TWAS – Women in Climate Action research grants

To support action-based projects with a direct impact on society, the Elsevier Foundation is partnering with TWAS – the World Academy of Sciences to provide research grants for projects led by women scientists that address concrete problems in climate change through collaboration and interdisciplinary research.

The program is community-focused: a competitive, open call for applications will consider projects that respond to the needs of, and to the development requirements, of the applicants’ community and/or national or regional context in one of the 66 scientifically and technologically lagging country (STLCs). The UNESCO TWAS-Elsevier Foundation grants for gender equity and climate action aim 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.


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.

The grants will support women researchers from the Global South to reinforce both scientific and soft skills such as project management, leadership and science diplomacy – with the aim of sustainably improving the livelihood of their entire community by supporting women’s wellbeing.