Published: May 2013; updated November 2013

What is the problem?

To assess the magnitude of climate change impacts, we have dealt separately with the most likely impacts and unlikely but potentially extremely harmful impacts, because they present different issues and may call for different approaches.

• In attempting to assess the most likely impacts of unmitigated climate change, we focused on reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (The IPCC, along with Al Gore, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for its work on synthesizing the research on climate change. We believe it to represent the most authoritative consensus view of current science regarding climate change.)

  We summarize our reading of the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report on this page. Briefly, we find that unmitigated climate change would have extraordinarily negative humanitarian impacts across all of the outcomes we looked at: hunger, water stress, flooding, extreme weather, health, biodiversity, and the economy. Successfully mitigating these negative impacts would carry vast humanitarian benefits.

  When looking at the range of possible futures outlined in the report, the bulk of the variation (in humanitarian terms) comes from variation in the level of assumed economic growth and adaptation, rather than variation in the amount of climate change. Of the outcomes we examined, only biodiversity is expected to be unambiguously worse off in the future as a result of both climate change and economic growth. More here.

• Because of some of the dynamics of climate change, extreme but unlikely climate changes contribute disproportionately to the total expected harm of climate change. We summarize our understanding of these dynamics and give some examples of how extreme climate changes could be particularly catastrophic on this page. Many of these potentially extreme outcomes are not well-captured by the models described in our main page on climate impacts (which is based primarily on the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report), suggesting that that page likely underestimates the total expected damages from climate change. Our page on extreme risks also discusses some of the approaches to dealing with extreme climate change that may be different from the overall approaches to climate change discussed on the rest of this page. More here.

What are possible interventions?

Philanthropic funding could be used for many different activities aiming to reduce the negative impacts of climate change, including, amongst other opportunities:

1. encouraging the adoption of policies to mitigate global warming (e.g. by lobbying for a tax on emissions of greenhouse gasses, domestically or internationally)
2. investment in research and development and scaling of clean technology (e.g. by developing cheaper solar panels)
3. preparation and adaptation to limit the negative impacts of climate change (e.g. by funding research on drought-resistant crops)
4. research on geoengineering to determine efficacy and likely side-effects of efforts to limit the warming effects of emissions (e.g. by conducting additional climate model tests); see our page on this topic here.

We are not confident in our assessments of the likely returns to any of these types activities.

We plan to eventually do more research on the returns to past philanthropic engagements with these strategies.

Who else is working on this?

We’re not aware of an authoritative source for tracking overall engagement or funding flows in climate change. We have identified several sources that provide estimates of the amount of nonprofit or foundation funding devoted to addressing climate change:

• According to the Foundation Center, U.S. foundations granted roughly $900 million to climate change issues in 2008, with more than half of the funding coming from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.1 Based on this source, 2008 appears to have been an outlier because of a one-off transfer from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to the ClimateWorks Foundation.
• Matthew Nisbet, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., estimated that U.S. environmental groups spent $394 million in 2009 on climate and energy efforts, while the opposing coalition of conservative groups and industry associations spent $259 million in the area.2
• A 2012 report by the Environmental Grantmakers Association indicated that roughly 21% of all environmental grants made by U.S. foundations in 2009, totaling about $330 million, went towards climate change and energy issues.3

We do not have a good sense of the methodology for any of these reports, and even the most recent ones describe the situation in 2009, so they may already be meaningfully out of date. Based on these reports and an off-the-record conversation, we would estimate that typical annual philanthropic spending on climate change mitigation in the U.S. is likely in the range of a few hundred million dollars.

Of course, philanthropic funding (and American philanthropic funding at that) makes up only a portion of all of the funding globally devoted to addressing climate change. We have not seen any estimates of global funding levels across sectors, but U.S. federal government reports seem to indicate that they spend roughly $8 billion a year on climate change efforts, mostly (~$6 billion/year) on developing technology to reduce emissions.4

Across these different funding sources, we don’t have much sense of what activities (at a very granular level) the funds have been spent on. Of the four very broad strategies of climate change philanthropy that are described above, our impressions are that:

1. most philanthropic funding focused on climate change goes towards the strategy of encouraging government adoption of policies to mitigate climate change, with the ClimateWorks Foundation playing a particular notable role with around $150 million in spending in 2011.5
2. a large portion of U.S. government funding (>$5 billion/year) and large amounts of private (for-profit) capital are invested in development of lower-emissions technology; we don’t have a sense of how much philanthropic funding is spent here.6
3. some philanthropic funding goes towards climate change adaptation, but we don’t know how much.
4. geoengineering research receives relatively little funding, from either government or philanthropic sources.7

Questions for further investigation

Our research in this area has been relatively limited, and many important questions remain unanswered by our investigation.

Amongst other topics, our further research on this cause might address:

• Have there been significant strides in scientific understanding of the likely impacts of climate change since the last IPCC report in 2007?
• How much philanthropic funding and effort goes into climate change globally? How reliable are the estimates from U.S. sources?
• What have the returns to past philanthropic involvement in climate change efforts been? How have they varied by type of activity?
• Are there particularly “low-hanging fruit” in any of the areas of activity described above (e.g. adaptation, geoengineering research) that current levels of philanthropic engagement haven’t found?

Sources

• Climate Works. 2011. Climate Works 2011 Annual Report (PDF).
• Environmental Grantmakers Association. 2012. Tracking the Field, Volume 3: Exploring Environmental Grantmaking. Summary available at http://ega.org/sites/default/files/pubs/summaries/Executive%20Summary%20… (archived).
• Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research. http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/FICER.html (accessed March 22, 2013). Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6FJriTmg1.
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 2007. Fourth Assessment Report.
• Lawrence, Steven. 2010. Climate Change: The U.S. Foundation Response (PDF). The Foundation Center.
• Leggett, Jane A. 2012. Funding for Federal Climate Change Activities, FY2008 to FY2012 (PDF). Congressional Research Service.
• Nisbet, Matthew C. 2011. ClimateShift: Clear Vision For the Next Decade of Public Debate (PDF). Washington, D.C.: American University School of Communication.
• United States Government Accountability Office. 2010. Climate change: A Coordinated Strategy Could Focus Federal Geoengineering Research and Inform Governance Efforts (PDF).

• 1.

  See chart “Foundation Giving for Climate Change, 2000 to 2008,” Pg 3, in Steven Lawrence, “Climate Change: The U.S. Foundation Response”

• 2.
  “In Chapter 1, to better understand the influence of money and spending in the debate over cap and trade legislation, I reviewed the nature, composition and funding sources of the major national environmental groups working on climate change and compared these factors with the opposing coalition of conservative think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations. Then, analyzing data compiled from tax returns, annual reports and other sources,
 I systematically compared the revenue and forms
 of spending by both sides in the climate change debate.
  Overall, in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, the major conservative think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations took in a total of $907 million in revenue, spent $787 million on all program-related activities, and spent an estimated $259 million specific to climate change and energy policy. In comparison, the national environmental groups took in $1.7 billion in revenue, spent $1.4 billion on program activities, and spent an estimated $394 million on climate change and energy-specific activities.” Matthew C. Nisbet, “Climateshift: Clear Vision For the Next Decade of Public Debate” pg iii.
• 3.
  Environmental Grantmakers Association, “Tracking the Field, Volume 3: Exploring Environmental Grantmaking”:
  • “Climate & Atmosphere received more support overall in 2009 than it did in 2007, and moved from the seventh most granted issue (at 9.6% in 2007) to the second most granted issue (at 20.8% in 2009), all while still receiving proportionally less from the philanthropic community as a whole than it received from EGA members. ” Pg 11.
  • Table 5, page 15, indicates that 2009 overall giving in the climate area was $215,298,518 while giving to energy was $114,246,650, totaling $329,545,168 across the broader climate change sector. $329,545,168 divided by total environmental giving ($1,582,970,825) = 20.82%.
• 4.

  Congressional Research Service, “Funding for Federal Climate Change Activities, FY2008 to FY2012:”

  • “In sum, OMB and agencies have identified approximately $70 billion available to federal agencies from FY2008 through FY2012 for climate change activities. The large majority – about 80% – has funded technology development and deployment, mostly through the Department of Energy (DOE).” Pg 1.
  • Table 2, Page 4, shows $5.6 billion in funding for climate change technology, almost all through the Department of Energy, in fiscal year 2012.
  • Table 5, Page 7, shows $8.3 billion in funding for climate change programs overall in fiscal year 2012. 2010 and 2011 had $8.8 billion and $8.9 billion, respectively, in overall climate program funding.
  • The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the 2009 stimulus bill) also contained significant funding for climate change technology – more than $25 billion. See Table 5, Page 7.
• 5.

  Climate Works 2011 Annual Report, page 45.

• 6.

  Congressional Research Service, “Funding for Federal Climate Change Activities, FY2008 to FY2012,” Pg 4.

• 7.
  • According to the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. federal government funded about $100 million of research relevant to geoengineering over FY 2009 and FY 2010, but only $1.9 million of that was spent directly investigating particular geoengineering approaches. There is no coordinated federal geoengineering research effort: “USGCRP agencies reported funding at least 52 research activities relevant to geoengineering in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. We found that, of these 52 activities, 43 were either related to conventional mitigation strategies or were fundamental scientific research, whereas 9 directly investigated a particular geoengineering approach. We identified approximately $100.9 million in geoengineering-related funding across USGCRP agencies in fiscal years 2009 and 2010, with about $1.9 million of this amount related to research directly investigating a particular geoengineering approach. The other roughly $99 million was related to research concerning conventional mitigation strategies that could be applied directly to a particular geoengineering approach or basic science that could be applied generally to geoengineering. However, there is no coordinated federal strategy or operational definition for geoengineering, so agencies and policymakers may not know the full extent of relevant federal research.” GAO, “Climate change: A Coordinated Strategy Could Focus Federal Geoengineering Research and Inform Governance Efforts.” Pg 18.
  • The only dedicated source of philanthropic funding for geoengineering research that we’re aware of is the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research, funded by Bill Gates (not the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and administered by professors Ken Caldeira and David Keith, which has distributed $4.6 million in grants since 2007. “Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research”