If you want to access the best and most recent data on climate philanthropy, you have to be a funder. But for the rest of us, there is a steadily growing list of tools that attempt to track this fast-expanding field.
Say you want to know how much money U.S. philanthropy spent on clean energy in a recent year. Or how many climate philanthropy dollars were spent in Wyoming, the top coal-producing state. ClimateWorks Foundation and the Environmental Grantmakers Association keep (reportedly) extensive databases available only to funders and partners. There are, however, a few resources open to the public that offer rough and somewhat dated figures. The resulting picture is a bit blurry, as with most philanthropic data, but it is better than none at all.
The following list of tools and reports comprises those I have come across during my time reporting on the sector, as well as several shared with me by staff at the ClimateWorks Foundation.
Free big-picture summaries
For a 30,000-foot view, GivingUSA will give you an overall figure for all green funding. Last year, it counted $16.3 billion given to “Environment/Animals,” a 10% increase. A 2022 report by the Climate Policy Initiative offers a similar, climate-specific overview, but is mostly focused on other forms of climate finance, of which grantmaking accounts for just 5%. Neither offers many grant details.
A closer look, what you might call a bird’s-eye view, is available from the Environmental Grantmakers Association’s occasional report on the field. EGA publishes the executive summary of its report, which is based on its grantmaking database — said to be among the most comprehensive in the field, but accessible only to members. The current edition of its summary runs only through 2018, but EGA’s president recently told me they plan to publish a new version soon.
The most widely used resource is ClimateWorks Foundation’s annual report on climate change mitigation funding, which is one of the few free sources with much detail on the field. Like EGA, ClimateWorks maintains its own funders-only database. But this yearly report offers big-picture insights in static tables drawn from that private resource. It’s an unparalleled public resource on climate philanthropy, though that in part reflects how few options there are. The report is also the source of the commonly cited statistic that just 2% of global philanthropy goes to climate change mitigation.
For a look at the imbalances and inequities within environmental philanthropy, a March report co-authored by environmental justice researcher Dr. Dorceta Taylor of Yale University provides a wealth of statistics, whether on the gender and racial demographics of leadership and grantees or the locations — by region, state and city — of funders and their grantees.
Databases open to all
If you want to get down to the ground level and dig into a free searchable database, there are a couple of options. For a mix of domestic and international numbers, you can turn to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s online tool, Private Philanthropy for Development: Data for Action. As you can guess from the tool’s name and host, it’s not focused on environmental grantmaking. But you can filter for funding on that topic, or by topics like energy, transport and “agriculture, forestry, fishing.” It’s an international resource, but includes many U.S. institutions, such as the Ford Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
A more extensive option is the new kid on the block, the Climate Finance Tracker, created late last year by Vibrant Data Labs with support from a long list of partners. Again, the name and host give away that its scope is a bit broader, in this case covering both grantmaking as well as investment in climate-related companies. It licensed Candid’s data and ran it through its own artificial-intelligence-assisted process to pull out climate grants. The result is a dynamic visual database of climate grantmaking across the country unlike any other free resource.
Pay to play data
For those able and willing to pay, there is Candid’s well-known Foundation Directory, which offers perhaps the biggest public database of where U.S. foundation dollars are going. As with other topics, you can search for different branches of environmental grantmaking using filters like geography. Candid faces the unenviable challenge of uniformly categorizing millions of grants from tens of thousands of foundations across dozens of topics. It does the best it can, but often has to contend with vague tax filings and myriad other challenges, so errors and misclassifications are inevitable. Nevertheless, until the Climate Finance Tracker, if you wanted names of foundations and region-specific data, this was one of the few places non-funders could find them in aggregate.
Funders-only databases
If you’re a funder, there are at least two robust sources that are, alas, inaccessible to the rest of us. The field’s longest-running effort, as far as I can tell, is the Environmental Grantmakers Association’s members-only Tracking the Field program. Started in 2007, it contains more than 150,000 grants that represent some $18 billion in funding across all areas of environmental grantmaking. EGA also partners with Candid to track demographic data of grantees.
The other option is an extensive database of climate mitigation grantmaking maintained by ClimateWorks’ Global Intelligence team. Only funders have access, though some data is also shared with researchers and peers. Built over the course of the past decade, it’s based on both public data and their relationships with foundations and philanthropists across the United States and the world. For a snapshot of the insights from this private resource, check out its overview report mentioned above.
Numbers from around the world
Step outside the United States, and there is a similar mix of overview reports and public databases, though it seems like a lot more of those resources are freely available to the public.
In the U.K., 360Giving offers a variety of free public tools covering all types of grantmaking, though its data is sorted by elements like geography and grants size rather than topics such as climate. Another group, the Environmental Funders Network, publishes a more tailored resource, “Where the Green Grants Went,” that tracks big-picture themes in U.K. environmental funding. For regional data, the European Foundation Centre publishes a biennial report, “Environmental Funding by European Foundations,” which analyzes funding figures across thematic areas, countries and more.
Beyond Europe, there are several guides to specific countries and regions. For instance, the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network publishes biennial reports on what’s going on down under that include trends and details on the country’s top 20 environmental givers. ClimateWorks also offers special reports on climate grantmaking abroad, such as summaries of such giving in China or across six African countries.
Is there a climate grants report or database I missed? Let me know at michael@insidephilanthropy.com.
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