Women-Led Onsets
Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist who has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. He is a luminary of the environmental movement and the New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation (Penguin, 2021). He recently wrote and shared this piece on the critical importance of the W+ Standard and the value of Empower Co.’s work. We are honored to have Paul’s endorsement!
Coodad, a women-led cacao growers cooperative in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo by Philipp Kauffmann, Original Beans.
The way to reverse global warming is to deploy climate solutions that address current human needs. This is the gateway to create a worldwide engagement that could end the climate crisis. We could operate the world on 100% renewable energy and still be losing our living and social systems. There would still be poverty, hunger, injustice, income disparities, exploitation, disempowerment of women, and a lack of human rights. Rather than seeing these issues as ancillary, they are core.
It makes sense that efforts to reverse global warming have been heavily focused on carbon, fossil fuels, industry, cars, and methane. After all, fossil fuels cause 80% of greenhouse gas emissions annually. It also makes sense that carbon credit marketplaces developed as a way to incentivize corporations and governments to reduce emissions. This includes the purchase of offsets, which aim to neutralize an individual’s or a company’s carbon footprint. However, offsets have not lived up to their promise and their impacts have fallen unfairly on developing nations and the poor in the Global South. Offsets are being used by corporations as a way to achieve ambitious ‘net zero’ emissions goals sometime in the future. But as we describe in Regeneration, offsetting a loss is not a gain. Real emissions reductions are required right now.
That being said, the transfer of capital to people around the world using carbon as a metric was an innovative concept. Could there be other metrics that define regeneration? Many groups are seeking the metrics that can be used to pay for the regeneration of oceans, pollinators, rivers, lakes, fisheries, biodiversity, and more. What is the measurable unit for restoring an ecosystem, whether it be on land or sea? If beneficial impacts could be identified, measured, and verified, there is no doubt that money would go to them.
Why not go further? It is long known that when women have agency, things improve down the line for health, education, reproductive choices, income, innovation, agriculture, and food. What if there was a metric to restore social systems, gender inequality, and women’s rights? Jeannette Gurung set out to do just that. As executive director of WOCAN (Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management) she created the W + Standard, a fungible market unit for the advancement of women. W+ Standard maps out six vital areas: time, income, education and knowledge, leadership, food security and health. These areas of focus were co-created with rural women from Nepal and Kenya and recognize that regeneration cannot happen in silos.
The metric measured by W+ Standard is a minimum ten percent improvement in a woman’s life. The assessment employs third party audits based on a standardized methodology. The certification is verified after a specific initiative or project is completed. Several initiatives began in 2010 and are committed to run for thirty years, representing long-term partnerships. One example is the Kasigau Corridor Community Ranches project in Kenya, which aspires to include all women in the area (nearly 50,000) as beneficiaries. The benefits would not only be direct income from the W+ Standard program, but also improved access to healthcare and family planning services, to water, and agri-business support and education.
The quantifiable improvement in a woman’s life can be called an onset. The difference between a carbon offset and a woman-led onset is that the onset purchaser is acquiring the credit for an improvement that has already been accomplished. To expand and meet market demand, Rachel Vestergaard built Empower Co., which connects the W+ Standard to mission-aligned buyers throughout the world. Vestergaard sells these “empowerment units” to foundations, companies and other buyers and directs funds back to the women at the local level, who then determine how to spend the money. Women are not the investment but the investors, and that's a powerful distinction. Women-led onsets reinforce that women are co-pilots in this model. Not surprisingly, the funds are spent primarily on climate resilience and adaptation initiatives.
Policy may come from the top, and substantive initiatives from governments are sorely needed, but real change comes from the ground. W+ Standard has its feet solidly on the ground.
— Paul Hawken, Courtney White, Kavya Gopal, and Emily Jensen
This piece was first published in Paul Hawken’s ReGeneration newsletter. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission.
