Women In Sustainability: Recent Episodes
Efeca
On the 8th March 2022 (International Women’s Day) Efeca announced the creation of a new podcast series: a platform for women’s voices in sustainability. The 2022 UN theme for International Women's Day, "Gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow," sought to highlight the contribution of women and girls around the globe, who participate in their communities and promote climate change adaptation, mitigation, and response, in order to build a more sustainable future for all. Join our host Emily Fripp, Founding Director of Efeca for this new podcast series and platform for women’s voices in sustainability. Together we’ll help celebrate and elevate the perspectives and work of women, showcasing the role that women play in supporting sustainable livelihoods, climate change mitigation and creation of sustainable supply chains. Emily has been lucky enough to work around the world with amazing people and fascinating forest commodities across different sectors, geographies and commodity interests. We hope you enjoy these monthly chats with inspirational women working in sustainability today, showcasing how diverse and inclusive working are essential parts of our sustainable future.
In this episode we speak with Carolina Brandao, who works for the World Economic Forum, leading the public sector engagement work for the Tropical Forest Alliance. She and Emily discuss the work of women in the policy space, the evolution over the years of women’s work in multi-stakeholder partnerships in leading dialogue and engagement, and ultimately delivering impact in the field of sustainability. After working in education in Brazil for several years, Carolina graduated from Sciences-Po in Paris with a degree in International Relations. She has over thirteen years of policy-advocacy, strategy and multi-stakeholder partnership management in the field of sustainability. She is currently working on mobiliszing major food and agricultural companies to engage in advocacy with the aim of enriching and supporting the adoption of public policies for sustainable agricultural commodities in the EU and US markets. She has also worked as the lead on COP26 Mobilizsation for Sustainable Supply Chains with the Government of the United Kingdom in the COP26 Nature Campaign – the Forests, Agriculture and Commodity Trade (FACT) Dialogue, which aimed to achieve sustainability in the supply chain of globally traded agricultural commodities while supporting livelihoods. She previously worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, handling Donor government relations for BMGF in France, providing critical support to the Head of Southern Europe, G7 and G20, and increasing resource mobilizsation for the empowerment of women and girls, global health and international development. https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolinacoelhobrandao/ https://www.tropicalforestalliance.org/ https://www.weforum.org/ https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report-2022/
In this episode, Emily talks with Penny Davies, a recognised change agent who has over 35 years of experience working in the field of forestry, climate change and sustainable development in diverse geographic locations across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America. They discuss Penny’s early experiences working in Sierra Leone with rural women, her transition from working at a grassroots level with rural communities to the international policy making world, and women as a minority in food, forests and climate-policy making. Across her career, Penny has supported evidence-based policy development on forests and livelihoods - including access to markets, climate finance, property rights (forests, land and water), involving producer organizations and social networks, as well as the contribution of forests and lands to conflict resolution. She has led UK Government and European Union (EU) delegations in international forest policy-making arenas (United Nations (UN), EU, World Bank) and played a key role developing the European Union’s Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan (and coined the term!). For 14 years, Penny was Senior Forestry Advisor to DFID, leading advice on UK Government’s global policy and international programming on forests, focusing on their contribution to poor peoples’ livelihoods and climate protection. More recently, she was International Director for Natural Resources and Climate Change at the Ford Foundation. Within her role she supported rural communities and indigenous peoples in the Global South, ensuring their needs were reflected in government and company policies. She was also Coordinator of the Climate & Land Use Alliance (CLUA) for 7 years, where she created strategies to reduce climate change by supporting international policies, programmes, and finance that conserve tropical forests, biodiversity and ecosystems, promote indigenous peoples’ and rural communities’ forests, livelihoods and land rights, while reducing deforestation and human rights abuse from illegal logging and agribusiness.
Join Emily as she talks with Dr. Junzuo Zhang, who leads the China-UK Collaboration on International Forest Investment and Trade (InFIT) Programme, based in Beijing. Together they discuss Junzuo’s early work researching the role of gender in sustainable development, the evolving role of women in policy creation and research and the importance and the need for women to be confident, to empower their engagement and drive this agenda forward. Junzuo graduated with a Phd in Geography from SOAS in London, having previously studied agricultural and rural development at the School of Social Studies at the Hague. She currently leads the China-UK Collaboration on International Forest Investment and Trade (InFIT) Programme, which aims to reduce impacts of China's international trade in timber products and other commodities grown on forest land. Prior to this she served as the Community Development Coordinator for GIZ’s EU-China Natural Forest Management Project and worked closely with partners in 58 villages and 6 counties in Sichuan, Hunan and Hainan Provinces, South China. Here, shemanaged the implementation of various pilot and demonstration projects that provided models for community based alternative livelihoods.
On the 8th March 2022 (International Women’s Day) Efeca announced the creation of a new podcast series: a platform for women’s voices in sustainability. The 2022 UN theme for International Women's Day, "Gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow," sought to highlight the contribution of women and girls around the globe, who participate in their communities and promote climate change adaptation, mitigation, and response, in order to build a more sustainable future for all. Join our host Emily Fripp, Founding Director of Efeca for this new podcast series and platform for women’s voices in sustainability. Together we’ll help celebrate and elevate the perspectives and work of women, showcasing the role that women play in supporting sustainable livelihoods, climate change mitigation and creation of sustainable supply chains. Emily has been lucky enough to work around the world with amazing people and fascinating forest commodities across different sectors, geographies and commodity interests. We hope you enjoy these monthly chats with inspirational women working in sustainability today, showcasing how diverse and inclusive working are essential parts of our sustainable future.
To kick start our conversations with Women in Sustainability, Emily sits down with Frances Seymour, one of the world’s foremost authorities on sustainable development. They discuss what it’s like to be a woman working in the field, how the role of women in sustainability is changing and offer some advice for future female leaders. Frances has been a Distinguished Senior Fellow at WRI since 2017, where she has been conducting research and writing on forest and governance issues. This has included advising WRI leadership on major initiatives including Global Forest Watch, the Global Restoration Initiative, the Food and Land Use Coalition, and Cities4Forests. Before that she served for six years in Indonesia as the Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). Her achievements at CIFOR included the development and implementation of a new organization-wide strategy, positioning CIFOR as a leader on policy research and convening related to forests and climate change. In 2012 the Government of France awarded her the rank of Officier in the prestigious Order of Agricultural Merit, in recognition of her leadership and accomplishments in the field.