to highlight one example that we are working with community women's and that is a case in Colombia with 230 women from the Afrodescendant communities in 10 municipalities in the south of Colombia. And they are leading a process in one of the most conflicting areas in the region. And they are defining a strategy that is a self-definition systems of protected areas within Afrodescendant communities that have already titled their territories. But they are doing the self-definition of protected areas from the community perspective and from the community self-governance systems as a way to contain not only conflict that affect highly women, but also ensure that the full application of their rights, we think their governance rights in the territory is in place. And they had managed to create 15 community protected areas integrating ecological socioeconomic ecosystems and biodiversity systems that integrates a very good strategy on the ground. When we pay attention on what communities and what women on the ground are doing, we can help not only to make visible, but to help those communities to make systemic changes on the ground. Okay, thank you, Amira. Moving on to a style of leadership point that has been raised in this conversation around information sharing and the success of women at sharing information. Ritu, could I ask you to share your experience of how that's been used in a technological way on some of the projects that you're working on, please? As you highlighted technology, it can play a very critical role in enabling women get access to information. But quite often in the case of climate change space, the climate information and focus can become very complex and difficult to understand, even for people like me who spend years in this space. So we developed a tool called CRISP M app, which is simple to use and makes climate information easy to understand and apply. And we delivered this through a people's driven approach where we created a card of women climate sarkis, as we call them, but in literal translation that would be climate friends from among the community. And we trained them on the use of this app and we supported them with mentors. And you can see, we could actually see how, what difference this technology, but also the information that this technology to empowering women in those villages. So armed with that information from the app, women climate sarkis, when we went and interviewed them, they said that now we, when we go into the village meetings, people look at us with respect and awe because we have information that others don't have. But we don't use that information to help ourselves, but we share it so that others can benefit from it. Just purely simple access to that technology and the use of that app had much bigger shifts in that area. So along with this use of CRISP M app, the women, they started using and exploring other apps on the smartphone. And they're now making videos and uploading it on TikTok. They watch videos on YouTube and learn to make recipes, to make new food that they like for themselves and not just for their husbands. So as you rightly highlighted, James, that we can see the ripple effect of how small changes can drive bigger societal changes. And I'll also quote Yvonne who said, knowledge is power. So accessing internet has opened up the world to them, that world of knowledge to them. And more information is giving them more knowledge and more power by which they're actually not just changing their own situation, but changing the situation in the village in general. We're coming to the end of the discussion, Yvonne, coming to you first. If there was just one thing that you could do to increase the empowerment of women in leadership positions in climate change and biodiversity, what would that be, please? Thanks, Jayma. I think it's a collective push. I think as I might re-do it myself, we can do a lot. But if it's not collective, if it's not bringing on men on the streets, we can do a lot. If it's not collective, if it's not bringing on men on board as well, it's difficult to make change. And I'm not talking only about that at the international level, but at the national level, at the community level as well, we've heard some very good examples of how those changes need to happen at the other levels within the country to make a difference, to make a change. And in my case, if it wouldn't have been because the United Nations Secretary General decided that he won a gender equality and high level post, I wouldn't be sitting here speaking to you. So definitely we need our male counterparts to be part of this push to include women and to ensure that we hear their voices. That's terrific. Thanks, Yvonne. And same question if I may to you, Amara. What's the one thing you would focus on? I think one of the major steps that we can take is to provide dedicated and sustained funding to allow women from the grassroots organizations and the local level to participate in different scenarios and to make the changes and arrangements to allow for that participation to be effective, inclusive and a safe place for women from the local communities to be able to participate. And that means to allow for women to talk in the way as an indigenous and a pro-descendant local community to provide interpretation in different languages and for the organizer of the events, to understand what are the women that they are bringing to participate and give the same respect and status that we will get to any other women from the global north. Thank you, Amara. And Ritu, one thing if you could change, what would it be? I would say that the journey of all these women leaders I talked about, it hasn't been smooth. And for women to get where they want to be, they have to walk five steps more, a mile extra, then they're male counterpart. And in that sense, when I look around me, every woman is a leader because they still face barriers due to repressive societal and institutional norms. But the efforts are transforming the system and making a difference. And I would say that women, like you asked me one, but I would say that women would need capacity, they would need support and they would need encouragement. Right now, these women that I talked about are making difference in small ways in their own society around them. But if we really want that transformation and impact to happen at that broader canvas, at the bigger level, we need to provide them support and encouragement and capacity and technology. Thank you, Ritu. And thanks to all three of you for demonstrating inspiring leadership and inspiring female leadership to the sectors that we work in. Wrapping up now. Yes, I'd like to thank Ritu Baradwaj from the IED, Amirah Balanyos from the Rights and Resources Initiative and Yvonne Higuero, the Secretary of General Societies for your input today in this really important conversation. Thank you so much. And you can find out more about today's podcast, our guests and their work at ied.org slash podcast where you can also listen to more episodes. You can also find further information by searching for climate change and gender within our website. You can leave us feedback or follow the podcast at soundcloud.com slash the IED. For more information on all aspects of IED and our work, please visit our website at www.ieed.org.