Summary: Climate giving options are either cost effective but risky, or cost ineffective but more direct. There is no climate equivalent to bed nets. As an individual donor, one has to decide how to trade off risk vs cost effectiveness in climate donations.
As someone interested in climate and environmental issues, I’d like to include it as one of the cause areas in my personal giving. However, I’ve never felt completely satisfied with the available options, and haven’t settled on a consistent strategy. Wanted to post this in case others feel similarly, have solutions or can explain why I should feel differently.
The central issue is that the available options are either cost-effective but relatively high risk, or more direct but expensive. In terms of the former, Giving Green and Founders Pledge provide lists of cost-effective organizations to donate to, but as far as I can tell the recommended organizations are all either advocacy organizations or research organizations. While I’m sure all do very impactful work with very limited resources, they are also somewhat risky – the policies could never be adopted, the research could fail, etc.
[As an aside, I find it difficult to quantify the counterfactual of not donating to these organizations. If I donate to an advocacy organization and the policy they advocate for is implemented, how can I quantify the net effect the organization had on the policy? If I don’t fund some research, will it never be carried out? Will it be slowed down?]
There are two ways to ensure that my donations are directly bringing down atmospheric CO2 concentrations. One option is to buy carbon offsets. These have a mixed history, but there are now companies doing legitimate Direct Air Capture (e.g., ClimeWorks), so you can be confident that CO2 is actually being taken out of the atmosphere. But these cost on the order of $1000/ton CO2 stored. Giving Green notes that “high-impact climate donation opportunities in policy advocacy and technology advancement are an order of magnitude more effective than the best direct emissions reductions projects, such as carbon offsets.”
A way of feeling better about this is to view buying legitimate carbon offsets as both an immediate benefit and an investment to help bring CO2 removal down the cost curve. So the effective net price/ton CO2 stored may be lower than advertised.
The second option is to focus on my personal CO2 emissions and count this as part of my giving. Some of the changes I can make are free (eating vegan) and some may save money in the long run (e.g., installing solar panels or a heat pump). But this is a different model of giving and not something I can do on a monthly basis. There may also be a limit to how much I can reduce my personal emissions.
What is missing is a “bed nets” option that is both cost-effective and low risk. As an individual donor, I would feel better placing some riskier bets if I knew part of my donations were having direct benefits, though I recognize that I may be unusually risk averse in my giving. An analogy would be donating to both purchasing bed nets and to reducing x-risk. My intuition is the situation is different for larger organizations and donors who can afford to spread their bets and can do more to single-handedly galvanize an area of research or policy.
So I feel stuck on this issue, and have pursued a few different giving strategies over the years. It may also be that focusing on donating to reduce CO2 concentrations is the wrong approach, and I can see several viable alternatives:
- Focus on other environmental causes with more directly actionable solutions (e.g., improving air quality)
- Focus on cost effective climate adaptation, e.g., buying cheap air conditioners for those who can’t afford them.
- Instead of donating money, donate time in the form of advocacy. My money is best used elsewhere (my guess is in terms of pure cost-effectiveness this is the optimal choice).
I think one factor that adds uncertainty to climate giving is that effective climate action requires systems change and innovation breakthroughs, and that you can't simply put a price tag on these two because advocacy and innovation can fail. A more bednet-style approach to climate giving, such as forest protection and reforestation, seems promising because it offers high certainty and hardly any political opposition. Even then, these direct interventions have all kinds of uncertainty related to permanence (will the forest be cut down again?), additionality (would the forest have regrown naturally?), and leakage (will people just cut down different trees?). Unlike in global health and development, directly tackling emissions in one place can increase it somewhere else.
Personally, I've come to terms with the idea that climate action is inherently uncertain. I can never pin down how my actions reduced global emissions because there's a high chance of failure. But if we pool the probability of the efforts of thousands of people, we can collectively say that we very likely made a big dent in emissions because we can spread the risk over many donors, activists, and professionals.
How would you feel about donating to a high-impact grantmaking funds that spreads their climate bets and works to advance entire areas or research and policies? If you donate to the Founders Pledge climate fund or the Giving Green fund, for example, your donations are pooled with those of hundreds to thousands of other people who collectively can spread their bets and build new areas or research and policy.
(PS. Setting up donations to funds instead of individual charities has some additional benefits. It helps to allocate funding to charities when they need it most, they can make grants to individual projects that don't need continuous funding, and funds can change their recipients if other charities become more effective. See the EE website.)