Rockefeller, Bloomberg, other major donors bet big on climate at UNGA

Multilateral efforts to combat climate change may have seemed shaky, at best, during this week’s United Nations General Assembly. However, the philanthropy sector sent a clear message — in the form of multiple multimillion-dollar pledges — climate action has become a top priority. Climate philanthropy experts told Devex that UNGA, which coincided with New York’s Climate Week, would be an opportunity to further progress made at recent global events such as last November’s U.N. Climate Change Conference and the recent Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi. And while the head of the U.N.-created Green Climate Fund referred to her own organization as “outdated” in a draft speech and U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (who skipped the event) announced plans to roll back green policy measures, a slew of influential philanthropists made promises to deliver funding for global climate efforts. The Rockefeller Foundation’s ‘big bet’ The Rockefeller Foundation pledged $1 billion over the next five years to support the global transition away from fossil fuels to more sustainable energy sources. “The Foundation has made many big bets in its history, and we believe climate change’s threats and the climate transition’s opportunities—especially for the most vulnerable—justify what will be the biggest and most impactful bet in our history,” foundation President Rajiv Shah said in a statement. The new commitment builds on a strategy that The Rockefeller Foundation announced last year to make climate change central to its programmatic, operational, and investment strategies. Bloomberg, others push for a future beyond carbon Billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg announced he would commit an additional $500 million to the Beyond Carbon Campaign, which is a philanthropy-backed effort to address climate in the United States. “Beyond Carbon’s next phase will ensure the U.S. delivers on our global climate commitments by retiring the last remaining coal plants, stopping the expansion of natural gas, and quadrupling clean energy capacity while continuing to prioritize environmental justice and workforce transition,” his foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies said in a statement. Bloomberg Philanthropies also joined a coalition of other funders such as the Bezos Earth Fund, ClimateWorks Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in a three-year, $340 million pledge to support the development of data and research that could inform the adoption of net-zero practices within the financial sector. More corporate philanthropy The IKEA Foundation also donated $20 million to a joint effort with ClimateWorks to help workforces in the global south adapt to an economy based on renewable energy. Roughly 32 million people worldwide work in “high-carbon” industries and will need to be retrained so that they can find work amid the transition to renewable energy, according to the IKEA Foundation and ClimateWorks. Other pledges came from corporate donors such as software company Salesforce, which announced that it would direct part of a $8.3 million climate grant towards global efforts to conserve and restore mangrove forests. Mangroves provide coastal communities with protection from extreme weather and act as “huge carbon sinks,” the company noted. Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, also gave a $5 million grant to Global Methane Hub, which is supported by a coalition of more than 20 funders. The Google grant will support an initiative to use satellite monitoring to track and measure methane emissions from landfills.