To Meet the Climate Challenge, Philanthropy Must Challenge Itself

(Photo by iStock/YasmineV)

Climate philanthropists, we are counting on you.

Despite the world’s best efforts to date, we still face a yawning investment gap of several trillion dollars a year that needs to be closed between now and 2050 to spare the planet from cataclysmic warming. And despite ever-improving models prompting ever-greater alarm, we remain in a David-and-Goliath struggle with transnational interests and states who perceive carbon neutrality as an existential threat.

If the world is going to ward off the worst of the climate crisis, philanthropists have a central role in remaking the global economic system for a carbon-neutral future. Philanthropy has a unique perch from which to assess complex challenges and flexibility to choose the place, moment, and means to intervene. The broad range of actors and interventions that philanthropic resources—funding, but also courage, patience, and agility—can support provide a base that raises government and institutional ambition, mobilizes action, and engenders accountability.

We believe so strongly that philanthropy can catalyze the change needed to move the global system that, five years ago, we each left public sector roles to lead major philanthropic organizations in climate change. In that time, we have witnessed many positive changes in climate philanthropy that sometimes go unnoticed. Philanthropists have gained confidence, coordination, and influence to push more deeply, quickly, and effectively at the levers of change. At COP26, philanthropists teamed up with the Danish and Costa Rican governments to launch the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, or BOGA. These forward-leaning governments, backed with flexible funding, have set a new benchmark by signaling such a serious diplomatic and sectoral push to emulate the transformative progress made on retiring coal power worldwide, and apply it to an even bigger and more wicked problem.

At the same time, more philanthropies are directing more resources to climate. From 2016 to 2020, known foundation funding to climate mitigation nearly doubled, from 1 billion dollars to 1.9 billion, an important and praiseworthy increase. Major new pledges to climate organizations in 2020 have created new momentum for climate philanthropy and the work it supports.

This influx of philanthropic resources is very good news—with climate funding still making up just 2 percent of global giving, we need far more resources to win. But if misdirected, this transformational money risks creating sprawl, redundancy, and dangerous distractions that could hamper progress just when we have no time to lose.

This sum is also still dwarfed by the money and influence of fossil fuel interests, so we need to be extremely efficient in our use of resources. In climate philanthropy, that means finding a set of investments that have a higher probability of successfully avoiding near-term warming at the lowest cost possible. The task is only made harder by the complexity of climate science and the lag time for measuring results.

Giving support to the highest impact programs takes more than individuals making the right bets. It also requires an entire community of organizations working together with a better understanding of, and alignment toward, what must be our goals: rapid and deep reductions in emissions and avoided warming—a technical measure which, in truth, we are still trying to understand in terms of the magnitude of social change it entails.

We believe philanthropy can play an essential role in achieving this. As crisis after crisis sends government off course, philanthropy can hold a stable heading, guided by the North Star of the most advanced net-zero modeling. Many essential solutions, strategies, and technologies exist; the real challenge is getting states and societies to adopt them—and markets to place their trust in them. And in this time of historic change and crisis, this transition compels a bigger opportunity: the rebalancing of the broad social compact between humanity and nature.

But to realize this potential, climate philanthropy must step up to the challenge, giving not only more, but more effectively. We want to share four critical principles for climate philanthropy that will help donors arrive at these objectives together.

Embrace complexity. Climate change must be addressed with systemic solutions, linking research and advocacy to citizen engagement, clean energy, finance, and all the complex leverage points in between. As the climate emergency moves from abstract target-setting to concrete implementation in virtually every aspect of society, organizations must shift from a technical-only focus on sectoral emission reductions to include a more sophisticated understanding of communities, people, and politics.

We are not the first to recognize that our ultimate goal of a carbon-neutral world requires a multifaceted approach from philanthropy. Nearly a decade ago, climate funders helped find a long-awaited breakthrough in international climate negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement by funding an unprecedented spectrum of action, from convening in the developing world to research and analysis to strategic communications. This effort helped give science and frontline communities their rightful place in the deliberations. Philanthropy also supported the French government’s ambition—as hosts of the negotiations that year—to deliver what was termed “360-degree diplomacy,” creating an enlarged space for climate negotiations that involved cities and local authorities, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and more.

Climate donors can support this kind of innovation with the understanding that it is not about linear action but a holistic, coordinated effort. Project-based, sector-specific funding cannot muster this kind of mobilization.

Steer clear of the siren song. Considering the odds stacked against climate progress, we are troubled when we see some new climate philanthropists pledging tens of millions of dollars not toward near-term emissions reductions but for high-risk silver-bullet technologies that distract from and undermine them.

Tracking such donations is notoriously tricky, but we know for example that major donors allocated at least $123 million to exploring and developing carbon capture and storage in 2021 alone. Over-investing in high-risk technologies that are years off from scaling, at best, lends cover to countries and corporations whose climate plans depend, disingenuously, on technologies that do not yet exist.

These technologies may be part of the eventual solution. But we’re so hard-wired to seek the silver bullets that we’re over-investing in them, at the expense of the less cognitively attractive but more effective work of systems change. By casting confusion on the true path to climate neutrality, this plays into the hands of those who would keep burning fossil fuels. Such friendly fire can be fatal to our common goals.

Work together. Climate action is a complex regime of actors, and climate philanthropy will invariably encounter a tension between strategic coordination and striking it out alone. Some philanthropies will embrace highly collaborative approaches, such as regranting organizations, funder collectives, and pooled or aligned funds. Others may prefer to invest independently, drawing on the community’s expertise to see where their unique resources can enhance existing work on proven solutions.

It might be news to some that climate funders helped kick-start a clean energy transition in Southeast Asia, home to the world’s biggest pipeline of coal-fired power plants and significant emitters. They created a localized grantmaking capacity focused on delivering clean energy at scale while challenging the business case for growing fossil infrastructure. By agreeing on this common goal and supporting a new entity to do so, philanthropies have led to more ambitious policies, supported governments to deliver them and bolstered local expertise. This organization, Tara, is now poised to become an independent foundation, backed by a dozen global philanthropies.

It’s important to note that additional effort will be required to keep resources focused and coherent as the parameters of climate philanthropy broaden to address adaptation to climate impacts; as our community expands to include philanthropic actors focused on human rights, health, and development; and as philanthropy takes a more active role in partnerships with businesses and governments.

Learn from successes, failures, and each other. Making the most of coordinated philanthropy requires constant recalibration, testing our approaches to understand what works, what does not, and why. This means that as a climate philanthropy community, we integrate learning into our strategies and make space to evaluate our work in real time and adjust responsively. For some, this is not new; climate philanthropy has been asking questions and testing its approaches for more than a decade, contributing to a knowledge base that new entrants should tap into. The more we create and share this learning, the more we will develop our common understanding and basis for collaboration.

Such a learning approach can also be applied within our organizations and our community at large—questioning that may also have implications for our funding relationships and the community they help create. Surprisingly perhaps, this means we need to let go of top-down, accountability-focused monitoring and evaluation processes in favor of a more nuanced approach, which centers shared learning with grantees. For example, we can move from accountability-focused reporting to deeper strategic reflection about how change happens, in which funder and grantee are equally responsible for bringing insights to the table. Such a stance does not preclude the quantitative metrics that often dominate accountability-based monitoring, but rather shifts their role in our decision-making. Indicators become a jumping-off point for a critical discussion, sentinels of change rather than the last word of the story.

This learning agenda demands more of us. Learning to maximize impact means increasing our ability to see through the cognitive biases that cloud our judgment and working to foster trust-based relationships and have transparent dialogue about our failures as well as our successes. Providing partner organizations with the time and institutional resources this reflection demands, and supporting the strategic adaptation that results from it, also invites a conversation about more flexible, longer-term funding.

In the years since we joined this committed and passionate community of climate philanthropy, we have seen its contributions help move mountains. Youth climate movements have reached new heights, galvanizing people and governments around the globe. Citizens, investors, and thought leaders have convinced public and private financial actors to redirect trillions away from fossil fuels. The Paris Agreement, and the mid-century net zero target it implies, have become the accepted political framework—not just for its state signatories, but for hundreds of cities, thousands of businesses, and millions of people around the world.

We celebrate these successes even as we recognize that targets without implementation are words without action. More mountains must be moved, and quickly. Nor can we neglect the rising need for adaptation efforts, as some climate impacts are becoming locked into our collective future already. The impacts of severe weather events and the increasing mortality and morbidity associated with extreme temperatures will continue to hit the most marginalized in our society hardest.

We must learn in real time—and learn to learn. The pressure is great, but so are the dividends: to avert generational injustice and make investments of incalculable benefit. In doing so we will become stronger, more effective, and more attentive in the art and science of giving, in the face of humanity’s biggest test yet.

This challenge, as ever, is a historic opportunity. Climate philanthropists, we believe you can seize it.

Read more stories by Laurence Tubiana & Christie Ulman.