With every corner of the global market seeing new potential for clean energy development, a group of women working across the Canadian financial sector are actively deploying billions of dollars in capital into climate solutions—even if decarbonization isn’t always the motivation that seals the deal.

In the three years since it formed, Women in Climate Finance has grown into a network of more than 100 executive financial professionals representing organizations with a collective $4 trillion in assets under management, said its co-founder Joanna Klimczak, founder and CEO of Northern Light Capital Partners.

“Our members influence substantive capital across many of the largest financial institutions based in Canada,” she told The Energy Mix late last month. This includes leaders from Canada’s largest pension funds, banks, major insurance companies, Crown corporations, private funds, asset managers, family offices, and foundation endowments.

“It’s a lot of money, and part of it is [about] advancing the energy transition.”

By building trust among peers, facilitating cooperation on specific investment deals, and increasing colleagues’ reach across the meetings where those deals take place, the network helps members maximize their impact while directing capital where it will help address climate change and the energy transition.

“Our members are women in leadership roles that have a direct influence on the deployment of capital,” Klimczak said. “All of them have years of experience investing in climate solutions.” So the collective power of WCF members “creates a unique leverage that is hard to replicate, and one we are compelled to accelerate for greater investment and impact.”

Much of the networking among members happens in a series of a dozen convenings that WCF hosts each year, usually with 20 or more women in the room. Lately, much of the conversation has focused on the pace and volatility of the energy transition, the pace at which climate solutions are being implemented, and the differences in the way the transition is playing out in different regions of the world.

“Global energy markets, for instance, have gone through a major reckoning,” Klimczak said. “Whether it’s the massive energy demand from AI data centres in North America, the focus on industrialization in China and the rest of East Asia, or energy independence concerns in many other parts of the world, all of them point to energy needs. And all of them point out how clean energy is a major and necessary opportunity.” That understanding is leading to record investment in clean energy, she added.

Another WCF co-founder, Natalie Deschamps, a principal with Power Sustainable in Toronto, said the group’s convenings are cued to climate finance issues that are directly pertinent to members’ professional practice—like past sessions on green guarantees and carbon contracts, and an upcoming panel with senior women who are shaping the federal government’s sustainable finance taxonomy. Lately, those topics tie in with the overarching concern over Canadian sovereignty and trade diversification.

“It’s a time of great interest in the opportunity for Canada to lead,” she said. “So I think it’s a great time for us to convene and better coordinate capital to serve those themes, and that’s really what our network is able to contribute and enable.”

While many finance networking organizations focus on specific asset classes or lanes, Deschamps said WCF deliberately breaks down those barriers.

“We create a trusted space for exchange,” she said. “When you have shifts in policy or priorities, we’re the container for people to come together, digest together how those opportunities are evolving, and create a natural space for collaboration.”

“At WCF, the power of collaboration and candid conversations has helped me the most as a professional,” said board member Anne-Marie Monette, managing director at the National Bank of Canada. “WCF’s most important role [to me] has been its ability to be an enabler for creative thinking and knowledge sharing.”

“In other sectors I’ve worked in, people have convened naturally,” Deschamps recalled. “We had that in the earliest cleantech community 10 or 20 years ago. But in this moment, there’s a great need for different parts of the market to come together and understand what’s happening in earlier-stage innovation and how that bridges into opportunities for the banks to lend.”

For Canada in particular, she added, “there’s a great need for that ecosystem to collaborate.”

At one recent roundtable lunch, Deschamps said she got a snapshot of how quickly and effectively those conversations can take shape—even if no one anticipated the topic before it happened. A conversation around a specific, timely opportunity in electrification brought together a woman involved with a venture-stage company, a potential equipment provider, a utility executive, and two or three colleagues with access to different pools of capital.

“It was not at all by design,” she recalled. But “you had all of these different actors in the business ecosystem at different stages of the capital stack who happened to be gathering for lunch. It created a conversation about capital coordination, speeding up access, and having a lens into it from a start-up perspective.”

The experience showed how “it’s about tapping into what other people are seeing day to day that might affect another asset class, geography, or sector, then being able to collaborate to move forward.”