TWAS – Women in Climate Action project grants

One of the project grant team leaders, Lydie-Stella Koutika of the Democratic Republic of Congo (center bottom), with some fellow researchers. [Photo provided]

Knowledge deriving from scientific research often suffers from not being applicable to real-life scenarios, especially in the Global South – slowing down tangible improvements. Greater progress in the livelihoods of individuals are achieved when research is done in cooperation with local populations, and when scientific know-how is effectively shared by those living in the same communities. UN Women reports that globally, one fourth of all economically active women are engaged in agriculture, where they regularly contend with climate consequences such as crop failure and experience an unequal burden of care for collecting increasingly scarce water and fuel.

Launched in 2021, the partnership with TWAS – the World Academy of Sciences focuses on women researchers working in climate action and builds off of an earlier 4-year partnership supporting the UN SDGs, the TWAS North South Collaboration in Sustainability (2015-2019) — which encompassed PhD travel grants, visiting professors, case study competitions and a sustainability symposium at the TWAS General conference. The Climate Women grants aims to empower women to lead concrete projects in climate action that take them outside the lab, deepening their scientific and soft skills such as project management and leadership. The project grants are awarded to teams of between 2-5 women for scientific projects with the potential to produce tangible strategies for addressing climate change. It is designed to be flexible and modular, with a total value of USD 25,000 over the course of 3 years.

This program aims to:

• Promote gender equality by creating opportunities for women in climate action projects that take them outside the lab, enabling them to deepen their scientific skills, while acquiring, through training, soft skills such as project management and leadership.
• Respond to and tackle communities’ needs in ways that are in line with the principles of sustainable development, focusing on the brunt of climatic changes.
• Effectively transfer knowledge from scientific research to real-life scenarios for practical and tangible change under the umbrella of the “climate action” SDG.