Dear colleagues and friends,
It’s been a great privilege to get to know so many of you and your work better during my first year as president and CEO of ClimateWorks Foundation. I feel honored to be part of this incredibly engaged, diverse, and expanding community of climate funders and grantees working together to drive ambitious climate action. I’ve been energized by the collective sense of urgency, radical collaboration, and dogged determination to chart a more equitable and sustainable future. Despite the multiple crises that dominated in 2022 – including the war on Ukraine, extreme weather impacts, global energy and food crises, rising inflation, economic uncertainty, and continuing COVID outbreaks – we still managed together to deliver meaningful progress on climate.
But the clock is running out. Emissions must be halved by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 to avoid dangerous levels of warming. Global action and investments to achieve the 2030 target still fall short. With rising emissions, the carbon budget is rapidly shrinking and we are seeing the devastating impacts of climate change hitting communities worldwide much faster than scientists predicted. Last year was the eighth year in a row with temperatures more than 1°C above the pre-industrial level. Already, 85% of the world’s population has been affected by climate change and wildlife populations have declined by 69%. And those impacts are not being equally felt: those least responsible for our changing climate are often hit hardest.
2023 marks the halfway point between when the Paris Agreement entered into force and the 2030 targets. While many of us hoped we would have made more progress seven years in, we can and must still put the world on a better climate trajectory. The question we are asking ourselves in ClimateWorks, and one that I share with you, is: How can we move faster and go bigger to deliver climate solutions at the scale we need globally, and in a way that benefits people and planet? We’re focusing on the role philanthropy can play in driving these solutions and how ClimateWorks Foundation can best help all of philanthropy to meet this challenge.
Philanthropy has already been stepping up significantly to address the climate crisis. But, despite strong year-on-year growth of 25%, our most recent Funding Trends report found that under 2% of global giving goes to mitigating climate change. There is much more philanthropy can do to be catalytic and nimble in spurring transformative climate action across systems, sectors, and geographies. In an age increasingly defined by polycrisis, now is the moment to fully embrace climate action as a focal point for tackling our interconnected challenges in a way that benefits peoples’ lives and advances global development goals.