Founders Pledge
Climate Change Fund
The Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund supports highly impactful, evidence-based solutions to the “triple challenge” of carbon emissions, air pollution, and energy poverty.
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:
- Clean Air Task Force — a multi-year grant enabling CATF's growth across key emerging economies
- UN High Level Climate Champions — strategic communications support for the Breakthrough Agenda Report to spur stronger international collaboration in driving down emissions
- Qvist Consulting Ltd — conducting techno-economic research and 'mainstreaming' the idea of repowering coal in key emerging economies (China, India, Indonesia), South Korea, and Japan
- TerraPraxis — funding modelling capacity to support better energy modelling of advanced nuclear power by key institutions such as the International Energy Agency
- Future Cleantech Architects — scaling FCA's work and team across key innovation priorities
- Carbon180 — strengthening Carbon180's ability to advocate for carbon removal support in the Biden administration's agenda
See the Fund webpage for more information about how donations are allocated, past recipients, and plans for the future.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of the Climate Change Fund?
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 funds managed by grantmakers we’ve looked into as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations; while we expect to soon look into Founders Pledge as part of this more in-depth evaluator research, we haven’t yet. As such, we don't currently include this 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.