The Climate Resilience Justice Fund, backed by funders including Porticus, Oak, Bosch, and Ikea Foundations, has called for at least $1 billion in philanthropic funding to address the injustice already facing poorer nations and communities.

The call was made by Farhana Yamin, the coordinator of the Climate Resilience Justice Fund, at the end of series of panels at the headquarters of Scottish Power on 3 November just a few minutes walk from the centre of climate negotiations at the COP26 ‘green zone’.

At the event, loss and damage expert Dr. Saleeemal Huq, who has attended all 26 UN COPs, urged funders to shift their focus to fight the growing experiences of climate injustice today alongside efforts to mitigate the future effects of climate change. Dr. Huq advised funders to support loss and damage funds established by governments and philanthropies. His call came in the same week that the Scottish Government announced a £1 million commitment to Climate Resilience Justice Fund’s initiative on loss and damage.

During the event, foundation professionals and activists made the case for climate justice to be a more central plank of philanthropic strategy.

Speaking at the event, The Children’s Investment Fund CEO, Kate Hampton, which has pioneered efforts to hold governments and companies to account through strategic climate litigation, also emphasised the need for foundations to diversify the own staff teams. Hampton encouraged foundations to be humble and recognise their own privilege saying that foundation directors like her, who worked for billionaires, were ‘the elephant in the room’.

Another elephant in the climate justice room was the presence of the Bezos Earth Fund. Opinion appeared divided about the potential of the $10 billion Fund to pursue social justice in light of Bezos’s reported labour practices at Amazon and commercial interests in fossil fuel intensive space exploration.

Read the full article about climate justice by Charles Keidan at Alliance Magazine.