By Charlotte Parker
Honnold Foundation Spring ‘22 Programs Intern
While conducting research on climate policy and impact investments, Honnold Foundation’s 2022 Spring Programs Intern, Charlotte Parker, quickly realized that while billions of dollars are being poured into research and “big bet” technological innovation, there’s a proportionately tiny amount of funding being invested in communities. In this guest blog, Charlotte summarizes a portion of her findings.
In the Ecuadorian Amazon, a boat glides through the muddy waters of the Amazon River next to two small canoes. The boat leaves a wake as it travels at a steady clip of 14 mph; yet, save for the gentle hum of the rainforest, the river is nearly silent; there’s no roar of an engine, nor the pungent odor of diesel fuel. Instead, this boat is powered by a roof of solar panels feeding an electric motor. The photovoltaic technology in these panels has been around since the 1950s, but this application is new.
The boats, rapidly expanding into a network, are creating new transportation and trade opportunities across the Amazon. They’re also restoring something harder to find — agency, self-determination, and support that the Achuar, a community of about 6,000 people, need to sustain in order to protect the rainforest they’ve called home for thousands of years.
Kara Solar, a Honnold Foundation grantee Partner, uses the best of existing clean energy technologies to create opportunities that enable Amazonian communities to adapt and thrive. Their methods illustrate the common thread between the 34 organizations across 20 countries that we have supported since 2019: community-owned and community-centered climate solutions.
While organizations like Kara Solar have deep and expansive impact, they often struggle to access the funding that they need to serve their communities. They aren’t alone. In spite of growing public awareness, nonprofits in the climate space are perpetually underfunded. According to a ClimateWorks 2021 report on foundation and individual philanthropic giving, less than 2% of all global philanthropic funding goes to climate-related causes. That 2% is still billions of dollars - between $6 and $10 billion in 2021, by ClimateWorks’ estimation. But it’s certainly nowhere near enough to tackle this enormous global problem, and that’s before taking into account where exactly those donations are going.
At the outset of the Honnold Foundation’s strategic planning process earlier this year, we took a close look at the climate change philanthropy landscape. We wanted to understand which focus areas are getting the funding that they need and where there are gaps that we could help to close. Soon, a clear call to action for funders of all budgets emerged: use your donations to advance the adoption of clean energy while helping communities improve the quality of their lives at the same time.
Current climate giving trends, analyzed by ClimateWorks and a follow-on report by Founders Pledge, show that the bulk of pledges focus on funding “big bet technologies.” These innovations address future climate change mitigation, often at national or global scales, and are less relevant for low-income communities that are trying to deal with the effects of climate change today. Clean electricity, mainly off-grid solar, has also emerged as a priority among philanthropic funders focused on climate change adaptation. Similar to big bet pledges, the majority of these dollars are not financing off-grid solutions for energy-poor communities, leaving the communities most vulnerable to climate change paying for fossil-fuel powered energy that causes health problems and eats up a significant portion of their monthly income.
Meanwhile, private sector funding for climate solutions is booming. Climate tech startups raised $39.2 billion across 605 venture deals in 2021, with funding increasing about 20% each quarter of the year, according to Climate Tech VC. Let that sink in for a moment: That’s more than three times the amount of philanthropic capital invested in climate solutions each year. And an increasing amount of this funding is going towards the same types of innovation that philanthropy has been placing bets on: carbon capture, removal, and offsets.
Photo Credit: Love for Life, Mike Kollöffel
If we’re serious about reversing climate change, someone needs to be making those bets. The private sector is well-positioned to make informed investments in innovation, especially if it drives down the cost of new technologies. But why not encourage philanthropy to do what it does best: reaching those communities that governments and the private sector have left behind? We need cleantech development, but we also need the organizations that can implement that cleantech in the right places, with community buy-in, so that these solutions actually work. Recent multibillion dollar pledges for forest conservation and indigenous sovereignty are promising, but still leave opportunities for targeted grants to enable communities to create clean, reliable energy access, increase climate resilience in the face of increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, innovate transportation solutions like the solar boats developed by Kara Solar, and lead advocacy for pro-solar government policies and legal action against fossil fuel companies.
In 2022, the Honnold Foundation is committing $2 million in grant funding, doubling the previous year’s commitment. Three years into offering an annual open call for applications, the Honnold Foundation is enabling solutions like Kara Solar’s solar-powered boats to scale regionally. HF’s 2022 Core Partners will include an award for an indigenous-led team working with Kara Solar to adopt and expand on their vision for solar-powered river transit across the Amazon.
“What I think the Honnold Foundation does well is the human side [of climate-focused work]. So much climate funding is going towards technology projects [...] and while there’s space for developing the technologies of the future, that’s not helping the quality of human lives,” Founder Alex Honnold said in an interview last month.
Juxtaposed against the climate funding landscape, the need to expand the Honnold Foundation’s work is more clear than ever. Whether you’re a well-established private foundation, a corporate sustainability lead, or an individual who invests in a cause that you care about personally, we invite you to join us in using philanthropy to power marginalized communities’ well-being and resilience.