Climate Change

The world is contending with a climate emergency that threatens to impact lives and livelihoods across the globe, leaving no one unscathed. These impacts will be complex and interrelated, affecting access to food and nutrition, through increased likelihood of crop failures, and negatively impacting health, through increased heat stress as well as the rise of vector-borne diseases. These impacts will also demand new approaches to financing and governance to ensure that resources are available when and where they are most needed.

The climate crisis also risks exacerbating existing inequities: the depletion of the carbon budget to date is linked to economic development in emerging and developed economies, with 81 energy-poor countries accounting for just 8% of the emissions currently accumulated in the atmosphere. And yet, these are also the same countries that are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and far less equipped to adapt and stay resilient in the face of rising temperatures.

These impacts on food, health, and equity, as well as the strong correlation between access to reliable modern energy and resilience to the impacts of rising temperatures, make climate change the biggest challenge to The Rockefeller Foundation’s 110-year mission of promoting humanity’s well-being throughout the world. Recognizing this, the Foundation has put the issue of climate change at the center of all its programmatic work.

In this regard, we are supporting cutting-edge research and seeding new ideas to address a range of climate issues across all our programmatic focus areas. This edition of the Bellagio Perspectives features prominent leaders, entrepreneurs and experts hosted at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center working to address the climate crisis. These leaders are moving forward practical and bold solutions that can be scaled to address various parts of the climate crisis, ranging from galvanizing crucial climate finance in the Global South, to decarbonizing the fashion industry supply chain, to collating and mapping the human impacts of climate driven extreme weather events.