To reduce climate change learning curve, philanthropists lean on collaboratives

SAN FRANCISCO — Even before the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were calls for philanthropy to go beyond funding interventions at the program level to match the urgency, scale, and complexity of climate change. This year, the Global Philanthropy Forum focused on the role of philanthropy in combating climate change, and several participants noted how the West Coast’s hazy skies — a result of the dozens of destructive wildfires across the region — were a preview of how the world might look if temperatures continue to rise and extreme weather events become more frequent. Grant-making collaboratives can help funders identify the opportunities for greatest impact, wrote Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in a January article titled “Philanthropy Must Stop Fiddling While the World Burns.” At GPF, speakers said that collaboration among climate funders is as critical as ever to ensure that, as governments spend trillions to stop the spread of COVID-19 and stabilize the global economy, they also support a low-carbon recovery. With less than 2% of global philanthropy addressing climate change, there is a need to scale up funding while also collaborating to maximize the impact of limited resources, experts told Devex last week. “We have to solve this problem, and we can, but tackling climate change is not simple,” said Charlotte Pera, president of ClimateWorks Foundation, which has awarded more than $1 billion to over 500 grantees around the world since it was founded in 2008. “We need to literally transform the global economy. The world needs to spend trillions of capital on solutions. We need to transform entire sectors.” Collaboration is crucial to success, she said, adding that ClimateWorks designs all of its programs and services — which include funder forums, learning networks, and joint action groups — to support collaboration. Support organizations like ClimateWorks “help funders engage and connect, work together on climate, and make the most of their combined intellectual and financial resources,” Pera said. Collaboration is appealing to donors who might otherwise feel overwhelmed by the learning curve, said Jennifer Kitt, president of the Climate Leadership Initiative, or CLI, which launched in 2019 to help new and experienced donors learn about opportunities to maximize their impact. “The obstacle is complexity,” she said. “Having a framework and peers to learn with and do with is usually the best way to get past that barrier.” Donors can start by exploring the interventions they want to support, such as stopping emissions, protecting nature, and ensuring that transitioning away from fossil fuels happens in a just and equitable way. They can then home in on what is most interesting to them and find collaborators. “But get in there quickly, because there’s such urgency with this problem that learning while doing is actually the way to go and scale as quickly as possible,” Kitt said. Experts at GPF said that while not everyone needs to be a climate funder, all philanthropists should consider how to incorporate the issue into their portfolios, since climate change will impact any and all of those priorities. “The only way to advance climate action is really through purposeful collaboration,” said Douglas Griffiths, president of Oak Foundation, a longtime climate funder, and a supporter of collaboratives like ClimateWorks and CLI. “We need to literally transform the global economy. The world needs to spend trillions of capital on solutions. We need to transform entire sectors.” --— Charlotte Pera, president, ClimateWorks Foundation He shared four key lessons from Oak Foundation’s support of collaboratives. The first, he said, is to focus on big-picture goals while being flexible in how to achieve them. When organizations are rigid in their strategies, they get weighed down in the details and “find it is easier to go it alone,” Griffiths said. He also advised funders to use their networks to learn about giving opportunities, build in mechanisms for sharing and learning, and bring partners to the table early. Oak Foundation learned this the hard way in 2016 when it set up the Climate Justice Resilience Fund, a collaborative that supports communities hit hardest by climate change, including youths, Indigenous people, and women. “The fund failed to attract much co-funding, largely because we didn’t do the collaborative work up front,” Griffiths said. “So hopefully, with great humility and great collaboration, we can work together to chart a new path for climate justice, because I think there’s just a lot of interest in that field right now.” Through collaboratives, philanthropists can use their grant-making to unlock larger-scale investment, such as from bilateral and multilateral donors. An example is the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program, or K-CEP, a multifunder collaborative housed at ClimateWorks that is focused on improving the energy efficiency of air conditioning and refrigeration and on supporting other cooling solutions in low- and middle-income countries. With grant support from K-CEP, the World Bank launched the Efficient, Clean Cooling Program to provide technical assistance to low- and middle-income countries as they design environmentally sustainable energy solutions, influencing the direction of hundreds of millions of dollars in loans for climate-friendly cooling. “While the amount of philanthropic funding in this space is relatively small, it serves as the rudder that steers the ship, shifting the direction of the World Bank’s larger amounts of debt financing towards solutions that benefit the climate and developing countries,” Pera said in an email to Devex. As funders establish or join climate-funding collaboratives, they might learn from development finance institutions that have created ways for communities to file grievances for compliance investigation or dispute resolution. Philanthropists and impact investors who “intend to do good” with their money often have “a blind spot” because they fail to consider “the potential negative consequences in a real way,” said Natalie Bridgeman Fields, founder and executive director of Accountability Counsel, in a follow-up interview with Devex. She said she wants to see more climate-funding collaboratives not only incorporate community voices from the beginning, but also build in mechanisms for when things go wrong.