We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bianca Pitt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bianca below.

Bianca, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Why have I realised that you had to be a gender champion to be a climate champion? Why do we need women in leadership if we want to see climate action? What happens if we don’t let them join the leadership table? Find out here.

Bianca, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Bianca Pitt and I am Co-founder of SHE Changes Climate, a campaign to get women equally represented at international climate negotiations and beyond.

My background is in law, corporate finance and media. A few years ago, when I was taking a sabbatical from work to have my first child, it gave me the chance to read up on things outside my immediate industry interest, resulting in a growing realisation that we were heading for a collapse of our ecosystems.

I decided to use my professional experience and network to build a more sustainable future for the planet and people. After founding the Women of the Environment Network and joining several environmental charity boards, me, together with two other founders in the environmental sector, were compelled to start SHE Changes Climate, in response to the lack of women at the decision making table to the COPs, International Climate Negotiations. Covid has shown us that our environmental, social and economic systems are fundamentally connected, and when looking at who was making the decisions in business and governance, it becomes very clear very quickly, that women are not forming 50% of our leadership today, and we are not operating with 50:50 Vision at the top. Research shows that women matter when we want to see climate action: countries with more female parliamentarians have better climate policy and lower emissions. The same is true for boards of companies. And yet only 25% of parliamentarians and 20% of ministers are women. only 16% of board members. Only 2-3% of VC funding goes to women-led teams. This is the result of bias, and goes to explain why we have had such lack of action when faced with the climate crisis. Our climate emergency is the result of a leadership crisis.
Many people suffer from carbon tunnel vision, they don’t understand that there are further factors that have brought us to where we are today. If we don’t address the climate, biodiversity pollution and waste crisis today, our children will not inherit a liveable planet from us. I could not feel more compelled, or honoured to be working on this monumental task. We placed SHE Changes Climate to address the intersectionality between women and climate: women and girls are the first and foremost victims of climate change: due to their roles in the community, their lower socio-economic status makes them be hit the hardest in times of an emergency. During Covid, the Gender Gap widened from 100 to 136 years. 75% of people living in poverty are women, they make up 80% of people who get displaced during natural catastrophies. On the positive, they are the solutionaries – people acting in the community for the community. If they do not get to decide on climate policy and implementation at Intrenational climate negotiations, the COPs, the Conference of the parties, organised by the UN, then we stand no chance in coming up with new solutions either. New solutions need new actors. New solutions need new vision and ideas. New solutions need a whole new set of decision makers, who don’t have a legacy to defend, but think about the future and generations to come. Since the inception of COP over 27 years ago, there have been only four female Presidents. This is blatantly not just unfair, but presents a huge barrier to success, like the absence of women on boards presents a barrier to success for companies. Without diversity in thinking, we cannot come up with the best ideas and conclusions. Given what it at stake now, all our future, we would have thought that it would be easy to adapt and get women on boards. This however seems to be met with huge resistance and reluctance from existing power holders. We are therefore also asking men to join the campaign, to talk about why the patriarchal systems have not necessarily worked for them either, and to help bring about systemic transformative change.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I thought that our current leadership today would deal with the climate crisis and sort it out for humankind. Surely this was too important to drop? However thanks to my work I could see, with increased horror, that governments and businesses were indeed failing us. I could see we had a leadership crisis, but I did not think about analysing that leadership further.

It was only when we started taking a closer look and saw that women most critically were missing, that our leadership was by no means diverse, that we did not get the perspective ,experience and vision from over 50% of the world’s population, that the alarm bells began ringing and the realisation set in that we were missing one critical thing for change: diverse leaders! My own background, having been raised in the West or Global North as we often refer to, my education made me very privileged and blind to the lack of access to the decision making table that women still face today. I wish I had known this already ten years ago and that I had seen that women could be the key lever for climate action.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

We started the campaign online, during lockdown. My co-founders are in Switzerland, I am in the UK. Now, over two years later, I still have only met one of them in person, the other one I have only worked with online. It is remarkable how much we have been able to achieve despite working just online – we had over 154 million impressions of our campaign in the first year of operation. We met on the network that I created, I cannot remember who suggested they join, but we are now a coalition and generation of environmental leaders that meets online, and does not depend on physical offices anymore. We can initiate and execute on ideas, and not only that – we have found ourselves joined by women and men from around the world who support our campaign and want to be part of the movement it has created. I find such mobilisation, particularly if it is not well-funded, remarkable.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.shechangesclimate.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sheclimate/?hl=de
• Linkedin: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/she-climate
• Twitter: @sheclimate
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnotwRGtsgNy87bZC5NIIqw
• Other: SHE Changes Climate Film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydbRQYYJbOY SHE Changes Climate Brief: https://www.shechangesclimate.org/news/issue-brief

Image Credits
Please can you contact Frances Storey on [email protected] to send updated photo material from he campaign? Many thanks.