My organization, Open Road Alliance, is in the business of identifying and helping to remove unexpected roadblocks that stifle social change. These roadblocks happen every day. They can take the form of a weather catastrophe or an abrupt change in government policy. We believe that by gathering enough data, we can anticipate the most likely disruptions and quickly provide grantees with the resources needed to continue their work when crisis hits.
But our model is inadequate when it comes to the greatest roadblock of all — climate change. Our data can’t yet foresee the level and scale of disruption we know awaits our planet.
As we celebrate the 51st Earth Day, climate change poses the greatest existential threat of our lifetime. Every challenge facing humans, including hunger, conflict, housing, racial inequity, and poverty, is adversely affected by climate change. We’ve already seen some repercussions, but they will grow significantly greater if humanity fails to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero global carbon emissions by 2050, as climate scientists recommend.
Neither of these goals can be achieved without widespread philanthropic participation. But effective participation is easier said than done. When faced with the vast challenge of changing ingrained societal behaviors, it isn’t enough to carve out a piece of one’s grant-making budget or endowment to address the climate crisis.
Mitigating the effects of climate is a long game, so we must find a way to begin turning the ship while still ministering to the other urgent needs addressed by the nonprofits we support. Rather than add a climate grant-making priority, we need to integrate climate concerns into all of our work throughout our giving portfolios and operations. We need to approach climate as we have learned to approach gender and equity — by making it a part of all our grant-making strategies.
Climate, like racial equity, is a structural issue, so infusing it throughout our work is critical. Especially during this past year, we’ve come to understand that integrating equity into every aspect of our operations means recognizing and taking ownership of bias and structural racism inside philanthropy itself. None of us can claim that we don’t play a role in systemic racial inequity. Successfully examining that role and taking steps to redress it is uncomfortable, even painful.
Integrating climate considerations into the fabric of philanthropy will require a similar level of self-examination and even sacrifice. Philanthropic organizations that are actively engaged in racial-equity work are in a good position to start this process since equity and climate are inextricably linked. Communities most harmed by climate change are also those that have historically faced the most structural discrimination and injustice. Any lasting and sustainable transition to a carbon-neutral world needs to fundamentally alter and correct these inequities.
Changing Investments and Operations
As with addressing racial injustice, confronting climate change will require those of us in philanthropy to change our assumptions about how we operate our organizations, how we live, and the way we fund. Fully integrating climate considerations into all our work will mean going far beyond divesting from fossil fuels and purchasing our office electricity through a community solar contract.
It may require us to push our grantees and partners to think about what they will do to mitigate or adapt to the likely effects of climate change on their work in the coming decade. In return, foundations need to be prepared to financially support grantees to implement mitigation plans or reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Put another way, budgeting for climate risk should be part of every grant.
Grant makers may also need to make tough choices about their own operations, endowments, and internal practices, including understanding their carbon footprint and adopting a clear greenhouse gas reduction strategy.
For most philanthropic organizations, the largest contributors to greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t office buildings or business travel but emissions from the companies in which they choose to invest their assets. Agriculture, industry, building construction, and others all play outsize roles in contributing to climate change. Emissions aren’t just created by companies with a bad environmental track record — they are embedded in the process of development itself.
For example, manufacturing concrete makes up an enormous 8 percent of total global emissions, even if that concrete is being used to build a school in Rwanda or affordable housing in Chicago. The good news is that new technologies can drastically reduce carbon emissions from the production of concrete, but this process is not mainstream. So what is the best way to proceed? Not building the school isn’t an option, but it may also not be realistic to simply require all grantees to use low-carbon concrete without additional funding and support. A climate-integrated approach would include such factors in the decision-making and investment strategies.
Prepare to Change and Adapt
We certainly don’t have all the answers, but we are following the lead of grantees and donors who have engaged in climate work for decades. From the Hive Fund for Gender and Climate Justice, we are learning how to bring an explicit racial- and gender-equity approach to funding climate work; and from the Gulf South for a Green New Deal, we are discovering how to do this work from the bottom up, starting at the community level.
None of us can predict with certainty what the next decade will look like as climate disruptions go from the unexpected to the new normal. As grant makers, we need to be prepared to change and adapt.
At the Open Road Alliance, we’ve begun with baby steps. While we continue to support nonprofits and social enterprises in a range of fields, our priority is organizations with a clear understanding of their role in fighting climate change. Whichever path other philanthropic organizations choose, one thing is certain: We can no longer pretend that climate change isn’t part of all our work.
