CharitiesGiving Green
Giving Green
Charity

Giving Green

Effective Giving Research & Advocacy

Giving Green's Effective Giving Research & Advocacy program seeks to advance climate action philanthropy by evaluating and recommending what they've assessed to be the most cost-effective giving opportunities in climate.

Addressing climate change

What problem is Giving Green working on?

There is a plethora of climate initiatives that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but only some are based on the best available evidence. Supporting these highly effective initiatives is one of the most impactful climate actions individuals and businesses can take. Giving Green aims to help donors find the organisations doing the most impactful work to address the climate crisis.

What does Giving Green do?

Giving Green is a team of climate scientists, economists, and impact evaluation experts with decades of experience working at the intersection of evidence-based policy and the environment.

Giving Green's primary activity is conducting research to identify cost-effective giving opportunities in climate. It assesses the landscape of climate philanthropy to identify important, tractable, and neglected interventions, and assesses organisations working on those interventions for their theory of change, cost-effectiveness, and room for more funding.

Its recommendations include top giving opportunities for individuals (including its Giving Green Fund), as well as guidance on “beyond net zero” climate action plans for businesses and guidance for climate-conscious investors.

Giving Green then works to promote top organisations through partners and media channels. It aims to reach a wide audience with its research, including those not previously familiar with cost-effective approaches to giving. Its work has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, TIME, and more. So far, Giving Green reports that it has so far directed over 15 times its own budget to its recommended organisations.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Giving Green?1.

We don't currently have further information about the cost-effectiveness of Giving Green beyond it doing work in a high-impact cause area and taking a reasonably promising approach.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.

We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things:

  • When we include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this may not be the only evidence that exists. It is simply the evidence the GWWC research team has at this time.
  • When we don’t include information about an organisation’s cost-effectiveness, this does not necessarily mean there is no such information. However, it does mean the GWWC research team isn’t privy to any more information at this time.