Inside a Campaign to Move $1 Billion Toward Electrifying Global Transportation
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Drive Electric connects global partners who are accelerating the adoption of electric transportation, like the Movilidad eléctrica en América Latina y el Caribe (MOVE) platform. Photo credit: MOVE/UNEP Latin America and Caribbean Office
Transportation — from daily commutes to cross-country trucking — is responsible for roughly 60% of global oil demand and is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.
And yet, even compared to other segments of funding for climate change, a cause that is neglected as a whole, transportation has received relatively little attention. Between 2015 and 2020, an average of $50 million a year in climate philanthropy was directed toward transportation, putting it among the five least-funded climate sectors, according to ClimateWorks.
Starting this year, however, more money will be making its way into the field. The Drive Electric Campaign — a global effort launched in 2021 by ClimateWorks to help electrify all forms of road transportation — landed $300 million over five years from the Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative created and overseen by TED (as in, the talks) with support from the Bridgespan Group. Audacious runs an annual philanthropic competition that’s backed by several of the country’s largest foundations and donors, such as the Gates Foundation, Hansjörg Wyss and the Ballmer Group.
The award last year marked something of a coming out party for Drive Electric, which had accelerated its shift from an internal ClimateWorks strategy to a more public-facing effort expressly to apply for the prize. With this latest boost, Drive Electric has now mobilized a total of $700 million from a growing mix of long-time climate funders, rising tech donors and even MacKenzie Scott herself.
“It really is positioned… to succeed at a scale and on a timeframe that can really contribute significantly to greenhouse gas impacts,” said Anna Verghese, executive director of the Audacious Project. “There’s this urgent window of opportunity.”
With the recent appointment of its first full-time director, Rebecca Fisher, who previously served as ClimateWorks’ associate director for road transportation, the campaign is starting to formalize. However, it retains a somewhat decentralized structure; it’s a global campaign steered by ClimateWorks and a handful of other funding intermediaries and foundations, but more than 100 partners are involved, and much of the actual grantmaking is carried out by individual funders signed onto the campaign.
Here’s a look at this sprawling effort, what it has accomplished so far, and where the money is headed.
Chalking up wins
When the goal is to transform transportation around the world, it’s hard to know how much to credit any one campaign. But Drive Electric points to several indicators of progress in the work to electrify the transportation sector. The campaign’s partners have secured 1,269 signatories committed to a zero-emissions transportation future, spanning business, government, finance and others.
The campaign calculates that 24% of the world’s road transportation demand is now committed to transitioning to 100% zero-emission vehicles by 2050 or earlier, based on pledges and policies. Drive Electric counts 202 major policy developments in this sector since 2019, with the campaign’s partners contributing to at least 74 policies that support zero emissions vehicles in the second half of 2021, most focused on passenger cars.
The campaign is particularly encouraged by policies like the European Union’s massive plan, Fit for 55, to cut greenhouse gas emissions 55% by 2030. To meet that goal, it is targeting a switch to 100% zero-emissions sales of cars and vans by 2035. Drive Electric’s partners, combining both technical research and advocacy, pushed back against opposition and helped ensure a “much more ambitious” plan than industry representatives were proposing, Fisher told me.
Another milestone is, of course, the funding — $700 million secured toward a total goal of $1 billion. But it’s important to understand that Drive Electric is not a fund. Most of the committed grantmaking comes from foundation partners, who make their own decisions on what to support and where. The campaign’s $1 billion headline figure, therefore, is not so much a fundraising target as a mobilization goal.
“It’s based on need… and it fluctuates,” Fisher said of past funding. “Aligned funders, they do what they see fit and what aligns with their priorities, and then they eventually let us know.”
The campaign typically moves money in a few ways: funding going to ClimateWorks for passthrough grantmaking and program work, similar streams of funding going to a network of regional partner intermediaries like the European Climate Foundation, and funding directed by individual partner foundations to grantees. The $300 million from Audacious will be split between ClimateWorks and the regional partners, but further details are not yet available.
How Drive Electric works
Drive Electric functions to some extent as a lightly staffed funder collaborative, but with a much bigger range of partners than usual. It’s hosted by ClimateWorks, and Fisher is now dedicated to the campaign, along with several other staff from ClimateWorks’ road transportation team. The campaign also relies on an advisory group of more than 100 specialists and experts. And there’s a steering committee composed of regional intermediaries and foundation partners.
The campaign seeks influence through three channels: policy, business and movements. Like a collaborative, one way it pursues its goals is simply by bringing together the vast global network of NGOs, funders, businesses and government offices working on electrification. Members connect through the traditional tools — a listserv, quarterly Zoom meetings, and annual in-person meetings.
Beyond connecting its members and others, Drive Electric tries to plug holes in existing efforts and mount rapid responses. With so many partners doing work all over the world, sometimes the campaign’s role is simply connecting people to existing resources. If someone in Paraguay is looking for talking points on battery sustainability and mining, the Drive Electric team and members might know that a Chilean partner has already created a handout in Spanish.
Of course, there are also needs that require fundraising or new staff assignments. For instance, if there’s an emerging need for more global strategic communications, the campaign might talk to its funders about support, or also consider whether ClimateWorks’ team can lend a hand, Fisher said.
Who’s on board
It’s tricky to get a comprehensive picture of a campaign that counts more than 100 partners working in over 65 countries. But the fact that there are so many groups involved and much of the grantmaking appears to be decentralized suggests ClimateWorks has listened to past criticisms that called its approach overly top-down and rigid.
That said, the list of grantees includes many of the usual international environmental juggernauts. That includes NGOs like NRDC, EDF and the Sierra Club; think tanks like World Resources Institute and RMI; corporate networks like CERES; government organizing efforts like the C40 Cities network of mayors; and multilateral institutions like the UN Environment Programme and World Economic Forum.
There’s also a long list of zero-emissions vehicle groups — both as grantees and allies — as well as some lesser-known partners highlighting elements of the campaign. For instance, there are grantees focused on equity, such as the Greenlining Institute; on anti-extraction organizing, like Earthworks; others, like the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and the New Urban Mobility alliance, on public transit and non-automotive modes of transport,.
While ClimateWorks did not provide overall grant figures for Drive Electric to date, it said that ClimateWorks itself has granted more than $10 million over the last year for efforts related to clean trucks. That sum included awards to EarthJustice for federal advocacy ($500,000), RMI for capacity building in India and China ($500,000), CALSTART for a global zero emissions initiative ($450,000), and the Climate Group to organize corporate fleets ($350,000), among others. Aligned funding added additional dollars to that effort.
Fisher also pointed out that much of the campaign’s work is on topics like public transit and micro-mobility, and not just personal cars and trucks. “It’s easy for people to see the name Drive Electric and think, ‘Oh, you’re just talking about personal vehicles.’ That’s definitely not what our campaign is about. And it’s actually not what our grantmaking primarily consists of,” Fisher said. It’s not clear how much total funding goes to such efforts, but one U.S. example is ClimateWorks’ $100,000 contribution to the Urban Mobility Fund in 2020.
When it comes to geographic focus, Drive Electric is largely putting its chips on three countries and one region — China, India, Europe and the United States — that accounted for 73% of new vehicle sales in 2020 and represent 70% of vehicle manufacturing. “Tipping those four major markets will create this cascade across the world,” said Fisher.
At the same time, Drive Electric has started to expand its work in emerging economies. For instance, campaign members might push multilateral development banks, like the World Bank or Asian Development Bank, to consider how to phase out polluting forms of transport, such as by financing electric two- and three-wheeler fleets or funding electric buses in place of diesel ones in mass transit projects. It also supports NGOs advocating for EV policies in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia.
“The work that we’re now doing in emerging economies is some of the most impactful and will actually pay huge dividends down the road,” she said. “If you look at population growth and the subsequent vehicle demand between now and 2050 … most of it will occur in emerging economies.”
Who’s behind the wheel
While the campaign’s work is spread across dozens of partners, at its core, Drive Electric is representative of the global network of funding intermediaries that ClimateWorks’ founders envisioned when they launched the initiative in 2008.
ClimateWorks’ regional offshoots, the European Climate Foundation and Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation, lead the campaign’s European and Indian efforts, respectively. Meanwhile, the Energy Foundation, ClimateWorks’ close partner and predecessor, heads the United States effort, while its spinoff, Energy Foundation China, oversees its work in that country. Efforts across those regions and beyond are managed by ClimateWorks itself, and together, these five intermediaries make up part of the campaign’s steering committee.
Most of Drive Electric’s 20-plus funders also are key supporters of one or more of those pass-through organizations, such as the Children’s Investment Fund, IKEA, Oak, Pisces and Sea Change foundations, as well as Bloomberg Philanthropies. One of ClimateWorks’ founding funders and longtime supporters, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is also on that list.
There are a few funders from outside that circle. Those backers include the Canada-based Trottier Family Foundation and a pair of U.K.-based funders, FIA Foundation, and the relatively new Quadrature Climate Foundation (which also works with Audacious).
Many in this same pool of funders also give through Audacious: Hewlett, Sea Change, CIFF and Oak. Audacious also lists support from the Sea Grape and Someland foundations, as well as from cryptocurrency billionaires Chris Larsen and Lyna Lam; billionaire cosmetics empire heirs Gary, Laura, Josh and Eliana Lauder; and tech billionaires Jeffrey and Marieke Rothschild. Another prominent backer is MacKenzie Scott, who gave $35 million over five years to Drive Electric via Audacious.
Why one regional climate foundation got involved
Aside from other commonalities, most of Drive Electric’s foundation funding comes from institutions with a national or international focus. McKnight is a rare exception.
The Minneapolis-based foundation was one of ClimateWorks’ founding funders in 2008, but exited the partnership a few years later and refocused on its home region. It is now the largest climate funder in the Midwest, though it also works at the national level.
Tenzin Dolkar, a program officer with McKnight’s Midwest climate and energy program who leads the foundation’s strategy for transportation, said the foundation joined Drive Electric as a path to cutting transportation emissions, but also to revitalizing a region that the American auto industry has long called home.
“Through proactive policy and coordination, we believe that the Midwest can retain and expand its role as a global leader through the production and sale of EVs, creating many thousands of family-supporting jobs along the way,” Dolkar said in an emailed statement. Drive Electric estimates the transition will create 7 million to 9 million jobs worldwide.
McKnight also sees a key role for philanthropy in ensuring equity, both around affordability of electric vehicles and speeding the transition to trucks and delivery vans to reduce pollution that predominantly plagues people of color and low-income communities. Globally, hundreds of thousands of deaths can be prevented by switching to zero emissions forms of transportation.
The Midwestern funder’s perspective offers one window into both the challenge and opportunity Drive Electric is taking on — achieving global impact while supporting the needs of those on the ground. Transportation is, after all, an intensely local issue, impacting community members’ daily lives, pocketbooks and even the air they breathe. The campaign is rallying impressive, long overdue sums from national and global funders. But the extent to which the campaign is also serving regional and local needs could be where the rubber really meets the road.
