Sundaa Bridgett-Jones champions diversity in climate talks

Much of Sundaa Bridgett-Jones’ professional life is spent huddling with the world’s top climate experts to devise strategies to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and avert the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

Very often she is one of the few women in the room — and one of even fewer Black women, she told Devex.

Bridgett-Jones, a longtime policy expert with The Rockefeller Foundation, recently left that role to join the ambitious philanthropy-backed Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, a coalition seeking to raise billions of dollars for renewable energy projects. She is serving as vice president and chief advocacy officer.

In her new role, she said it is rare to run into colleagues like Open Society Foundations’ climate justice chief Yamide Dagnet, who is also Black. She said she and Dagnet recently spent time together at a climate funders roundtable in Amsterdam and “talked about this very thing.”

“And in that particular meeting, she and I said, ‘You know, you can count on one hand the number of Black women or even the number of women here’,” Bridgett-Jones recalled.

Even though Bridgett-Jones and Dagnet are both Black women, they bring key differences in perspective that highlight the benefits of racial, ethnic, and geographical diversity, Bridgett-Jones said. Bridgett-Jones is U.S.-born from Philadelphia while Dagnet is from the island nation of Guadeloupe.

Bridgett-Jones, who is now based in New York, said it’s critical that this type of diversity is represented in climate change talks. Study after study shows that global warming and extreme weather events already disproportionately affect people in the global south and nonwhite and low-income communities.

‘Different way of listening’

The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet launched last year at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow with the goal of unlocking $100 billion in public and private capital for green projects in the global south within the next 10 years. Its founding members include the Bezos Earth Fund, IKEA Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation. Officials from the United Nations, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and Shell Foundation are among its Global Leadership Council.

In its first year, GEAPP has partnered with governments and multilateral development banks on projects in about a dozen countries, including Ethiopia and Malawi.

Given its goal and the populations it works with, it is important that GEAPP’s “thought leadership” include nonwhites, women, and people from the global south, Bridgett-Jones said.

“I think our experiences allow us to have a different way of listening and understanding the problems that we’re trying to address today.” 

She said her own experience growing up in a single-parent home and later as a first-generation college student has shaped her leadership style and spurred a desire to “lift up” marginalized voices.

“I think it’s just fantastic to be able to ensure that those voices who need to be at the table are at the table and can bring those concerns from particular communities to this,” she said.

The human dimension

Bridgett-Jones started working with GEAAP while still with The Rockefeller Foundation, where she’d worked for just over a decade on global policy and other issues. Before that, she was director of public diplomacy at the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. State Department. She also previously worked as a special assistant at the United Nations, focused on Asia and the Middle East.

The through line for all of her roles has been “trying to figure out ways to make a difference,” she said. And when it comes to her climate work, she has another important motivation: her 16-year-old daughter.  

“I know many of my colleagues also have young children and when you think about what the projections are for the next decade, the next two decades, where our children and where we all will be in terms of the state of our planet and our communities, this is one of the most important things that I could be working on,” she said.

“I feel very blessed that I am able to have that and be able to work within networks at the highest levels to be able to draw attention to what is needed for us to make a difference,” she added.

GEAPP focuses a lot on financing, but that’s just one piece, she said.

“At the end of the day, we’re talking about people’s lives, we’re talking about their livelihoods and how it is that they’re going to be able to put food on the table for their families and make a path for their communities and national growth,” she said.