Giving Compass' Take:

· Liberal philanthropy has not helped the climate initiative as much as it give itself credit for—it has been unsuccessful to date and action needs to be taken to engage groups on multiple levels. The author discusses the detrimental effects that the rising climate has on earth and what all channels of businesses, organizations and people need to do to lessen the inevitable issues to come.

· How can individuals work to reduce the effects of the rising climate? Where can leaders and countries go from here to help mitigate the issue?

· Learn what donors can do about climate change.

One of the world’s biggest philanthropic initiatives to address climate change is set-up to fail catastrophically, according to a strategy document setting out the initiative’s five-year plan.

The strategy document, published by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in January, represents the third renewal of the Climate Works initiative originally founded in 2008. The initiative was executed through the Climate Works Foundation in coordination with other big philanthropic foundations, the Packard and McKnight Foundations.

The Hewlett Foundation strategy document, titled Climate Initiative Strategy 2018–2023, reflects on the strategic thinking behind the process that led to the announcement last December that the foundation would commit $600 million to address climate change over the next five years — a 20 percent increase from previous funding.

The fifth largest foundation in the United States, the Hewlett Foundation is one of the most influential US funders on climate and energy, traditionally setting the agenda for other major foundations in these areas. Each year, climate philanthropy spends between $600 million and $1.2 billion a year.

But the Hewlett strategy document is completely out of whack with the latest science on the speed and scale of actions required to avert dangerous climate change.

It adopts a reckless approach – minimising emission reductions, calling for investment in dubious unproven negative emissions technologies, while ignoring emerging evidence of more promising technologies, and obscuring the urgency of transformative economic change.

Despite claiming to want to “reach farther and push harder”, the document puts forward a fundamentally flawed assessment of climate science to justify what it calls a longer time horizon approach to mitigation through a “2050 lens.”

The Hewlett Foundation strategy document and the latest available data on climate giving more broadly reveal that liberal philanthropy is mired in an entrenched delusion about the state of the climate fight. Patting itself on the back for past successes that are largely irrelevant, the document focuses almost entirely on a mitigation approach that is either doomed to failure or technologically questionable.

Liberal philanthropy lacks the collective intelligence processes required to actually understand and engage in the world effectively; and the very structures of its own endowments make it complicit, unwittingly or otherwise, in the systemic crises it wants to address.

To overcome this impasse, liberal philanthropy needs to fundamentally engage with the overwhelming fact that, to date, it has failed. Only in confronting and accepting this failure will liberal philanthropy be capable of re-assessing both the systemic and structural causes of this failure, and the systemic and structural actions necessary for success. At the core of this process, liberal philanthropy is called on to evaluate its innermost commitments, and therefore the most fundamental thing of all: what, really, is it in service to?

Read the full article about the global climate disaster by Nafeez Ahmed at Medium.