CharitiesFounders Pledge: Climate Change Fund
Founders Pledge: Climate Change Fund
Fund

Founders Pledge

Climate Change Fund

The Climate Change Fund aims to address climate change by supporting highly impactful, evidence-based solutions to the “triple challenge” of carbon emissions, air pollution, and energy poverty.

Addressing climate change

What problem is the Climate Change Fund working on?

The Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund aims to sustainably reach net-zero emissions globally.

Current levels of emissions are contributing to millions of deaths annually from air pollution and causing irrevocable damage to our planet. In addition, millions worldwide do not have access to modern energy technology, severely hampering development goals.

By pooling contributions, the Fund enables individual donors to contribute to organisations that require a large minimum donation or have short windows of opportunity for impact, and streamlines the administrative process for both donors and grantees.

What projects does the Climate Change Fund support?

Taking a holistic approach that recognises the global and overlapping nature of climate-related challenges, Founders Pledge identifies the most cost-effective donation opportunities so that time-constrained donors can be confident that their donations are truly making a difference.

Recent past recipients of grants from the Climate Change Fund include:

  • Quantified Carbon - multi-year grant supporting their work on repowering coal plants with clean heat sources
  • DEPLOY/US - learn more in our report "Climate at the crossroads?"
  • WePlanet - building a self-sustaining pro-nuclear grassroots movement
  • Cascade Institute - supporting their Ultradeep Geothermal Program
  • Energy for Growth - supporting the PPA Transparency Norms Project
  • TerraPraxis - general operational report
  • Future Matters - supporting the EU Climate Priorities Project

See the Fund webpage for more information about how donations are allocated, past recipients, the latest annual Fund reports, and plans for the future.

Unsure how a fund is different from a charity? See our page about why we recommend donors give to funds.

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

We previously included the Climate Change Fund on our list of recommendations because it is managed by the impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge. We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only organisations recommended by evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our evaluator investigations and chosen to rely on; as such, we don't currently include the Climate Change Fund as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.

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.