Does Having More Women in Power Help the Climate?

Climate Week wrapped up in New York a few days ago, and under all the panels and pledges was a stat that stopped me: women hold just 12% of the world's energy ministries. Not youth affairs. Not gender equality. Energy — the portfolio that decides whether a country keeps burning coal or builds out wind and solar. And a new study out of Brazil found that when women do get real power over environmental decisions, even at the local level, the numbers move. A lot.

What did the Brazil study on female mayors find?

Economists Inés Berniell, Mariana Marchionni, Julián Pedrazzi, and Mariana Viollaz looked at Brazil's mayoral elections — specifically the razor-close ones, where a woman barely beat a man or barely lost to one. That's what makes the study trustworthy: in a coin-flip race, whether a woman or a man ends up mayor is close to random, so whatever happens next in that town is really about who's in charge, not what kind of place elected her.

The difference wasn't small. In Amazon municipalities, towns that elected a woman mayor cut annual greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 1,510 thousand tons of CO2e compared with towns that elected a man, almost entirely by slowing deforestation. Forest loss came in about three percentage points lower than in similar male-led towns — a 32% reduction. And it didn't cost the towns economically; the researchers found no hit to local economic activity. The mechanism was simple: women mayors talked about the environment more during their campaigns, invested more in environmental programs once elected, and actually enforced the rules already on the books instead of letting them sit.

Why are women still locked out of the rooms where climate decisions get made?

If women in office get results like that, why aren't there more of them making these calls? Former Irish president Mary Robinson and former Argentine foreign minister Susana Malcorra laid out the pattern days ago in Climate Change News: women have presided over just three of the last seventeen UN desertification conferences, and three-quarters of every COP president in three decades has been a man. It's not that women are missing from government — the 2026 Women in Politics map from UN Women and the Inter-Parliamentary Union shows women hold 90% of gender-equality ministries and 73% of family-affairs portfolios. But energy drops to 12%. Economic affairs sits at 18%. Foreign affairs, 29%. Women get handed the ministries about people; men keep the ones that control power, often literally.

That gap is the quiet backstory behind why climate change hits women hardest — women absorb more of the damage from a warming world and hold the fewest seats where the response actually gets designed. It also shows up in something we celebrated a few months back, the ten-year low in Amazon deforestation: that progress is fragile, and it depends on exactly the kind of steady enforcement this new study found female mayors are more likely to actually deliver.

What can one woman actually do with a stat like this?

You don't have to run for mayor to put this to use. Local office is closer than it feels — city council, county commission, water board, school board — and it's exactly where the Brazil study says gender makes the most measurable difference, because those are the offices that decide zoning, permits, and whether existing environmental rules get enforced or ignored. If you've ever shrugged off a "boring" local election, this is the argument for showing up to it. It's also a reason to take a second look when a woman is running for anything from city council to state legislature with climate on her platform, instead of scrolling past.

It's the same thread running through why women leaders are saying AI needs more humanity: it's not that women lead better simply because they're women. It's that a different lived experience of risk changes what actually gets prioritized once someone has the power to act on it.

One thing to try today: look up whoever represents you at the most local level you have — city council or county commission — and spend ten minutes on your city's website checking whether they've voted on anything environmental in the past year. That's the fastest way to find out if your own backyard has a Brazil-mayor story quietly waiting to happen.

Quote to sit with

"It's the little things citizens do. That's what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees."

Wangari Maathai said that as the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, for planting trees one at a time until it became a movement. Your ten minutes on a city council website is smaller than that, and it counts anyway.

💌 Sarah