Climate Philanthropy Increased Again Last Year, But Still Far From Meeting Need
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The 2020 bobcat fire in LA County. Ringo Chiu/shutterstock
Last year, climate change packed an unprecedented punch. In the United States, record-breaking hurricanes, storms and wildfires wreaked havoc from the West Coast to the Atlantic and beyond, causing billions in damages and upending countless lives.
Abroad, climate-intensified damage in 2020 was even worse. Fires in Australia and the Brazilian Amazon razed communities and decimated wildlife. Widespread flooding in West and Central Africa and South Asia displaced millions. A pair of massive hurricanes battered Central America. The list could go on.
Yet the cascading disasters did not prompt the dramatic new outpouring from philanthropy you might expect. Foundation giving for climate mitigation did rise substantially in 2020, climbing by $300 million to reach $1.9 billion, according to a new report from ClimateWorks Foundation. But the increase was on pace with growth during the two prior years—and overall, the field still commands less than 2% of all philanthropic funding.
In other words, climate change philanthropy has come a long way and continues to grow, with big new pledges signaling a lot more to come. But the data still doesn’t reflect the kind of red-alert-level surge you’d hope for as the crisis wreaks greater havoc every year.
Released last week, ClimateWorks’ annual report on climate mitigation philanthropy offers an unparalleled overview of global individual and foundation giving, drawing on a more comprehensive data set than any other public source. And, like last year, the increases still pale in comparison with the need. Key areas continue to go begging for sufficient investment, even as total giving to climate mitigation rose 14%, far outpacing an overall 3% increase in total philanthropic giving by individuals and foundations.
A potential tipping point
Looking for a silver lining? The report arrives at what hopefully turns out to be a tipping point for climate philanthropy. A range of mega-pledges over the past 18-plus months are all but certain to remake the field. As always, this firehose of cash from individual donors brings with it a different set of concerns about influence, prioritization and transparency. But it also injects much-needed dollars into the climate mitigation space.
Most of the new pledges have come from billionaires. Jeff Bezos’ 10-year, $10 billion Earth Fund leads the way. Laurene Powell Jobs’ promise to spend $3.5 billion for the climate emergency over the next decade is a close second. On the smaller end of the scale, Elon Musk bankrolled a $100 million carbon-capture prize. (MacKenzie Scott’s $125 million in climate gifts was one of the few mega-donations that came early enough to be included in the analysis.)
Major foundations have also made some massive commitments. Wyss Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation joined with Bezos and others to pledge $5 billion for conservation. IKEA Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation set up a $1 billion fund for clean energy. This week, a coalition of foundations pledged $223 million to reduce methane emissions.
None of these pledges were included in ClimateWorks numbers. Nor do experts think these pledges are nearly enough to meet the scale of the challenge. In fact, Surabi Menon, vice president of global intelligence at ClimateWorks and one of the authors of the report, is concerned donors a tier or two down might get the wrong impression, asking “‘If people are coming with multibillion-dollar contributions, what is my million or $100 million going to do? Is it going to help?’ And the answer is yes,” she told me. “Don’t just think the billions are coming and that’s it.”
Many areas need much more attention
Virtually no areas of climate mitigation are receiving enough philanthropic investment to ensure a transition to a net-zero world. But certain sectors are lagging particularly far behind. The report calls out transportation as a notable concern.
Generating electricity was once the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. But over the last five-plus years, transportation emissions have overtaken the power sector, both in the U.S. and Europe. Nevertheless, ClimateWorks estimates transportation received an average of $50 million annually in foundation support between 2015 and 2020, less than 4% of all funding for climate mitigation, versus $180 million for clean electricity, i.e., the power sector.
There is some movement in this direction already underway. Hewlett Foundation’s new transportation strategy aims to raise nearly $200 million from philanthropy to advance the transition to electric vehicles, though public transport advocates argue for a more varied approach. ClimateWorks, meanwhile, is the organizer of a complementary campaign, Drive Electric, that has brought together an international coalition of philanthropies around a vision of 100% electric road transport. It recently received $300 million from the Audacious Project.
Some areas are seeing funding spike. Annual support for both the cooling and the food and agriculture sectors have both more than tripled since 2015. That said, with demand for air conditioning expected to skyrocket in a warming world, and our food systems estimated to account for one-third to one-quarter of emissions, it’s hard to see how either would not benefit from more support.
Did racial reckoning lead to more funding?
A January report from ClimateWorks estimated that only $60 million of the $1.6 billion spent on climate change mitigation in 2019, or 3.8% of the total, went to climate justice, just transition efforts, grassroots mobilization and equity. The data point is one of few efforts to measure such philanthropic giving, other than a 2020 study of 12 national funders that found only 1.3% of their environmental grantmaking went to environmental justice.
ClimateWorks’ new report does not offer an updated figure for 2020, but Menon said it is in the works for next year. Due to the foundation’s lack of experience in the area, ClimateWorks is looking for partners to help it establish a baseline for tracking such funding.
“We didn’t want to define it ourselves,” she said. “We would rather have someone who’s an expert in the field tell us what they think it was.”
As the report notes, a historic surge of social justice movements set off by George Floyd’s killing pushed philanthropy to focus on equity in 2020. ClimateWorks estimates U.S. foundations committed nearly $500 million to racial justice last year. Among the questions they hope to resolve next year is how much of such spending is related to climate solutions.
Efforts like the Climate Funders Justice Pledge also emerged to put pressure on the field. Yet with only seven of the top 40 funders participating, even in the transparency part of the pledge alone, many are still dragging their feet.
A timeline set by science
It is possible to look at the numbers and see a lot of action. It seems every day, a multimillion-dollar commitment is announced. One group of 29 funders, which includes several of the foundations mentioned above, is on track to spend $8.2 billion by 2025, more than doubling their original pledge.
Over the past four years, foundation giving to climate mitigation has risen about 15% annually. That’s well above the average annual increase in philanthropic giving. Many fields would love that level of investment. And that pattern did not flag, even as foundations scrambled to respond to a global pandemic.
Yet the measure cannot be other fields, but the timeline set by science. If the world does not halve emissions by 2030 and hit net zero by 2050, the catastrophes detailed above may pale in comparison to what is to come. Already, runaway emissions have all but guaranteed sea level rise that threatens roughly 50 major coastal cities, according to a new study from Climate Central. The U.N. Secretary-General has proclaimed climate change “a code red for humanity.”
Philanthropy mustered billions of dollars for aid after COVID-19 struck. Yet imagine if that same sum had been invested in pushing for pandemic readiness. A penny of preparation, as is often said, is worth a dollar of response. Of course, a changing climate is already creating cascading crises. But each passing year promises to be worse. Hopefully, it will not take a pandemic-level climate disaster to rouse a similar response. By then it would, in many ways, be too late.
