COP26 legacy funding for research project

Wendy Pring and Dr Maria Weikum (OSDU) were successful in receiving funding from the Centre of Sustainable Development through the COP26 Legacy Fund for their research project entitled Women’s Perspectives on Skills for Climate Leadership.

Wendy, Enterprise Fellow at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, and Maria, Concordat Officer in the Organisational and Staff Development Unit (OSDU), are both participants on the Homeward Bound Programme and got to know each other via this route. The pair are also hopeful to submit another application for funding to build on this initial research topic to further support research into how this can be framed better going forward to accelerate influence on research, policy and industry changes.

The funding of £2,500 was awarded last month.

Climate change decision-making has been approached with a strong unconscious bias for many years owing to male-dominated leadership and an underrepresentation of women and other groups. This is in contrast to findings from a multitude of studies that have highlighted the relevance that diverse voices, in particular those of women, play in tackling climate change. Beyond demonstrating the multi-faceted nature of the impacts of climate change, stronger female participation and leadership, for example, have also been shown to leverage co-benefits across various dimensions of the UN Sustainable Development Goals as well as leading to more stringent action towards sustainable practices.

The project aims to examine the breadth and depth of this bias by amplifying the profile and voice of women in the context of topics of climate change and leadership. This project focuses in particular on the question of what critical skills early-career professionals in research and business need to develop in order to become effective leaders in climate-related areas.

Published: 23 November 2022