Bet places to donate to for climate change mitigation? Most everything I see is just advocacy instead of actual work, or is astroturfing.
Hi Anon!
This is a really fantastic question!
The thing about climate change is that when you get down to the nuts and bolts of actually fixing things, there isn’t One Big Thing we need to do—there’s tons of little issues and projects that all add up to releasing less and sequestering more greenhouse gases.
That’s probably why most of the organizations you’ve found working on climate in general are focused on political or legal advocacy—because political and legal systems are some very powerful levers for facilitating a bunch of those smaller solutions at once.
Here are some recommendations of places to donate if you want to more directly fund the work itself:
For general climate change mitigation: There are climate change or environmental funds that will essentially do all the legwork of finding high value projects to allocate funding to. The Founder’s Pledge Climate Fund is a highly rated one, but I’m sure there are others.
If you’d like to contribute to more specific climate change work: Check out the Project Drawdown Explorer. They rate different climate change solutions based on plausibility, readiness, evidence, effectiveness, impact, risk, and cost to sort them into Highly Recommend, Worthwhile, Keep Watching, or Not Recommended. Find a highly recommended solution that aligns with your interests and values, then look for high rated charities or organizations tackling that issue. If you’re curious about the relative effectiveness/importance of various environmental solutions, I also highly recommend the book Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data.
Mitigating the human welfare cost of climate change: While this may not be the first thing that comes to mind, alleviating poverty is absolutely an environmental and sustainability issue (I could write a whole other post about this). One of the deepest cruelties of climate change is that the communities least responsible for contributing to it are often the hardest hit by its effects. Addressing poverty so that the most vulnerable communities have more resources to mitigate climate impacts is one of the most direct rubber-meets-the-road ways of fighting the human cost of climate change (and often has environmental/emissions benefits too, one of Project Drawdown’s highest rated solutions is access to cleaner cooking fuels). Data shows one of the best ways to do this is infusions of no-strings-attached money into impoverished communities. Give Directly is a great organization for this—they have also in the past had programs for giving directly to survivors of other major climate crises such as the California wildfires.
Don’t forget money you might already have sitting around: If you’re lucky enough to have a long term savings account or retirement account, see if you can move that money into a green bank or ensure it is invested in more climate-friendly companies or projects. Even if your retirement fund is managed by your employer, pushing employers to divest retirement accounts from fossil fuel companies has been a major trend in recent years. How you manage your money is a very personal decision and this obviously won’t be possible for everyone, but it’s a powerful way to put the money you already have towards something aligned with your values. Here are some links to learn more about green banking and divesting.
I hope this is helpful to you! <3
