Grant Makers Pour More Than $1-Billion Into Climate-Change Crusade

Some of America’s largest grant makers are pouring more than $1-billion into efforts to slow climate change and reduce the damage it is already causing. Most are pledging to keep those commitments despite the recession’s toll on their assets, citing the urgency of the global environmental crisis.

Three funds — the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif.; the McKnight Foundation, in Minneapolis; and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, in Los Altos, Calif. — have pledged approximately $1-billion over the next five to 10 years to support the work of the ClimateWorks Foundation, in San Francisco. ClimateWorks, an international effort started in mid-2008, makes grants to like-minded organizations that are working to press governments, businesses, and others to adopt policies to slow down global warming.

Last year, ClimateWorks received $39-million from Hewlett and $33.4-million from Packard. McKnight paid $3-million in 2008 as part of a $16-million pledge.

Other big grant makers, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York, are also making multiyear, multimillion-dollar commitments to curb climate change and its effects.

Of the 33 foundations that reported making grants of at least $5-million in 2008, several directed the big awards — 10 grants totaling more than $124.7-million — to environmental causes, with seven of those grants focusing on slowing climate change.

‘There Is No Waiting’

The ultimate goal of the ClimateWorks Foundation and the foundations that support it is the slashing of annual greenhouse-gas emissions in half by the year 2030 — translating into an expected reduction of roughly 30 billion tons annually.

Once ClimateWorks is fully in place, it will coordinate a network of grant makers in each of the five regions with the world’s highest rates of carbon-dioxide emissions — China, Europe, India, Latin America, and the United States — to promote policies that can streamline energy efficiency and expand the adoption of clean-energy technologies. ClimateWorks will also monitor work to end the destruction of the earth’s largest remaining swaths of tropical forest — which absorb carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis — in Brazil, Congo, and Indonesia.

The Hewlett foundation’s support for ClimateWorks is long term, and includes a five-year, $500-million commitment to the group made last year.

Susan Bell, Hewlett’s vice president and senior fellow for energy and climate, says that the mammoth pledge builds upon the foundation’s work over the past seven years to reduce the effects of global warming. Hewlett, she adds, is determined to keep its pledge to ClimateWorks even if its assets are approximately one third less than they were at this time last year.

“The issue doesn’t change because of the economy,” says Ms. Bell. “Aspects of how we address it might, but the bottom line is the science isn’t changing, or if it does it seems unfortunately to be changing for the worse. There is no waiting on this issue.”

Ms. Bell says she is impressed by the growing number of grant makers working on climate-change issues, as well as the stepped-up commitments by foundations that have been involved in the arena for several years.

At the Packard foundation, Chris DeCardy, a vice president, echoes Ms. Bell’s sense of urgency. Furthermore, he says, the foundation is concerned that global warming could “overwhelm and undo” the grant maker’s longstanding and costly work in land and marine conservation.

But he takes the recession’s tumult into account when he talks about Packard’s plans for giving to the cause.

While Mr. DeCardy says it is Packard’s intent to commit $500-million to climate-change groups over roughly the next 10 years, that timeline could shrink or grow, depending on the economy.

The foundation, he says, prefers to make grants on an annual basis, to remain more flexible.

Yet even those massive cash infusions are not enough, say environmental experts. For example, ClimateWorks bases its priorities on those outlined in “Design to Win,” an August 2007 study commissioned by Hewlett, Packard, and four other foundations.

Among the study’s assertions: Philanthropists must provide an additional $600-million each year — or $3-billion over five years — to augment the roughly $177-million they had been spending annually if they expect to succeed in persuading industries and nations to adopt the kinds of comprehensive policies needed to reduce global warming as quickly as possible.

Investing in Efficiency

Another organization focused on climate change, the Alliance for Climate Protection, a group in Palo Alto, Calif., that was established by former Vice President Al Gore in 2006, also received two of 2008’s largest single grants.

The Skoll Foundation, in Palo Alto, paid $10-million and the Soros foundations, in New York, contributed $5-million to the alliance, which is spearheading the We Campaign, an advocacy campaign with the goal of switching 100 percent of the country’s electrical grids from fossil fuels to solar, wind, and other clean-energy sources within the next 10 years.

Two other large grants in 2008 went to the Energy Foundation, in San Francisco, which inspired the creation of the ClimateWorks Foundation and serves as its partner in the United States.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, in New York, paid $7-million to the group as part of a three-year, $21-million grant made in 2007 to help bolster new markets for clean-energy technologies, while the Kresge Foundation, in Troy, Mich., also gave the Energy Foundation $5-million last year.

The Energy Foundation is using the money to advocate energy-efficient building codes, appliance standards, and building technologies. The group is also using the grant to encourage policies that can make investing in energy efficiency and renewable-energy production more profitable for American utility companies, and to foster “green building” activities in China.

The grant to the Energy Foundation is a cornerstone of the Duke foundation’s April 2007 commitment of $100-million over five years to efforts designed to curb global warming and spur an American economy based on renewable energy sources.

Douglas Meyer, a consultant to the foundation’s environment program, says that the logic behind that pledge hasn’t changed: “We have some solutions out there. Now how are we going to deploy them to scale, and what clean-energy technologies are on the horizon?”

But since the pledge was made, the Duke foundation’s assets have taken a 28.7-percent hit. The severity of the problem was announced to grantees in an e-mail message last month from Andrew J. Bowman, director of the foundation’s Climate Change Initiative. The message states that the climate-change program will “proceed at roughly half of its originally envisioned level of funding.”

And while the foundation anticipates that average grant awards will shrink and multiyear grants will become a “rarity,” the message also says that future commitments will focus on one or two areas yet to be determined, and that “the Climate Change Initiative will be able to make new grants during this critical window of energy and climate-change policy making.”

Building Resilience

New philanthropic dollars for climate-change issues have also been pledged by the Rockefeller Foundation, which in January announced a five-year, $70-million commitment to devising ideas that can help people, particularly in developing countries, adapt to the shorter-term effects of global warming.

The money will support the new Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network, which is designed to help urban areas in Asia — where the foundation has been working for decades on agriculture and other projects — cope with the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change.

A 2008 Rockefeller grant of more than $5.3-million went to the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition, in Boulder, Colo., to help national and local members of the network create and share ways to prepare for climate-related disasters in cities in India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Rockefeller cites a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that estimates that the world will undergo at least 90 more years of global warming regardless of any actions now under way to prevent the problem.

Some of the effects of global warming are already apparent, say experts, including prolonged droughts, intensified hurricanes and coastal storms, and shifts in seasonal rainfall patterns that can affect agricultural productivity.

“There are also these slow, creeping changes — say, the one-degree temperature increase that allows mosquitoes to spread into a new area and bring malaria,” says Maria Blair, associate vice president and managing director at Rockefeller. “You’re not going to see that on the nightly news, but that’s a very real impact in terms of people’s lives.”

Ms. Blair says that while efforts such as those of the ClimateWorks Foundation to curb further global warming are essential, they are “just one side of the coin. The other side, where we are focused, is let’s recognize that we’ve put into place a set of changes that are going to play out over the coming years, and we need to start taking preventative action now to ensure that the impact of those changes is as minimal as possible.”

She adds: “There is a justice angle here, which is that the people who are going to suffer the most are the ones who actually did the least to create the problem.”

Like Ms. Bell at the Hewlett foundation, Ms. Blair says she has seen a definite “acceleration” on the part of grant makers in response to climate change.

“We were a pretty lonely funder when we started, and we’re a little less lonely now. I do think people are starting to see it and starting to respond, so I am very optimistic.”