The World Is “Collapsing,” Says the Pope. Time to Get Up to Speed on Climate Philanthropy?
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The aftermath of catastrophic flooding in Libya last month. Hussein Eddeb/shutterstock
The Pope says the world is “collapsing,” with climate change pushing the planet near a “breaking point.” Some 4,000 are dead and 9,000 missing in Libya after climate-fueled floods. The WHO says dengue fever will “take off” in the U.S., Europe and Africa. And fast-rising temperatures have scientists digging through their thesauruses to convey their terror.
Those are just a few highlights from the past two months of climate news. Meanwhile, foundations are spending about as much each year on climate mitigation, just over $3 billion at last count, as Michael Bloomberg has awarded his alma mater. Nothing against the billionaire media mogul, or Johns Hopkins University, but I’d think foundations would want to spend more than a week and a half of their collective annual grantmaking outlay on preventing humanity from cooking to death. And assets, for the most part, remain on the sidelines.
Whether this latest batch of news has shocked you into climate curiosity, or if you’re already horrified and looking for guidance, or if you simply want to know what’s going on in the world of climate philanthropy, five recent reports and resources offer some food for thought on where the sector’s headed. (Incidentally, I’ve suggested in past roundups that annual reports don’t normally make the cut, but since they are in this list and most prior ones, consider that stance officially retracted.)
As always, more readings feel rather inadequate in the face of the climate challenge. Yet just like the crisis itself, the climate funding landscape is ever-changing and it pays to keep up with the latest developments. With $4 trillion in federal funding available over the next decade, there are more opportunities now for philanthropy to leverage government climate funding than any other time in history. Also, I hear dengue is awful.
How can funders back a transportation transformation in the Midwest?
If the Midwest were its own country, it would rank fifth in greenhouse gas emissions. So writes Tenzin Dolkar, program officer with the McKnight Foundation, in the introduction to a new report funded by her institution, The Midwest Transportation Landscape Assessment: A Roadmap for Funders. Figuring out how to decarbonize the region’s transportation — the biggest source of emissions there and for the nation as a whole — holds a lot of weight not just for Midwesterners or the United States, but for humanity’s race to net zero.
The report, also supported by the TransitCenter and SRAM Cycling Fund, is a product of the Mobility and Access Collaborative, a group hosted by The Funders Network. The publication is the latest in the collaborative’s long-running efforts to organize and push funders to back local advocates, bolster existing transit and expand alternative mobility options, and spread their philanthropic dollars beyond electric vehicles.
The report looks at both the big picture across the Midwest — Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin, by the report’s definition — and particular dynamics in individual states. Based on interviews with 75 nonprofit leaders, advocates and funders, it offers a deep dive into who’s doing what where, as well as the myriad health, safety and opportunity benefits of transit action. With nearly $1.7 trillion in new federal transit dollars coming down the pike, including $36 billion spent by Midwestern states in 2023 alone, it’s also a hell of a time for leverage.
Will billionaires put their money where the South is?
It’s hard to believe the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice is barely four years old. Since getting off the ground in 2020, it has become a darling of everyone from legacy foundations (Hewlett, Packard, MacArthur), billionaire funding vehicles (Ballmer, JPB and many more), other intermediaries (Climate Imperative, ClimateWorks), and at least one pop star’s philanthropy (Rihanna’s Clara Lionel Foundation). It’s also one of three climate justice intermediaries that received three-year, $43 million grants from the Bezos Earth Fund. As that grant from the Amazon founder runs its course, what’s next?
The Hive Fund Impact Report 2023 offers some hints by way of a look backward. In one sense, what’s ahead is more of the same: This year, the fund renewed 70% of its three-year grants from 2020. Three-year general operating support awards account for 90% of its grants. Almost all of Hive’s funding (again 90%) goes to Texas and the Southeast — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina — but it also supports work in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The report highlights examples of what that funding has made possible, from the Gulf Coast to the Rio Grande Valley.
Hive’s goal is to at least double its grantmaking to $40 million in 2025. Bezos and his fellow billionaires loom large in that calculation, as they do across the entire climate field. Through August, Hive had awarded $57 million since 2020. Take away Bezos’ one-time award, and that total falls dramatically. Will megadonors and the rest of philanthropy let an experienced intermediary shrink at the most critical of moments? Or, to adapt the language from the report, will Bezos and other billionaires “put your money where the South is?”
How big a climate fish is Lukas Walton?
When Walmart heir Lukas Walton launched a public face for his environment-focused philanthropy and investments in 2021, his team emphasized that the operation was still growing. That left a big question: Exactly how serious would the 37-year-old get about philanthropy, given he has a reported $24 billion to play with? Two years later, we have some self-reported answers.
The scion’s family office, Builders Vision, has released its first-ever annual report. (It self-identifies, for what it’s worth, as an “impact platform,” with an “impact report.”) Builders Vision, which says it now has roughly 100 staff, has deployed more than $3 billion across its three areas of focus — oceans, energy, and food and agriculture — through projects with nearly 450 partners. As Walton touts in his intro, its funding stretches from the South Side of Chicago to Massachusetts and Iceland. That said, most of that comes in the form of investments, not straight-up grantmaking. The foundation component, Builders Initiative, makes about $150 million in grants a year. Builders Vision is getting noticed, though: Fast Company named it one of its 10 most innovative corporate social responsibility initiatives of 2023.
Who’s actually working on climate justice?
For all of philanthropy’s resources, it can be painfully hard to find out who’s working on what and where. Foundations pour millions of dollars into research and analysis that mostly ends up sitting in their own personal archives, and a clear picture of, say, climate justice groups working around the world remains elusive. Enter the Climate Justice-Just Transition Donor Collaborative.
After a roughly two-year learning journey involving 21 events and 2,200-plus participants, the funder group has shared its findings about the global climate justice ecosystem. Its recently launched Climate Justice Map offers an interactive guide to 1,600-plus organizations spread across 150-plus countries, mostly in the Global South. Want to see who’s working on climate justice and/or a just transition in Senegal? It lists six organizations. Philanthropic funds have rarely reached such front-line groups, and the map’s creators hope their interactive tool pushes more that way.
It is, by admission, a working first draft. Given the resources of some of the core backers (Climate Justice Resilience Fund, ClimateWorks Foundation, IKEA Foundation, Oak Foundation, Porticus, Robert Bosch Stiftung), let’s hope they flesh it out. But there’s no need to wait. The map, which is set up as a wiki, welcomes submissions.
What would it look like to invest for a just transition?
If a 44-page statement on investment policy sounds sleep-inducing, you should know there are cartoons. More importantly, the Just Transition Integrated Capital Fund Investment Policy Statement lays out a vision, guided by the values of reparation, rematriation and community control, for how foundations can use their endowments to provide financing — like 0% loans — to projects for communities of color and the working class. Awake now?
Produced by Justice Funders, the statement is largely specific to the details of the new fund, and covers structure, governance, due diligence and reporting. But its appendix, and even the fund’s particulars, offer a detailed model for how a growing segment of progressive philanthropy would like to put assets to work for social transformation. In fact, the group published a report earlier this year detailing the framework it envisions for just transition investments.
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With a new generation of philanthropists keen to leverage all their assets for change, and unprecedented investment needed to confront the climate crisis, this growing body of resources imagines what that future could look like. To the old guard, the ideals involved may seem radical, even pie-in-the-sky. But what is bold today can become accepted tomorrow. Just look at philanthropic support for reparations. Or read the Pope’s latest encyclical.
