How Can Philanthropy Curb Climate Change?

The ClimateWorks Foundation has been the most influential voice in climate philanthropy since it was started by three big foundations 14 years ago. It has made $1.3 billion in grants and has helped boost climate giving to new heights. Throughout most of its history, it has focused on changing the policies and practices of government and industries to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions through its grants, its own programs, or advising other grant makers.

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But now a growing chorus of critics, particularly environmental leaders of color, argue that its approach has failed and that by not changing quickly enough, the influential grant maker is thwarting desperately needed progress.

Activist groups are calling on philanthropists — including Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion Earth Fund — to stop focusing so much on technocratic solutions long advocated by ClimateWorks and instead fund local, grassroots activists’ efforts to stop fossil-fuel extraction and promote community-based solutions to the climate crisis. Some philanthropists, including several heirs to the Rockefeller oil fortune, are responding to that call and urging ClimateWorks and others to follow their lead.

Philanthropy’s biggest successes on thorny problems have always come from funding to build and fuel movements, these critics say. Advocacy groups working on marriage equality, AIDS, civil rights, and other causes offer a model for where philanthropy can most make a difference on climate change.

No one wants to get this one wrong. Yet there is fierce disagreement about how to get it right.

ClimateWorks says it is becoming more flexible about its approach and is starting to help climate activists advance their political power. It has begun meeting with and financing some groups that offer solutions from people of color and others who are usually left out of decision making on big global topics. But ClimateWorks can be so distant from grassroots movements that at times, even when it tries to do better, it still draws ire from those organizations.

In the summer of 2021, ClimateWorks put out a public call asking for grant proposals from climate-justice groups for projects that would remove carbon dioxide — the primary greenhouse gas — from the atmosphere.

Such an open call was one way ClimateWorks hoped to reach beyond the groups it has typically funded and find a more diverse pool of potential grantees. The problem? Many of these groups oppose the entire idea of carbon-dioxide removal.

They say the nascent technology could relieve pressure to stop fossil-fuel production — oil refineries, pipelines, and other infrastructure that are often located in poor neighborhoods. They worry that these new carbon scrubbers will also end up in their communities and don’t think carbon can be moved or stored safely.

“If you actually look at how carbon removal works and what the side effects are, you know that there’s no way it’s environmentally just,” says Basav Sen, director of the Climate Justice Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, which is a member of the Climate Justice Alliance, a coalition of more than 70 groups.

When faced with the criticism, ClimateWorks was happy to meet with Sen and other advocates.

Shannon Finney, Getty Images for Green New Deal

“We want to be honest. We want to be clear about where we are and where we are not,” says Chris DeCardy, who served as interim CEO of ClimateWorks until he left the organization in January.

He was replaced with a permanent leader, Helen Mountford, who has worked on efforts to deal with the economic impacts and opportunities of the transition to renewable energy, including what it means for people’s lives.

ClimateWorks says carbon removal is necessary — a United Nations report calls for it — and won’t undercut renewable energy.

Yet ClimateWorks has sought input from those who disagree. “They should feel very comfortable continuing to criticize us and be frustrated with us when they disagree,” DeCardy says.

The meeting with Sen and others ended mostly with frustration.

“We kept going round in circles,” Sen says.

The frustration has real-world consequences that are devastating to the planet, says Sen. By funding risky, experimental technologies, ClimateWorks is denying money to effective and more just solutions, he says. “You are, in fact, doing a disservice to the cause of tackling climate change.”

Spurring Other Support

ClimateWorks is facing such intense scrutiny not just because of its longstanding role setting the agenda but also because it has achieved one of its major goals: spurring more grant makers to put money into curbing climate change. Its work is so prominent that Bezos’s Earth Fund plucked Charlotte Pera from her job leading ClimateWorks and installed her as a top official of the Earth Fund.

Foundation giving to climate efforts more than doubled to $1.9 billion from 2015 to 2020, though it is still just 2 percent of all giving by grant makers. And over the past several years, a bevy of billionaires has arrived on the scene.

Bezos’s 10-year commitment, made in 2020, to give $10 billion has already produced $1.4 billion in grants — more than ClimateWorks doled out in 14 years. And billions more philanthropic dollars were pledged to fighting climate change during U.N. meetings last fall.

Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and chairman of Alphabet, has been targeting renewable energy and sustainable agriculture through his organization, the 11th Hour Project, which he founded in 2006.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has put $300 million into efforts to help ensure farmers in poor countries can adapt their crops and growing practices to the changing climate, and Breakthrough Energy, a company Bill Gates finances, has a foundation that is also actively promoting green energy. MacKenzie Scott has given $25 million to the Nature Conservancy. The Musk Foundation and Tesla have announced a $100 million prize for carbon-removal technology.

It’s unclear if the ClimateWorks approach will be adopted by Bezos and other billionaires. But it is likely to have some influence, not just because of Pera’s involvement but also because its CEO, Andrew Steer, came from the World Resources Institute, another ClimateWorks grantee.

picture alliance, Getty Images

But from its very start, the Earth Fund faced some of the same criticisms and challenges as ClimateWorks. In August 2020, before the Earth Fund had a staff, Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, who serves as vice chair of the Earth Fund, met with Jacqueline Patterson, who was then senior director of Environmental and Climate Justice Programs at the NAACP.

She says that Bezos and Sanchez wanted to make sure their fund had a big impact and hoped to understand climate change from a variety of perspectives. They asked open-ended questions and, Patterson says, listened to her ideas and concerns about groups led by people of color being both effective and underfunded.

“She [Lauren] was engaged and she was particularly excited, saying that grassroots groups needed to be supported.” says Patterson.

But in November of that year, just before meeting with representatives at Bezos’s foundation, Patterson heard that Bezos planned to give each of five big environmental groups $100 million each. (ClimateWorks received $50 million in that round of funding.) A handful of environmental-justice groups would only get $2 million each.

“I was livid,” says Patterson.

After that conversation and pushback from some groups, the foundation quickly came back with a much larger offer. The Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice and the Solutions Project, which both fund climate-justice groups, each received $43 million. The NDN Collective, an organization run by Indigenous people that provides grants and services to Indigenous groups, received $12 million.

“Although we’re grateful for what we’ve got, it’s still an indicator that Indigenous people were an afterthought,” says Nick Tilsen, NDN Collective’s CEO. “We forgot about the Indians. We better add something in here.”

Patterson sees a clear desire from everyone at the Earth Fund to effectively address climate change and to work with grassroots groups. They are just having some growing pains in figuring out how to do that equitably, she says.

One sign of that recognition: The Earth Fund recently hired Danielle Deane-Ryan, a longtime adviser to the Donors of Color Network and foundations like Libra and Heising-Simons, as director of equitable climate solutions.

“We have really put a premium on spending time talking with environmental-justice groups and learning from them and being as thoughtful as we possibly can,” says the Earth Fund’s Pera.

A Need to Reinvent

While the infusions of money from the billionaires are potentially transformative, they took a long time to arrive. That lack of interest from donors of all kinds is what led to the creation of ClimateWorks.

In 2007, as a way to understand how philanthropy could curb climate change, six foundations commissioned a report that identified what industries and places produced the most greenhouse gases — the main cause of global warming — and set a goal of cutting emissions by 30 gigatons by 2030. That’s a huge amount: One gigaton is the equivalent of about 5 million Boeing 747 airplanes.

In 2008, two of those foundations, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, along with the McKnight Foundation provided the initial funding for ClimateWorks so it could carry out the report’s strategy. DeCardy was the director of programs at Packard at the time and one of those who helped found ClimateWorks. It spent $42 million more on consultants to figure out how to do that, according to a report ClimateWorks released in 2016 that examined the group’s failures during its first four years. (The Hewlett Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle.)

ClimateWorks was “designed by engineers and corporate consultants,” according to the report. It assumed that governments wanted to fix climate change. ClimateWorks and its grantees would just help them get the policies right — a technocratic solution.

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But not long after it was launched, political opposition to addressing climate change grew. ClimateWorks spent $50 million to provide guidance to several governments attending the 2009 United Nations climate meeting. But that meeting ended without an agreement.

Soon after, the important step of regulating greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States died, even after significant advocacy from groups financed by ClimateWorks. Other governments were growing reluctant to address climate change, too. ClimateWorks policy fixes were less likely to be adopted.

When ClimateWorks started, U.S. grant makers spent about $240 million a year on climate change. The consultants’ plan estimated that another $600 million a year over five years would be required to meet its goals. ClimateWorks never raised that much money.

The McKnight Foundation stopped donating after just four years, upset that it wasn’t offered a board seat or given avenues to contribute its expertise in creating diverse networks and forging collaboration, according to the report.

Several of the staff members interviewed for the report felt that ClimateWorks was a “Silicon Valley echo chamber.” The group was wed to the rigid consultants’ framework, which one person, whose name was not disclosed in the report, said impeded ClimateWorks from tapping into social-change movements and called it a “straitjacket.” Grant makers wanted more control. Staff complained that grant makers already had too much control.

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ClimateWorks faced numerous challenges by 2012 when Larry Kramer started as the president of the Hewlett Foundation.

“It was a serious decision for us about whether and how to continue funding,” says Kramer who has also been on the ClimateWorks board since 2013. “Ultimately, we decided to keep supporting it because of its role in advancing climate philanthropy and because of the way ClimateWorks was restructured.”

The group’s supporters decided they would reinvent ClimateWorks as a kind of advisory group. It would place its attention on developing strategies that it would share with grant makers and then help coordinate the strategies. Those foundations would make their own grants.

ClimateWorks’s finances changed sharply. In 2012 it brought in $170 million and gave $148 million. By 2015, when it was more focused on advising than raising money to channel to other nonprofits, it brought in just $54 million.

ClimateWorks also vastly expanded its staff, spending $10 million more a year on employees in 2019 than in 2012 to better provide services to donors and develop its own programs.

It created a global intelligence unit to track how money was being spent on climate change so it could advise and help grant makers be effective. And it staffed programs focused on transportation, cooling, carbon-dioxide removal, and later food and agriculture, among other approaches, often collaborating with other nonprofits. Recently the group has also turned more attention to the impact of climate change on people’s lives, including what it will mean for jobs and economic growth.

In 2020, as donations poured into ClimateWorks, the organization released a new strategic plan. The plan made it clear its primary focus was on shaping strategies for donors looking to distribute their own money, but it would also distribute funds on behalf of other grant makers.

But critics noted that the plan makes no mention at all of race, justice, inequity, or Indigenous people.

DeCardy points out that the plan includes language about creating an equitable future for all.

But that is not the same as explicitly addressing inequities.

“The reality is we had not given really any time or attention to the issues of equity,” says Shawn Reifsteck, ClimateWorks vice president of strategy, collaborations, and brand. “It’s kind of embedded in our thinking. But the language wasn’t there. The strategies weren’t there.

Following the murder of George Floyd, ClimateWorks made diversity, equity, and inclusion an organizational priority and plans to hire a justice and equity director.

It has done much to diversify its work force. Forty-four percent of its staff is people of color, up from 30 percent in 2017.

It says it has awarded $1.3 million to groups that focus on the environmental concerns of people of color and plans to add $3 million for such groups this year. It gave out $63 million in grants in 2020 according to its informational tax return. It says it has also made diversity, equity, and inclusion part of its grant-making process.

But ClimateWorks can’t be as nimble as many other groups. It has no endowment of its own. The many grant makers that fund it often earmark money to be spent in particular ways. And donors don’t often adopt its recommendations.

Power, Not Policies

Judging purely by carbon emissions — the group’s North Star, according to Surabi Menon, ClimateWorks’s vice president of global intelligence — everyone working on climate is failing. Global carbon emissions have continued a more or less steady climb since the 1950s. About the only thing that has caused emissions to drop were the global pandemic lockdowns of 2020.

Even those grim statistics show some progress, says DeCardy, the just-departed interim CEO. A decade ago, the planet was on track to warm by 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That has fallen to 3 degrees. Still far too high, but better. And philanthropy helped play important roles in the development and uptake of solar and wind energy and electric vehicles, he says.

But climate change cannot be deterred by the kinds of technocratic solutions that ClimateWorks has long championed, says Daniel Faber, a senior research fellow at the think tank, the Global Center for Climate Justice, and a sociology professor at Northwestern University. Governments simply lack the will to overcome the power of the fossil-fuel lobby, he says. That will only come from people.

“This is about political empowerment,” Faber says, “and creating a vision which can inspire people to be part of the movement, which can transform the power structures, which are blocking the implementation of these solutions.”

When large societal shifts take place — such as those that gave people of color and women more rights and legalized gay marriage — they come about only because of grassroots activism, says Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, which combines a traditional grant-making organization with an advocacy arm. These movements didn’t shy away from identifying the bad guy and fighting for bold solutions, he notes.

That is a problem for confrontation-averse foundations. “Virtually without exception, funders are lovers, not fighters,” says Wasserman. “Big, transformational change almost never happens in this country without fights.”

Wasserman’s relatively small foundation, which makes about $15 million in grants a year, is taking on big fights by financing investigations that allege that fossil-fuel companies knew about climate change decades ago yet participated in disinformation efforts. It is also funding small groups that oppose new drilling, coal mining, and pipeline projects.

Supporting groups led by Indigenous people and people of color is also the focus of the Equation Campaign started in 2021 by two Rockefeller heirs — Rebecca Lambert and Peter Case — who are trustees of the Rockefeller Family Fund.

Lambert says that ClimateWorks’s focus on lowering demand for fossil fuels is needed, but it is ineffective without also curtailing fossil-fuel production. Big environmental groups and grant makers rarely try to stop new drilling or pipelines despite the International Energy Agency’s finding that in order to meet emissions targets, no new wells should be drilled.

“Focusing on reducing demand while ignoring supply works like only one half of a pair of scissors,” she says. “Betting on the same strategy that’s been used for 40 years might not actually be the safest bet.”

Groups led by people of color and Indigenous people have done remarkable work on stopping gas, oil, and coal from being extracted and halting pipelines but have received very little funding, she says. In some cases, the Equation Campaign’s grantees are receiving their first grants ever.

‘More People-Centered’

The same old approach to climate philanthropy wasn’t working for Erin Rogers, who worked at the Hewlett Foundation — an original and current ClimateWorks donor — for eight years. She left and is now co-director of the Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice.

“I saw firsthand how the big climate funders were directing the vast majority of their grants. It was a very siloed approach, a very insider, technocratic, policy-driven approach that I think we’ve all come to see is failing,” she says. “These wicked, complex, systemic problems, of which the climate crisis is one, need solutions that are more people-centered, more connected.”

That has been the approach of Uprose, a decades-old, multiracial, community group in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It helped to get a 685-kilowatt community solar project built that will allow 200 homes and small businesses to get discounts on their electricity bill. It was instrumental in getting a $200 million investment for a wind-turbine assembly facility that will bring 1,200 green jobs to the area. Along with a coalition of groups, it pushed for a new state law that included the strongest emissions-reductions standards in the United States. Uprose has just seven staff members and received about $1 million in total contributions in 2020.

“We have to wonder why they’re not seeing what everyone sees, which is that we’re leading,” says Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of Uprose, who adds that “[ClimateWorks’s] approach is dated and conventional, and we’re dealing with an unconventional problem.”

In 2020, the Hive Fund made a three-year, $300,000 grant to a small community-based transportation group in Houston that has been achieving similarly outsize results. Link Houston has a comprehensive vision for changing transportation systems so people drive less, says its interim executive director, Ines Sigel.

Link Houston advocates for expanding bus schedules, adding sidewalks and bike lanes and planting trees so people can more comfortably walk places. And by connecting everyday transportation to climate, more people are engaged with the issue.

Her group and others’ opposition to a highway expansion plan led to a Federal Highway Administration investigation of the Texas Department of Transportation for civil-rights and environmental violations and delayed the project. Unprecedented crowds of people turned out for a public meeting on highway financing. The result: $50 million set aside for things like sidewalks and bike paths if the project proceeds.

“People want to have a say in what happens in their communities,” Sigel says.

Her nonprofit has received little interest from big climate grant makers despite applying for some large grants.

Electric Trucks

ClimateWorks also works on transportation but takes a different approach focusing primarily on advocating for government policies and working with manufacturers to shift the country toward greater electric-vehicle use primarily through the Drive Electric Campaign. It is a coalition that includes traditional environmental groups like the World Resources Institute, NRDC, and other big groups like the World Economic Forum and United Nations. But recently it has become more engaged with smaller grassroots groups in an effort to address the ways transportation is causing problems for people.

As part of the shift, it made a $50,000 grant to the environmental law firm Earthjustice, in Los Angeles, at the end of 2021. That group has worked with small environmental-justice groups as part of Electric Trucks Now, a nationwide effort to boost the number of electric trucks and buses on the road.

That is a life-and-death issue for residents in California’s Inland Empire, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. Communities there have seen a surge in warehouse construction. Truck traffic is so bad that one count found 1,000 diesel trucks an hour passing through its majority Latino neighborhoods. A switch to electric trucks could drastically improve air quality.

“We can’t get rid of the things that are already here, like the warehouses and the rail yards and the gas plants,” says Ana Gonzalez, interim executive director at the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, one of those local partners, which received a $15,000 ClimateWorks grant. “One thing that we can do is to create a better, sustainable, cleaner energy system, an infrastructure for them to conduct their business without harming the community.”

Along with Earthjustice, the electric-truck collaborative, ClimateWorks, and others, her group has successfully pushed for state regulations requiring a transition to electric trucks. Now, by 2045, no trucks sold in the state will be allowed to emit carbon dioxide.

Thinking Differently

While ClimateWorks is moving away from some of its technocratic roots, at least one of its programs has always taken a different approach, one that might be a model for how it thinks about working with justice groups.

Its Climate and Land Use Alliance, a collaboration among grant makers that it manages, works with Indigenous groups around the world and gave out $20 million last year. It has recently made a grant to a Native American group in the United States.

The alliance has been a champion of funding Indigenous people and listening to them, says Ginger Cassady, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, which received $550,000 from the land alliance from 2017 to 2019. “They’ve always been a really collaborative, thoughtful funder,” she says.

Native American leaders and groups have been almost totally ignored by traditional grant makers that tend to focus on discrete problems in ways that don’t fit well with the holistic way tribes approach issues, says Erik Stegman, CEO of Native Americans in Philanthropy, a coalition of foundations.

Yet tribes do important and effective work. They have been involved in high-profile fights over pipelines. Many tribes manage forests, waterways, and grasslands in ways that help absorb carbon, improve biodiversity, and provide other environmental benefits.

Stegman says ClimateWorks reached out to him in the spring of 2020.

Though the land alliance does little grant making in the United States, its staff went on a listening tour, talking with tribal leaders to learn more about their work. The alliance has helped Stegman see how tribes can better compete for grants. ClimateWorks has awarded his group two grants totaling $600,000, funds that Stegman says will be used to help tribes better understand and engage with grant makers.

“This is a strong first step,” he says. “They understand their influence in certain sectors, and they’re willing to work with us and other partners to think about how they can leverage that.”

New Leadership

ClimateWorks is facing a time of transformation as the climate crisis grows increasingly acute and time to act is getting ever shorter. The deep-pocketed Earth Fund is likely to have more influence, given it size. Groups like the Equation Campaign and the Hive Fund are adopting different strategies and supporting different groups.

Activist and justice groups are finally getting more funding and will have more resources to both do their work and to demand more of a voice and support.

Mountford, the new ClimateWorks CEO, will be only its fourth. (And one of those lasted only a few months.) Each was hired in a time of major change for the group. Though she only recently started, she says she expects to push for an even more human-centered approach in many of the organization’s programs, ensuring they will direct energy and funding to help people, not just the environment.

And she hopes to strengthen social and racial justice as a priority. “Going forward, rather than being split on where our differences are, we can focus on how we can learn from each other, find common areas, and move things forward,” she says. “There is a lot for all of us to learn.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. See more about the grant and our gift-acceptance policy.