As President & Founder of the Arab International Women’s Forum, I was honoured today to participate as a speaker at the inaugural IUCN Philanthropy Summit in Abu Dhabi, set in the dynamic context of the IUCN World Conservation Congress 2025 and under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates. The Summit offered a unique platform to mobilise philanthropic capital for a nature-positive future. This invitation-only event gathered around 75 global and regional philanthropy leaders, with the objectives to exchange ideas, learn more about global biodiversity trends and needs and, ultimately, weave coalitions that drive positive change for nature and people and truly power transformative conservation.
My session, ‘Cross-Sector Catalysts: Powering Inclusive Conservation’, explored how climate, biodiversity, and inequality crises are deeply interlinked, with each intensifying the others, and cannot be solved in isolation. These overlapping challenges are especially acute in the Global South, where communities are on the front lines of both environmental degradation and systemic underinvestment. Tackling them requires intersectional approaches and better collaborative models. Building cross-sector, inclusive alliances with intention is critical to correcting these systemic failures and unlocking more equitable, lasting impact.
Up to US$1.3 trillion per year are needed to fully achieve the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and no sector can achieve this alone. As the crises of biodiversity loss, climate change and pollution accelerate exponentially, worldwide, massive geopolitical changes threaten to substantially decrease reliable government and multilateral funding for conservation and climate mitigation solutions. More than ever, philanthropy can play a crucial role in supporting and accelerating a just, nature positive transition, and increasingly, philanthropic donors are seeking to make more innovative investments such as seed funding and blended finance, which create more sustainable funding models. Philanthropists are also driving innovation by supporting incubators and accelerators to create nature-based business opportunities.
Our session was expertly moderated by Aileen Lee, Chief of Programs, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, USA, and I was joined on the panel by distinguished fellow speakers: Anne Deane, President, Freyia Foundation, UK; Laila Hosni, CEO, Sawiris Foundation for Social Development, Egypt; and Olivier Wenden, CEO, Fondation Prince Albert II of Monaco. During the panel discussion, I shared my insights from three decades of advocacy work as a development economist and as President & Founder of the Arab International Women’s Forum, drawing from direct examples of the work of AIWF and my own sustainable agriculture enterprise to realise the power and potential of cross-sector partnership and coalition-building.
Such collaboration, in my experience, is instrumental to achieving strategic, sustainable and equitable progress for communities adversely and disproportionately impacted by climate change. In AIWF’s 25 year history, we have seen time and again the remarkable outcomes generated by meaningful partnership and collaboration. I was proud to share a very recent case study of our work with WiSER, the Masdar platform for Women in Sustainability, Environment and Renewable Energy, in hosting two major conferences in London during London Climate Action Week, that brought together change makers and climate leaders from the MENA and internationally to innovate solutions to the climate crisis and sustainability gaps in the region with women and young people at the heart of our human-centred joint advocacy.
For further information about the IUCN Philanthropy Summit, please click here.
