BEFORE YOU GO

BACK TO HOME

PROJECT DANDELION

Project Dandelion is a global, women-led campaign reimagining climate action by uniting people, amplifying women-driven solutions, and shaping narratives that accelerate systems change.

BACKGROUND

Since the early days of Project Dandelion, we have gathered each year at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center with a clear purpose: to understand how we better support the women already leading on the frontlines of climate change. Those convenings built the trusted relationships, sharpened the shared analysis, and deepened the commitment across a growing cohort of leaders that now anchors this work. What they made increasingly clear is a question that funders, practitioners, and advocates kept returning to from different directions: why, given the scale of evidence and the urgency of the moment, is coordinated action at the intersection of climate, health, and gender still so difficult to sustain?

The Project Dandelion Climate, Health & Gender (CHG) Compact took shape in response. Through a series of engagements with funders and partners, the framing evolved, sharpening from a broader lens across climate-health stressors toward the areas where women's leadership, frontline experience, and the convergence of capital and policy are most ready to convert: extreme heat and access to care, with particular focus on the implications for maternal and newborn health. The challenge, it became clear, is less about the absence of solutions and more about the absence of connective tissue — the shared framing, the sequenced capital, the trusted relationships — that allows solutions to scale and sustain.

The pressures are intensifying. Extreme heat and limited access to care are not future risks, they are present conditions, converging in ways that are reshaping daily life and economic stability across the Global South. And yet women are already adapting, stabilizing, and holding systems together. The question is whether our institutions are keeping pace. The Nairobi Convening is the next step in that learning journey: bringing the Compact's evolved strategy into a room of senior leaders with the authority, reach, and relationships to move it forward.

STRATEGIC CONTEXT

Global momentum on climate, health, and gender is at an inflection point. Major philanthropic commitments, growing institutional engagement on heat, climate-sensitive diseases, and health system resilience, and a maturing ecosystem of women-led solutions are beginning to create the conditions for system-level change, but the coordination required to convert that momentum into durable impact does not yet exist at the scale needed.

The constraint is not the absence of solutions. It is the architecture through which capital reaches them: fragmented funding streams, misaligned incentives, debt burdens in climate-vulnerable contexts, and a public finance system not yet designed to support the kind of coordinated, sequenced investment that moves from pilot to system. What is required is not marginal reform but a shift in how capital is structured, sequenced, and deployed, blending public, philanthropic, and private finance in ways that unlock progress rather than stall it.

The CHG Compact advances that shift. Grounded in the realities of the East African context, where women are already demonstrating, from smallholder farms to heat-stressed health systems, that they are the infrastructure holding communities together — and oriented toward the global policy architecture where influence is most likely to convert, the Nairobi Convening is designed to move coordination from intention to action.

The opportunity ahead is to broker pathways: not isolated investments, but coordinated efforts that align actors, clarify outcomes across climate, gender, and health, and make the work investable over time. The work of reframing risk is as important as the work of mobilizing capital. Both happen in Nairobi.

OUR ROLE

Project Dandelion catalyzes coordinated action at the intersection of climate, health, and gender by connecting leaders across capital, policy, and frontline delivery. We mobilize coalitions around clear leverage points, align narratives to help institutions and governments move in concert, and use disciplined convening and strategic sequencing to convert momentum into durable, system-level impact over a 3–5-year horizon.

In Nairobi, that means holding the architecture of the room: ensuring that the right actors are in deliberate conversation, that outputs are defined and owned before participants leave, and that what is agreed in Nairobi has a clear path into the global moments that follow. It also means naming what this work is, with precision: Project Dandelion is brokering pathways, building the connective tissue between capital, policy, and proximate leadership that the moment requires and the market has not yet provided.

TO READ

3 paradigm shifts and 4 practical reform ideas for debt and public finance for sustainable development

This Brookings commentary argues that the central challenge is not a shortage of capital but a shortage of the right architecture, and that countries too often "default" not on their bonds, but on their people, cutting health, education, and care systems that underpin resilience. It proposes three paradigm shifts in how sustainable debt is defined and measured, and four practical reforms for global debt instruments and national fiscal strategies.

Defining and conceptualizing equity and justice in climate adaptation

This peer-reviewed scoping review synthesizes 316 articles to examine how climate adaptation researchers conceptualize equity and justice, finding that very few scholars define and differentiate between the two, and that when they do, issues of scale, affected actors, pathways, and normative principles are the key components. Rather than pushing for a single consensus definition, the authors argue for pluralism — being explicit about which framework is being used and why.

Returns on Resilience: Investing in Adaptation to Drive Prosperity, Growth, and Competitiveness

This landmark report, co-published by Systemiq and more than 20 organizations ahead of COP30, finds that investments in climate and nature adaptation deliver four times more benefits than costs, with an average annual return of 25%. It identifies 15 high-impact, cost-effective solutions — including crop resilience, heat mitigation, and water storage — and projects that scaling resilience investments could create more than 280 million jobs by 2035 and unlock a $1.3 trillion annual market by 2030.

Turning Down the Heat: pathways to adapt people, systems, and economies from extreme heat risk

This report — known as "The Scorching Divide" — quantifies the profound consequences of extreme heat on women's labor productivity, both paid and unpaid, and on their health, with analyses across India, Nigeria, and the United States. It estimates at least $120 billion each year in heat-related losses to women's paid labor productivity across these three countries alone, and projects that extreme heat could claim the lives of 204,000 women annually by 2050. It also examines the double burden women face: they are more physiologically vulnerable to heat and are simultaneously expected to shoulder the care burden for everyone else who becomes sick from it.

How Does Green Patriarchy Shape Climate Action? A Critical Analysis on Gendered Inequities in Climate Solutions

This paper examines how women, particularly in the Global South, are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to their social, economic, and cultural responsibilities, while simultaneously their knowledge and contributions are overlooked in the design and implementation of climate solutions. The concept of "green patriarchy" names a specific dynamic: the way mainstream climate action can reproduce existing power hierarchies even when it claims to address them.

Women political empowerment and vulnerability to climate change: evidence from 169 countries

This peer-reviewed study analyzes the effect of women's political empowerment on climate vulnerability across 169 countries from 1995 to 2017, finding strong evidence that women's civil liberties, participation in civil society, and engagement in political debates all measurably reduce a country's vulnerability to climate change. The transmission channels are education spending and governance effectiveness, meaning the argument for women's political leadership is not just moral but structural and empirical.

The muted voices of women in climate news coverage

This analysis examines women's representation in climate news coverage, as journalists, editors, experts, sources, protagonists, and activists, finding that while women make up 43% of leading climate editors and journalists, eight of the ten most followed on Twitter are men, and fewer than one in three of all experts and sources quoted in online climate coverage are women.

TO LISTEN

Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg: Reema Nanavaty on SEWA, Climate Stress & Women Farmers

Reema Nanavaty speaks with Food Tank about how climate stress is placing growing pressure on women farmers and agricultural workers, SEWA's parametric climate insurance program, the social and environmental benefits of clean cooking, and the Association's vision for the next 50 years.

System Catalysts: How to Invest in a Moral Revolution

Jacqueline Novogratz shares Acumen's journey over 30 years, exploring how patient capital creates real systems change by investing in companies tackling climate change, energy access, and poverty alleviation, and what it takes to build systems that prioritize people and dignity.

Voices of Impact Investing: Gender, Climate & Integrated Finance

This series explores how climate finance can drive both mitigation and adaptation in emerging markets, and how gender lens investing can promote women as leaders, entrepreneurs, and change-makers, with real-world examples of what it takes to build a more inclusive economy.

Investing for Impact: Gender & Climate at London Climate Action Week

Recorded during London Climate Action Week, this episode features the CEOs of FinDev Canada and British International Investment discussing how integrated investments in gender and climate are already driving transformative change in low-income countries, from empowering women entrepreneurs to building climate-resilient businesses.

Health Warning: The Human Cost of Climate Inaction

Hosted by former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, this episode makes the case that the climate crisis is already a health crisis, from deadly heatwaves to worsening air quality to climate-related trauma. Former Australian Prime Minister and Wellcome Trust Chair Julia Gillard argues that health must become central to climate communication, and that we should be talking about "lives lost" rather than simply degrees gained.

Supporting Women Farmers on the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis

A conversation with Keithlin Caroo-Afrifa, Founder of Helen's Daughters, on strengthening the capacity of women farmers through technical skills and financial literacy, the mental health toll of shifting weather patterns, and the concern that global climate conferences have become networking events with too little space for implementation.

TO WATCH

Make Shift Happen: A New Model for Change in Impact Investing

In this conversation, Erika Seth Davies, CEO of Rhia Ventures, and Ruth Shaber, Co-founder and Board Chair of Rhia Ventures (and Founder and President of Tara Health Foundation) discuss the need for new financial models and products to serve both the market and movements.

Katharine Wilkinson: How Empowering Women and Girls Can Help Stop Global Warming (TED Talk)

Wilkinson, as part of Project Drawdown, makes the evidence-based case for three key pathways connecting gender equity and climate solutions, supporting women farmers, educating girls, and expanding access to health care, arguing that drawing down emissions depends on rising up.

Elizabeth Wathuti: Opening Keynote at the Climate and Clean Air Conference, UNEA6, Nairobi 2024

Speaking at UNEA6 in her home city of Nairobi, Wathuti underscored the profound interconnection between climate, air quality, and health, centering the East African context and the urgency of moving from negotiation to action.

Jacqueline Novogratz at the New York Times Climate Forward Event

Novogratz spoke about what it would take to solve energy access in the most challenging markets, and on the importance of moral imagination in rethinking how capitalism can be extended to those most left behind.

Agnes Kalibata: "How to Empower Farmers and Nourish the Planet" (TED Countdown 2024)

Agricultural scientist and policymaker Agnes Kalibata makes the case for empowering Africa's smallholder farmers with better tools, climate resilience strategies, and market access. She centers the reality that smallholder farmers produce most of Africa's food while often lacking the most basic resources to thrive.

Colette Pichon Battle: "Climate Change Will Displace Millions — Here's How We Prepare" (TED)

Disaster recovery lawyer and climate justice advocate Colette Pichon Battle reframes climate change not as an environmental problem but as a symptom of a failed economic system of extraction that benefits few.