With Catherine Abreu of Destination Zero. I’ve heard people say, “climate disaster knows no bounds” and “it discriminates against no one.” There’s a sense in which that’s true. But impacts of climate change affect different people in Canada and around the world differently, depending on who they are.

Women, girls, and gender-diverse people often experience harsher impacts of climate change, especially if they are marginalized due to racism, poverty, and other factors. They’re also an important part of effective climate solutions. Gender equality itself is a climate crisis solution.

Our guest Catherine Abreu is Founder and Executive Director of Destination Zero and an internationally recognized, award-winning climate justice advocate. Recognized for her diplomacy, communication, and coalition-building skills, she’s one of the world’s top 100 climate policy influencers according to Apolitical. Catherine was named the 2023 National Hero by Canada’s Walk of Fame. She’s a member of Canada’s Net-Zero Advisory Body, the expert body tasked with providing advice to government on pathways to meet climate commitments. She is an advisor to the Canadian Climate Institute and sits on the Boards and steering committees of several organizations, including Climate Action Network Canada, the Global Gas and Oil Network, and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Catherine is the recipient of the 2020 Jack Layton Progress Prize. She is a vital figure in climate policy and action, shaping global discussions on the transition toward clean energy.

Transcript

00:00:03 Catherine

There is this deep connection between ideas of power over land and power over bodies. I think when we fail to see that connection, and talk about that connection, we’re failing to talk about the things, we’re failing to get to the place that we need to get to to really tackle climate change and the other crises that we’re experiencing in this era of polycrisis.

00:00:29 Andrea

What are the gendered implications of climate change in Canada and what does feminist climate action look like?

I’m Andrea Gunraj at the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

Welcome to Alright, Now What? a podcast from the Canadian Women’s Foundation. We put an intersectional feminist lens on stories that make you wonder, “why is this still happening?” We explore systemic routes and strategies for change that will move us closer to the goal of gender justice.

The work of the Canadian Women’s Foundation and our partners takes place on traditional First Nations, Métis, and Inuit territories. We are grateful for the opportunity to meet and work on this land, however, we recognize that land acknowledgments are not enough. We need to pursue truth, reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship, in an ongoing effort to make right with all our relations.

00:01:24 Andrea

I’ve heard people say climate disaster knows no bounds, and it discriminates against no one. There is a sense in which that’s true, but impacts of climate change affect different people in Canada and around the world differently, depending on who they are.

Women, girls, and gender-diverse people often experience harsher impacts of climate change, especially if they are marginalized due to racism, poverty, and other factors. They’re also an important part of effective climate solutions. Gender equality itself is a climate crisis solution.

Our guest, Catherine Abreu, is founder and executive director of Destination Zero and an internationally recognized, award-winning, climate justice advocate. Recognized for her diplomacy, communication, and coalition building skills, she’s one of the world’s top 100 climate policy influencers, according to Apolitical. Catherine was named the 2023 National Hero by Canada’s Walk of Fame. She’s a member of Canada’s Net Zero Advisory Body – the expert body tasked with providing advice to government on pathways to meet climate commitments.

She’s an adviser to the Canadian Climate Institute and sits on boards and steering committees of several organizations, including Climate Action Network Canada, the Global Gas and Oil Network, and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Catherine is recipient of the 2020 Jack Layton Progress Prize. She is a vital figure in climate policy and action, shaping global discussions on the transition towards clean energy.

00:03:09 Catherine

I am the founder and Executive Director of a small nonprofit called Destination Zero, and there I do quite a lot of work on the international stage, pushing for our international systems, in particular the UN system, but other multilateral spaces to acknowledge the key things that we need to be doing to address the climate crisis. In particular, we need to be accelerating the global energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.

I also sit on Canada’s Net Zero Advisory Body. I’m the former director of Climate Action Network Canada. I’ve been working on climate change my entire career, so it is indeed very much a passion of mine and something that I’m deeply committed to.

What else am I passionate about? Well, I love to dance. I love to spend time in community with those I love. In fact, that’s something that I really love about working on climate change, is that there’s such an incredible community of people who are also really committed to exhausting themselves in the fight for a livable planet. And, in times when I feel down–this can be a really emotional piece of work–it’s to this incredible community of committed advocates and activists that I turn to for solace.

A story about myself: well, I often tell the story of the beginning of my activism career, which started very early. In 3rd grade, I organized my class into a letter writing campaign to protest cuts to the education budget. My activist roots go deep, and I’ve certainly continued being an activist for social and climate justice my whole life.

00:04:47 Andrea

We hear more and more about climate change and crisis being gendered, but I still feel hazy sometimes on what it means in our contemporary Canadian context. Can you explain more about that?

00:04:58 Catherine

This is, I think, such an important area for conversation. I think about it on two levels. So, one is in the kind of lived experience of women and girls. When we talk about how each of us is experiencing a changing climate and contributing to solutions towards stabilizing our climate and building a better world, very often women and girls are on the front lines of climate impacts. I think that’s something that many of us know and acknowledge.

But something that we perhaps don’t know and acknowledge, as much as we should, is that women and girls are also on the forefront of climate solutions. Everywhere you go around the world, whether it’s in the household or in the workplace, you see women who are innovating, who are bringing a collaborative community, empathetic and compassionate leadership, to the work that they do. And I think compassion, empathy, creativity, and innovation are really critical elements to finding the suite of solutions that we need to be acting on simultaneously in order to address the climate crisis.

In the lived realities of women and girls, and this has certainly been my personal experience, we find both the stories that we need to be hearing about the impacts of the climate crisis, as well as the incredible tools that we need to be deploying to address that crisis.

But there’s another level that, I think, we have to consider this on. This level is about structural inequalities, structural injustices that both underlie the climate crisis and worsen the climate crisis. And one of those structural injustices is, of course patriarchy, and the other is colonialism. Which, I would say, colonialism is a very patriarchal construct. Both of these things, patriarchy and colonialism, harm people of every gender–that lived reality of the negative impacts of colonial structures based on extractive practices of resources, of human ingenuity, of knowledge. Those are structures that really hurt us all. Structures that marginalize women and marginalize the feminine, hurt us all. And those are the structures that also lead to climate change.

I actually recently heard a colleague use this incredible phrase, that “the blueprint of colonialism lives in our bodies”, and I feel that. I feel the way in which the blueprint of colonialism occupies my being, and it occupies many of our beings, and there is a gendered aspect to that.

When we talk about climate justice, for me, that means addressing at the root these structural systemic injustices and inequalities that are the foundations, not just of the climate crisis, but of so many other crises that we are experiencing. Growing gaps between rich and poor, inequal wealth distribution, structural racism, you know, they’re all interconnected at that systemic level. And we have to change things at that systemic level if we’re going to achieve lasting action on climate change.

So, there are these kind of two ways in which I think about the gendered aspects of climate change and climate action—both how we feel it as women and girls and also how we experience those gendered dynamics in the structures that we are working within and must change in order to address climate change.

00:08:57 Andrea

What about feminist leadership in climate action and policy?

00:09:02 Catherine

There is this deep connection between ideas of power over land and power over bodies. I think when we fail to see that connection and talk about that connection, we’re failing to talk about the things, we’re failing to get to the place that we need to get to to really tackle climate change and the other crises that we’re experiencing in this era of polycrisis.

So, what do we do? How do we move from that place into a place where, you know, we’re more welcoming of feminist modes of leadership, of different world views that break this supposed power of human animals over the non-human world and, therefore, that normalizes the idea that some humans have power over other humans’ bodies?

You know, there are a lot of ways that we have to tackle this. Definitely one for me is we need to be seeing more women in leadership positions. When I started working in my career, I’ve not just worked on climate change my whole career, but I’ve primarily worked on energy policy my whole career. And when I started, I was very often the only woman in the room. More often than not, very much the youngest woman in the room. I have had the experience of showing up to conferences where I was the only woman who would be on stage and being called a princess and the various bits of micro-aggressive misogyny that come along with that.

And it’s been a real joy for me over the course of my 15-year long career to see what a change there’s been in that regard, to see so many more women coming into leadership spaces in the environmental and social justice movements.

And yet, we’re not quite, we’re not there as much as I would like us to be. You know, I still see so many organizations where the bulk of the work is being done by women, but the person at the top is a man. Welcoming conversations about how to shift that is really important. Often in the environmental movement, we assume we’re all progressive, therefore we’re all feminists. And there’s a real discomfort sometimes in the environmental movement of unpacking the ways in which we’re not actually living progressive values across our workplaces. And one of those ways is, of course, in not lifting up feminist leadership as much as we need to be.

I would add to that Indigenous leadership and Indigenous worldviews. Again, we see that Indigenous worldviews have, you know, so much to offer when it comes to a different way of relating, not just to the non-human world but to each other.

I’ve benefited so much from learning from Indigenous worldviews, learning from Indigenous traditional knowledge, and I know that many environmental organizations are still struggling to decolonize their own organizations and, you know, we’re all struggling, I think, still to decolonize ourselves and our ways of thinking about the world and thinking about how we address problems, how we do our work.

And again, I see baby steps moving in the right direction, right? I see that Indigenous leadership is coming to the fore in climate solutions more often across so-called Canada in particular. Again, I see that in the energy sector, Indigenous communities are at the forefront of renewable energy in Canada. About 20% of renewable energy projects are owned and operated in Indigenous communities across so-called Canada. And so, ways that we can continue to lift that up, continue to acknowledge that Indigenous stewards are stewarding the bulk of the world’s biodiversity and figuring out how we create international agreements that help to bake that in, that acknowledge that leadership and provide space for it to grow.

When I look into the international spaces at the UN, I see that the women and gender constituency–there’s these formal constituencies at the UN that bring different stakeholders together to, kind of, feed into the processes that are run under the United Nations–and the women and gender constituency has just been doing incredible work, I think, to bring into the climate conversation at the international level, the need for there to be a gendered analysis of climate impacts and a gendered approach to mounting climate solutions through policy and regulation.

00:13:51 Andrea

What needs to happen, not just to mitigate climate crisis but address its impacts on the most marginalized women, girls, and gender-diverse people?

00:13:59 Catherine

It was this moment at COP 28, so the annual UN climate talks wrapped up in December in Dubai, UAE. And a picture was taken at the high-level segment of COP 28 of the world leaders who were present, and many people noted how few women were in that picture. So, we still see this really discouraging imbalance of leadership at the highest levels between women and men. I think we see the impact that that has on decision making when it comes to addressing these crises that are very much rooted at that structural level.

That structural level ultimately works to solidify the power of many of those men. They’re less, perhaps, motivated to change things at that structural level. Even if they’re motivated to change things structurally, [they] have blind spots about the way the system works and who it benefits and who it doesn’t.

And so, you know, how we change that is a lot about how we as people in democratic societies vote, then that is a whole other conversation that, you know, I’m sure you’ve had with other guests.

We can still see, of course, decision makers of any gender making decisions that are relevant and responsive to the gendered aspects of climate change.

One example that we can talk about in what’s now known as Canada, is all of our international financing is now being filtered through a gendered responsive lens, and that includes our climate financing. And a part of what that’s meant in our financing for climate action and climate adaptation in other parts of the world, is that a lot of that money is now directly going to empower women actors at the ground level who are taking action on climate change, who are helping their communities adapt to the already devastating impacts of the climate crisis.

And maybe we need to actually do a little bit of work internalizing that in Canada, because I think, you know, we see that that some of that gendered analysis and some of that support that really goes directly to women and girls–we would benefit from that internally in Canada, as well.

I think we can also normalize some of the principles of feminist leadership. And these are principles that, again, someone of any gender can live. I think about feminist leadership as being leadership that is rooted in compassion, that has a systemic worldview, and that is really focused on cooperation.

Sometimes we think about leadership as being very individualistic, as strong leadership decisions as being ones that are about, like, a powerful actor doing one thing. And the reality is when it comes to addressing the climate crisis that it’s not on us as individuals–that’s a myth, that’s a lie that we’ve been told by the fossil fuel industry, that it’s all our fault and it’s up to us as individuals to solve the climate crisis. When in fact the only way we can address the climate crisis is by cooperating and collaborating and figuring out how each of us brings our skill set to this problem and does that together. We need to be changing the world together, not changing ourselves alone.

So, that kind of approach to leadership and decision making, of thinking about it as cooperative… How do we solve for multiple problems at once? How do we make sure we’re supporting groups of people to come together to take action? That’s ultimately how we get to lasting change and, you know, lasting policy and regulatory shifts that are critical to addressing the climate crisis.

00:18:10 Andrea

What advice would you offer us on our role in tackling the gendered impacts of climate crisis? What can we do?

00:18:17 Catherine

The number one thing that I always start with is talk to your friends and community. It is very often the case that we think we are not qualified to have these conversations. We don’t know everything about climate change. We don’t know all the science. We don’t have the exact language to talk about the intersectionality between climate change and other issues, and you know, so we retreat. We’re not sure what other people think about these issues. So, we kind of retreat from having those conversations with the people that we interact with on a daily basis in our communities.

But study after study tells us that the way people make decisions is by watching the decision making in the people that they see themselves as being a part of. We don’t make decisions, as much as I would love for this to be the case as a climate activist, we don’t make decisions based on facts. We make decisions based on our values and our values are determined by who we see ourselves as and who we relate to in our community.

And that means that if we have people who we see ourselves as being related to telling us: “I care about this thing, I see this intersectionality, I’m going to do something about it.” Then that opens the door for us to care about it, for us to want to do something about it. And again, we need to be doing this in community because when we try to do this alone, it’s overwhelming. It can be very discouraging. We can get disheartened and it’s in finding that community that we’re able to build the power that we need to really address this huge problem.

And so, my number one piece of advice is talk to your friends and community. Find community that is talking about this and figure out how you can contribute.

My second piece of advice is always talk to your political decision makers. Tell them that you care about this–of all political stripes. Unfortunately, climate change remains a relatively partisan issue in Canada, but climate change affects all of us, regardless of our political orientation. And we need political decision makers of every stripe to be taking this crisis seriously and to be thinking not just about how climate change is affecting the world around us, but how it’s affecting us as people, how it’s disproportionately affecting some people more than others. And it’s not until we give the strong mandate to our decision makers, start voting in the people who will be responsive to this issue, that they’ll start taking that seriously.

And then finally, you know, there are steps you can take in your daily life to bring you into communion with the non-human world in a way that I think is really nourishing and to implement the solutions that you’re able to implement in your own home and in your own existence.

And so, that might mean gardening. It might mean taking more walks in the forest, taking more walks by the lake or the ocean or in the mountains. It might mean once a week going out and joining members of your community who are doing a cleanup. It might mean doing an energy retrofit on your home so that you’re cozier and pay lower energy bills.

There are these solutions that we can do that help educate us, help nourish us, and help bring us in closer connection to the values that we want to be living. And that’s the kind of order, the three-step process I would give to what you can do as an individual if this is something that really sparks you.

00:22:10 Andrea

Alright, now what? Check out the work of Destination Zero by visiting destinationzero.earth.

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