Climate change and biodiversity loss are one of the biggest risks to human health and well-being. The encouraging news is that philanthropy is responding … only it’s nowhere near enough.

The The Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network (AEGN) report Environment and climate change giving trends 2024 reports a significant uptick in philanthropic support for climate and environmental causes in recent years.

Global foundation giving to climate change mitigation in recent years has tripled, growing from US$900 million in 2015 to more than US$3 billion in 2021, before plateauing from 2021 to 2022. Despite this growth, giving to climate change mitigation remains less than 2% of global philanthropic giving.

The ocean fares worse: despite covering 70% of the planet, the ocean receives less than 1% of global philanthropic funding. A threefold increase in giving is needed to meet global targets of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030.

In Australia, there has been a noticeable increase in philanthropic contributions to climate and environmental causes in recent years:

• Private ancillary fund (PAF) and public ancillary fund (PuAF) giving has increased at ten times the rate of overall giving
• donations and bequests to charities have surged by 82 per cent (around $122 million) from 2018 to 2021
• one-third of Australia’s 50 biggest givers (representing $1 billion in donations) supported climate and environmental causes
• almost half of AEGN members (representing $138 million in donations) increased their giving.

“Giving to climate and the environment has now joined universities, arts and medical research as the leading areas for large-scale philanthropy in Australia as donors seek to tackle societies biggest problems,” said John McLeod, JBWere Philanthropic Services.

Again, despite significant growth, only around 5 per cent of PAF and PuAF giving goes to climate and environment. Donations and bequests to Australian environmental charities also represent just 2 per cent of overall donations and bequests.