We know that the impacts of the climate crisis are not being distributed equally. Whether you’re looking at New Orleans or Nigeria, women — and especially women of color — are disproportionately bearing the consequences of climate-related natural disasters, including migration, food insecurity, job insecurity and violence.

So, it makes sense that when investing in climate solutions we should be paying attention to gender, race and ethnicity, both when it comes to who is deploying capital (on investment and fund management teams, at investment committee level, as individuals), and when it comes to who it is being deployed to (ownership of firms and funds, employees, customer base, who is in the supply chain).

We risk investing in products that don’t meet the needs of the people they’re trying to serve.

If we don’t, we risk investing in products that don’t meet the needs of the people they’re trying to serve, and in founder teams that don’t fully understand the problems they’re working to solve. We also risk failing to develop and scale the solutions and innovations we need to solve the climate crisis.

The good news is that a growing suite of investors is approaching climate finance with a multi-pronged climate, race, ethnicity and gender lens.

How you bring a gender and racial equity lens to your own climate investments depends on where you sit in the investment chain.

It may mean addressing the makeup of your investment team, with the understanding that diverse teams make better decisions — and are going to be better equipped to spot risks and market opportunities when it comes to climate change. It may mean asking questions of the advisors, fund managers or entrepreneurs you work with to make sure gender and racial equity are part of their climate investing agenda. (GenderSmart’s JEDI Investing Toolkit includes resources to help with this.)

If you’re a founder or corporation working in the green space, it may mean looking critically at your company’s leadership, supply chains and customer base, and making sure that good green jobs are going to women as well as men — and especially to women of color.

Bringing gender, race and diversity into our investment decision-making process isn’t just an add-on when it comes to solving climate change. It is an essential part of our toolkit for ensuring we spot the best solutions, forge a just transition and make full use of the collective intelligence and innovation of humanity we need to solve this crisis.

Read the full article about climate change, race, and gender by Suzanne Biegel at GreenBiz.