Report: Philanthropy can help protect against climate change

Philanthropists may help ease the harm from climate change by donating extra money to handle international warming and the communities most in danger from it, in keeping with a report that the analysis group Candid launched Wednesday.

“There can be huge climate value-for-money in supporting communities to address the inequalities that are causing their climate vulnerability,” Heather McGray, of the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, says within the report, ” Centering Equity and Justice in Climate Philanthropy.” “But it only works if success is defined as reducing the overall harm of climate change, not just reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

According to the report, solely about 2% of worldwide giving goes to climate change mitigation and fewer than 4% of that — about $60 million in 2019 — is designated for climate justice and equity-oriented work.

“It’s a tiny slice of an already-tiny slice,” mentioned the report’s co-editor Janet Camarena, senior director of Candid Learning. “Traditional top-down philanthropic practices often perpetuate inequities in how the climate crisis is addressed.”

Despite “all the buzz we hear about trust-based philanthropy and participatory processes,” Camarena mentioned most donors don’t base their contributions on the experience of the individuals who obtain their money.

A push to reverse that development is what impressed the report, which was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Oak Foundation.

In 2019, Ariadne, a European community of foundations that help social change and human rights points, acknowledged a necessity to extend funding for climate justice. In doing so, the community sought to handle the issues of racism, classism, patriarchy, financial injustice and environmental hurt that communities affected by climate change disproportionately encounter. Yet it additionally acknowledged that many donors didn’t know the way to get began.

“Ultimately, the climate crisis is deeply interconnected with questions of equity, which must be part of the analysis and embedded in the solutions,” Julie Broome, Ariadne’s director, wrote within the report. “The countries bearing the greatest burden of climate change are often far from the greatest contributors to the crisis.”

Candid’s Camarena mentioned the climate disaster requires the identical wide selection of small, artistic options that philanthropic donors used to help fight COVID-19. And she mentioned she believes there’s purpose for optimism that these adjustments can be achieved.

“In the wake of both the reckoning of COVID inequities and the wake of the racial reckoning with the murder of George Floyd, many foundations changed their value statements and posted notices about how they support racial equity, and in some cases even racial justice,” she mentioned. “Climate justice aligns very well with that, as funders think about not just putting the words on a website but how to operationalize those words.”

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