Climate change is perhaps the most difficult environmental challenge of our time. The philanthropic sector must play a vital role in combating climate change, working in partnership with nonprofits, the private sector, and government.
The Packard Foundation continues its long commitment to climate initiatives. In 1997, our Climate subprogram focused on slowing tropical deforestation and supporting the energy policy reforms and global research needed to combat global warming. In 2008, the Climate subprogram transitioned its grantmaking to focus on working to advance policies to encourage low-carbon, energy efficient practices around the world. Currently, the Climate subprogram supports the ClimateWorks Foundation and the Climate and Land Use Alliance.
ClimateWorks Foundation
ClimateWorks Foundation supports public policies that prevent dangerous climate change and promote global prosperity. Through its support of ClimateWorks, the Packard Foundation joins other international foundations and nonprofits in advancing innovative policies to prevent the planet from warming by more than two degrees Celsius, the amount scientists deem to be a threshold beyond which warming trends will be increasingly difficult to stop.
Built on the principles identified in the study, Design to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming, ClimateWorks is a global effort based on the successful model of the Energy Foundation in the United States. The Energy Foundation, a critical regional partner in the ClimateWorks network, has also been supported by the Packard Foundation for more than 10 years.
Climate and Land Use Alliance
Today the growing global demand for food, feed, fibers, and fuel is driving an expansion of agricultural lands into carbon-rich and species-rich forest ecosystems. Significant opportunities exist to reduce emissions in both the agricultural and the forest sector.
The Packard Foundation has joined forces with Ford Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and ClimateWorks to take steps toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation and other land use changes. Launched in 2010, the Climate and Land Use Alliance is a coordinated funding strategy that focuses on the best opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in ways that benefit—or at least do no harm to—indigenous peoples and other rural communities.
