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If you’re reading this, chances are you care a lot about fighting climate change, and that’s great. The climate emergency threatens all of humanity. And although the world has started to make some progress on it, our global response is still extremely lacking.
The trouble is, it can be genuinely hard to figure out how to direct your money wisely if you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a glut of environmental organizations out there—but how do you know which are the most impactful?
To help, here’s a list of 11 of the most high-impact, cost-effective, and evidence-based organizations. We’re not including bigger-name groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Nature Conservancy, or the Natural Resources Defense Council, because most big organizations are already relatively well-funded.
The groups we list below seem to be doing something especially promising in the light of criteria that matter for effectiveness: importance, tractability, and neglectedness.
Important targets for change are ones that drive a big portion of global emissions. Tractable problems are ones where we can actually make progress right now. And neglected problems are ones that aren’t already getting a big influx of cash from other sources like the government or philanthropy, and could really use money from smaller donors.
Founders Pledge, an organization that guides entrepreneurs committed to donating a portion of their proceeds to effective charities, and Giving Green, a climate charity evaluator, used these criteria to assess climate organizations. Their research informed the list below. As in the Founders Pledge and Giving Green recommendations, we’ve chosen to look at groups focused on mitigation (tackling the root causes of climate change by reducing emissions) rather than adaptation (decreasing the suffering from the impacts of climate change). Both are important, but the focus here is preventing further catastrophe.
Arguably the best move is to donate not to an individual charity, but to a fund—like the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund or the Giving Green Fund. Experts at those groups pool together donor money and give it out to the charities they deem most effective, right when extra funding is most needed. That can mean making time-sensitive grants to promote the writing of an important report, or stepping in when a charity becomes acutely funding-constrained.
Read here the full article by Mother Jones
