Interview with Poppy Mason Watts, Global Director, Impact & Partnerships, Project Dandelion
For those who may not be familiar with Project Dandelion: what is your mission, and what are the main projects or focus areas you are currently advancing – for example, the “Women, Business & the Climate Tipping Point” research based on over 70 interviews with women leaders – and why have you chosen to also include nature and adaptation within this lens?
Project Dandelion is a global women-led climate coalition focused on accelerating women-led climate solutions already taking root around the world. We use communications, connection, and convening as tools for systems change, connecting people and ideas to amplify solutions that are already transforming communities, markets, and business systems from the ground up.
Across our work, we connect innovators, business leaders, policymakers, funders, and community changemakers to help shift climate action from fragmentation into coordinated influence. One of our recent focus areas has been women in business and leadership.
Over the past several months, we’ve conducted more than seventy in-depth interviews with women working across corporations, investment firms, multilateral institutions, philanthropy, and the emerging eco-right movement. We wanted to understand not only the headwinds these leaders are facing, but where breakthroughs are actually happening inside systems today.
What emerged was incredibly consistent across geographies and sectors: the challenge is not a shortage of ideas or ambition. It’s that the systems through which decisions are made are still not designed to support long-term climate, nature, and resilience outcomes.
We chose to include nature and adaptation very intentionally because leaders increasingly no longer see these issues in isolation. Climate, biodiversity, water stress, supply chain resilience, and operational continuity are converging into one business reality. Particularly in sectors dependent on natural systems and global sourcing, nature is rapidly becoming not just a sustainability issue, but a strategic business issue tied directly to risk, resilience, and long-term competitiveness.
Your landscape mapping highlights a strong and recurring pattern: sustainability, resilience, nature, and adaptation work is often “female-led” but “male-governed.” In your view, what are the key power bottlenecks that are slowing down more ambitious and effective outcomes?
One of the clearest patterns across the research was that women are often leading the operational delivery of sustainability, nature, adaptation, and resilience work – but they are not always positioned where final strategic or capital allocation decisions are made.
In practice, this means many women are responsible for the “how” of transformation, but not always the “why” or the “where.” The real levers of power still often sit within finance, procurement, operations, investment committees, and boards.
We also heard repeatedly that many sustainability teams remain structurally isolated inside organisations. Leaders are navigating quarterly pressures, political sensitivities, fragmented incentives, and increasingly complex regulatory requirements, often without the mandate, resources, or cross-functional backing needed to move at the speed required.
Importantly, this isn’t fundamentally a capability gap. It’s a systems design issue. Many of the women we interviewed are already operating incredibly strategically and commercially. The challenge is that the internal architecture of many businesses still treats climate and nature as adjacent to core business strategy rather than embedded within it.
From your perspective, why is women’s leadership particularly critical in advancing climate, nature, and water stewardship today?
What stood out in the interviews was not simply that women care more about these issues, it was the way many women leaders are approaching them systemically.
Across sectors, women were often the leaders translating between functions: connecting sustainability to finance, nature to supply chain resilience, adaptation to operational continuity, or regulation to long-term business value. They were acting as bridge-builders inside complex systems.
Many were also leading with a more integrated understanding of risk and resilience. Particularly in relation to water, biodiversity, and nature loss, women consistently framed these issues not as standalone environmental concerns but as interconnected business realities affecting communities, supply chains, energy systems, food systems, and long-term economic stability.
At the same time, many women leaders are operating extremely close to implementation. They understand where friction exists inside systems because they are often the ones navigating it directly. That proximity to both operational reality and long-term risk makes their leadership especially important in this moment.
In the context of the Nature & Water agenda, how can companies move from a compliance-driven approach to one focused on competitiveness and resilience? Are there specific signals or examples that stood out in your research?
One of the clearest shifts we observed is that the organisations making the most progress are no longer framing climate and nature primarily through compliance or reputational risk. They are framing them through resilience, competitiveness, and business continuity.
For example, several leaders spoke about nature and water becoming deeply tied to supply chain resilience, agricultural security, sourcing stability, insurance costs, and long-term operational viability. The conversation is moving from “Should we act?” to “Can our business remain competitive if we don’t?”
We also saw that language matters enormously. Climate can become politically divisive very quickly when framed ideologically, but when leaders speak about operational resilience, affordability, resource security, or long-term business value, alignment becomes much easier.
Another important signal was that some of the most effective leaders were embedding sustainability directly into core business functions rather than treating it as a separate initiative. Once nature and climate become integrated into procurement, risk, finance, sourcing, and product development, they become much harder to roll back.
In practical terms, what levers have you seen work when women leaders succeed in turning commitments into real business decisions — not side sustainability initiatives — particularly on interconnected issues such as climate, nature, and water?
The leaders making the most progress were rarely relying on moral arguments alone. Instead, they were connecting climate and nature outcomes to the priorities already shaping business decisions.
That often meant:
- Linking sustainability to cost reduction, resilience, or risk management
- Embedding climate and nature considerations into capital allocation and procurement processes
- Translating technical sustainability issues into commercial language
- Building cross-functional alliances rather than operating solely within sustainability teams
- Positioning climate and nature work as business transformation, not corporate responsibility
We also consistently heard that breakthroughs happen when leaders are able to move beyond isolation. Trusted peer networks, strategic intelligence-sharing, and cross-sector collaboration were repeatedly identified as critical enablers, especially during periods of political or economic pressure.
What are the biggest barriers that still limit women’s participation in decision-making on climate and nature, and how can the sector address them?
One of the biggest barriers remains structural rather than individual. Women are highly represented in sustainability and implementation roles, but significantly less represented in positions tied to capital allocation, investment decisions, operations, and governance.
There are also important cultural dynamics at play. Many women described navigating business environments where traditional networking structures, informal influence channels, and decision-making cultures still favour existing power dynamics.
Another major challenge is fragmentation. Many women leaders are doing extraordinary work, but often in isolation and without coordinated support structures or strategic visibility.
Addressing this requires more than representation alone. It means redesigning how leadership operates inside organisations:
- Embedding climate and nature into core business functions
- Ensuring sustainability leaders are connected to strategic decision-making
- Creating trusted environments for collaboration and intelligence-sharing
- Investing in leadership pathways that bridge implementation and executive power
If you were to leave a clear message to CEOs and boards: what two or three immediate actions would you recommend to ensure that the women driving delivery and implementation also have greater influence over strategic decisions?
First, embed climate, nature, and resilience directly into core business governance, not only sustainability functions. The companies making the most progress are integrating these issues into finance, procurement, operations, risk, and long-term strategy.
Second, bring implementation leaders closer to decision-making. Many of the women leading this work have deep operational insight into where risk, opportunity, and transformation are actually happening. That perspective needs to sit far closer to boards, investment decisions, and strategic planning processes.
Third, invest in coordination and trusted infrastructure. One of the strongest findings from our research was that leaders do not need another symbolic network. They need spaces for honest dialogue, strategic intelligence-sharing, and cross-sector problem solving – particularly in a moment defined by volatility and fragmentation.
Ultimately, the organisations that will lead over the next decade are likely to be the ones that stop treating climate and nature as peripheral sustainability issues and start recognising them as central to competitiveness, resilience, and long-term value creation.