Last week, world leaders, business executives, activists, scientists, and policy makers gathered in New York City for Climate Week, the largest global climate event of its kind. More than 500 events amplified the scale of the climate crisis and the opportunity for climate action.
Women, in particular, often bear the brunt of climate change’s effects. Women are more likely than men to live in poverty and rely on natural resources for their livelihoods, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable to floods, droughts, and displacement. According to the United Nations’s Gender Snapshot 2025 report, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty by 2050, which is 16 million more than the total number of men and boys.
At the same time, women are leading some of the most innovative business solutions to combat climate change, showing that equitable representation is key for building a sustainable future. Here is a short list of innovative women shaping the future of climate action through business.
A Movement For Conscious Consumerism: Geren Lockhart, Founder Of CANAVA
Geren Lockhart, founder of CANAVA, is on a mission to harness consumer behavior to change the world for the better by combining storytelling with education that highlights sustainable lifestyle brands.
“CANAVA as a platform started because I kept seeing this gap where people want to make choices that align with their values, but the landscape is deliberately opaque,” says Lockhart. “You shouldn’t have to spend your life researching toilet paper or decoding corporate greenwashing just to live consciously. We’re building a community and a movement focused on the stuff that actually moves the needle and that people are already engaged with all day everyday—food, home, style, travel—because that’s where 50 to 70% of personal impact lives.”
Think of it like investigative journalism meets lifestyle brands. Most consumers don’t have time to research every brand to uncover who founded it, who funded it, whether the people along the way are treated fairly, whether the planet is treated fairly, whether or not the product lasts, and whether or not it has resale value. CANAVA simplifies consumer education with a new three-tier rating system: ‘Fuck Yes’ (brands that are regenerative, circular, community-advancing), ‘Yes But’ (brands representing a real effort toward better systems, but they’re still evolving), and ‘Hard No’ (brands and organizations prioritizing profit over people and planet).
“When consumers realize there’s a path where they can live brilliantly without destruction, they’ll choose it,” says Lockhart. “We already see this happening. We just need to build the permission slips to make change easier.”
Reimagining More Sustainable Food Systems: Sarah Lake, CEO Of Tilt Collective
The food that we eat and how it is produced is often overlooked in climate conversations. Sarah Lake, CEO Of Tilt Collective the official food program partner for NY Climate Week, is trying to change that. Tilt Collective’s tagline is simple: to make healthy, sustainable food accessible to all. They do this by funding community-based partnerships with farmers, researchers, and local organizations around the globe.
Nutritious eating is tied not only to greater health, but also to combating climate change. That’s because unhealthy diets are linked not only to an increase in preventable disease (think: Type 2 diabetes and heart disease). At the same time, our current meat-heavy food systems contribute nearly a third of greenhouse gas emissions—which is more than the combined emissions of the transportation and industrial sectors.
Previously, Lake co-founded the climate advocacy organization Madre Brava to do two things: elevate the role of food as a climate solution and to ask fundamental questions, such as ‘Can we shift what we are producing and not just how we’re producing it to increase benefits to our own health and the planet’s health?’ Lake says her other goal is advancing a feminine-style leadership that is about building bridges and a broader movement among organizations.
At Tilt Collective, Lake is trying to help shift food systems away from the trend of over-consuming meat (the average American eats six times the recommended amount of red meat) to move toward a healthier, sustainable food system achieving both climate and health goals, as well as food security and water goals. “Our aim is to do it in a way that makes it easy for consumers to do, as opposed to asking consumers to pay more for [plant-based] products.”
Lake thinks our fundamental challenge is to figure out how to produce enough food to feed 10 billion people by 2050 in a way that’s sustainable for our planet. “Right now our food system is wildly inefficient. We are using far more resources to produce our food than we have to,” says Lake. “We often use our land to produce animal proteins that require as much as 100 times more land just to get one gram of protein than if we were producing plant-based proteins. So we have an opportunity to increase the amount of food we’re producing at the same time producing foods that are healthier and better for people.”
Lake says people want healthy and sustainable food, but it’s often more expensive, not available, or not convenient. “People will choose it when it’s easy, but it’s not often the case,” says Lake. “Consumers can help build the demand for better options. One thing you can do is push your local grocery store to offer more plant-based options and make them the same price as the meat-based options. Studies that show when stores do this, the sales of the healthier, plant-based options sky rocket.”
Another easy move is to take small steps to cut down on the amount of meat you eat without giving up meat entirely, such as by substituting half the amount of meat you use to make, say meatballs, with mushrooms or another plant-based ingredient. Collectively, simply eating smaller portions of meat has a big impact on your own health, as well as the health of the planet.
Luxury-Meets-Responsibility Travel: Sarah Dusek, CEO of Few & Far
Sarah Dusek always had a desire to do good in the world, and so she started her career working for aid agencies. Eventually she came to the understanding that businesses are inherently created to solve a problem, and could be used to drive real change. The idea of harnessing business for good motivated her to become an entrepreneur, and so she started the sustainable travel company Under Canvas, growing it into the U.S.’s largest glamping company, and sold it for over $100 million in less than 10 years. She went on to launch Enygma Ventures, a private investment fund dedicated to supporting and investing in women-led businesses across Africa. It has helped over 10,000 female entrepreneurs.
“I know so many people who think making money is one thing, and then maybe they use a small percentage of what they make to give back,” says Dusek. “My emphasis is around how everything that we do aligns around our mission to make the world better—whether it’s a venture fund or a travel company—and whether the business is fulfilling our vision and the change we’re trying to drive.”
Today Dusek is the CEO of Few & Far, a sustainable safari and luxury outdoor hospitality company that curates carbon-negative journeys to nature destinations, such as Rwandan national parks or Argentina’s Iguazu Falls. She says that travel is something that we do for pleasure, but she hopes Few & Far helps more people to also learn about the places they are visiting and to engage in climate issues that impact those places.
One of her newest ventures is Few & Far Luvhondo, a carbon-neutral safari lodge in South Africa’s Vhembe Biosphere Reserve. Every stay helps regenerate over 100,000 hectares of wilderness while supporting local jobs and empowering the community. “I want to help open up this whole wilderness area and put it on a map, because when people know about a place, they care about a place,” says Dusek. “They’ll support the efforts of others to contribute to rewilding, protecting, and creating jobs for sustainable conservation.”
Few & Far Luvhondo has also launched its Nature Has No Price Tag campaign to open up greater access to this wilderness reserve and create more impact. Rather than have a fixed price, they’re inviting potential guests to submit an application and to pay what they can. The idea is that guests not only contribute financially, but also by joining a movement of people who care, protect, and give back. “We want to prove that tourism can regenerate the very places it touches when travelers choose to travel and spend with intention.”
In essence Dusek is creating a business whose value is not measured solely by the bottom line. “We have to stop having a one-pillar strategy when it comes to measuring value; rather we have to have a three-pillar approach that includes people, planet and profit,” Dusek says. “I believe when we hold those three pillars in tandem, we will end up with companies that are a real force for good in the world. By measuring value as more than money, we will eliminate some of that extreme wealth in the world, because you won’t be able to have extreme wealth and harm the planet. If companies hold all three of these things in balance and there is no valuation without all three of them, then I think we can create a very sustainable world.”
Harnessing Kinetic Energy To Power Cities: Jessica O. Matthews, Founder & CEO of UNCHARTED
Movement is energy, and we can harness it as a more sustainable energy source. Jessica O. Matthews’ work focuses on portable power and climate, and her career as an entrepreneur in the energy and tech sector first started when she was in Harvard College and invented SOCCKET, an energy-harnessing soccer ball that produces enough power to light an LED lamp for three hours after roughly 30 to 60 minutes of play.
In 2011 at 22 years old, she founded UNCHARTED, which builds infrastructure that fuses renewable energy, sustainable design, and community access. In 2016, she raised $7 million, which was the largest Series A ever raised by a Black female founder.
Her leadership in infrastructure and clean power solutions demonstrates how businesses can deliver climate impact and social value together. “It was never about the Soccket,” she said in a previous Forbes story by Tanya Klich. “It was about solving a problem I knew existed every time I visited my family in Nigeria. The problem, I realized, was infrastructural. The power lines couldn’t be relied on to give us electricity…That’s when I had an epiphany that changed the course of the company: We aren’t a soccer ball company, we are a tech company. We have intellectual property capable of building embedded renewable energy systems.”
From working with governments and municipalities to increase access to energy, to pushing for solutions to help lower consumers’ energy bills, Matthews has illustrated her mission to power the world and empower individual people by delivering smart, sustainable energy solutions to every corner of the globe.