New Report Says Climate Philanthropy Needs Not More Dollars, But Greater Focus on Justice

Efforts tackling the climate emergency receive less than 2% of global philanthropy. That reality has become a rallying cry within climate philanthropy in recent years, cited repeatedly by grantmakers and grantseekers confronting the crisis.

A report published this month takes square aim at the usual focus on quantity, arguing that instead, philanthropy must “radically rethink” its role in climate action, and echoing long-standing critiques that climate funders too often back market-based and technology-focused solutions rather than supporting grassroots movements on the front lines.

Titled “Beyond 2%: From Climate Philanthropy to Climate Justice Philanthropy,” the 32-page report offers a sweeping history of modern climate philanthropy, followed by a series of recommendations for individual foundations, the sector and the climate movement, which range from expanding multiyear grantmaking to acknowledging “philanthropy’s deeper history as a product of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism.”

While the themes and tips will be familiar to veterans of the space, the report collects those critiques and possible responses at a moment some feel is ripe for change.

“There’s a unique opportunity right now where organizations are really wanting to engage in climate justice work or climate change work,” said Sofia Arroyo, executive director of the EDGE Funders Alliance, during the report’s release event. EDGE, an international funders network focused on intersectional movement-building, published the report in partnership with the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (known as UNRISD).

Yet the flipside of that increased potential is the concern that funders, particularly newcomers, may adopt a watered-down form of climate justice that omits its central critique of capitalism’s role in the crisis.

“What we’re seeing, in all of these spaces, is the words being used but no political analysis or values underpinning them,” said Asad Rehman, director of the anti-poverty organization War on Want and an editor of the report, during the event.

The report also comes as a new wave of climate donors are sending out their first checks, and in some cases, such as John and Ann Doerr’s recent $1.1 billion donation to Stanford University, doubling down on the technology-centric and elite-driven approaches that this report and others believe have held back progress.

The report’s author, Dr. Edouard Morena, a lecturer at the University of London’s Institute in Paris and one of the few academics focused on climate philanthropy, has written a series of critiques of the sector over the years, including the 2016 book “The Price of Climate Action.” In his view, the fundamental shortcomings have not changed.

“To this day, a significant portion of philanthropic foundations continue to prioritize an elitist, supply-side, market-centred, technocratic and techno-friendly approach to climate action that celebrates corporate and policy ‘leaders’ as the key drivers of the low-carbon transition,” he writes in the report.

What the report recommends

The core of the report is a series of suggestions to foundations for how to tip the balance toward climate justice and away from an approach it calls “green capitalism,” or using technology to manage emissions without fundamentally changing the conditions that led to the climate crisis.

The report urges foundations to give more power to “activist-funders” within their ranks, particularly those with experience in organizing or the climate movement, as well as hiring more such individuals, instead of the “white people with similar educational and professional backgrounds” that dominate the space.

It also name checks intermediaries and their growing role in funneling money from large funders to the front lines. The report makes some increasingly standard recommendations for trust-based philanthropy: low-burden reporting, multiyear funding, unrestricted support and participatory grantmaking.

To push broader changes in the sector, the report’s suggestions range from long shots (lobbying to raise the minimum level of foundation spending above 5%) to practices gaining more traction (greater sector transparency about spending, expanded impact investing). It also urges philanthropists to advocate for climate justice in funder networks.

Finally, at a systemic level, the report urges foundations to consider whether philanthropic funding and engagement can, in some instances, crowd out more appropriate actors. And it urges philanthropy not only to help put climate justice and just transition into the mainstream, but to step back and consider philanthropy’s role within the broader history of capitalism and colonialism — and how that should inform its use of power.

Can the report be a bridge?

By the standards of your typical, all-too-common report on philanthropic trends, the report’s tone is sharp at times, accusing mainstream philanthropy of “groupthink,” “justice-washing” and sharing an “elite-driven green capitalist worldview.”

At least one audience member during last week’s webinar release was concerned about the potential to foster more division, saying “the idea of pitting these philanthropies against each other is as bad as pitting movements against each other.”

That said, the report’s critiques have been leveled many times at climate philanthropy, whether here at Inside Philanthropy, regarding the sector’s role in a failed cap-and-trade bill, in the post-mortem of ClimateWorks Foundation’s first phase, or during even earlier days when The Energy Foundation was the biggest game in town. The report reflects divides that run very deep in the climate movement, and its authors seem to be resurfacing them in an effort to avoid repeating past missteps yet again.

Drawing battle lines was not the intention, Arroyo said. She hopes the report brings foundations together and ultimately sparks action on climate justice. “It is about building bridges and having conversations, not about polarizing,” she said.

In one sense, the climate and environmental movement has already come a long way, but from a low baseline. Rehman recalled organizers once requiring “photogenic” people wearing animal masks lead protests, rather than members of Black and brown communities speaking out about “CO2 colonization.” “The sea change is quite incredible,” he said.

Climate philanthropy, too, has added some new faces to its grantee lists. But as the report notes, the change is not all that dramatic. The Climate Funders Justice Pledge, for instance, has shown that funding for BIPOC-led environmental justice groups by certain top 40 climate funders is paltry, with several giving 16% or less of their total climate funding to such groups.

And it’s unclear how much critiques like Morena’s reach the highest levels of climate philanthropy. For instance, Charlotte Pera, the former ClimateWorks Foundation CEO who is now vice president of the Bezos Earth Fund — and who Morena mentions in the report — told me in an interview a couple of years ago that she had never heard of him.

Perhaps this report will make that connection. The bigger challenge is a fundamental divide. Movement activists and progressive funders largely see confronting capitalism as inextricable from tackling the climate emergency. Mainstream funders and NGOs, for the most part, display no such conviction.

That doesn’t mean these two segments, which are merely convenient shorthands and by no means monoliths, cannot collaborate, or that they don’t already share a lot of common ground. More funders than ever are explicitly acknowledging that front-line groups and impacted communities need support. But overcoming the philosophical gap is going to take one heck of a bridge.

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