To Address the Impacts of Climate Change on People and Planet, We Need Transparent, Collective Learning

In what seems like a blink of an eye, climate change’s effects have gone from future theory to daily threat for people everywhere. Last year, 70% of the global workforce was at risk of injury or death from extreme heat. Of the 120 million people displaced in 2024, 75% were in countries heavily affected by climate change. And around the world, 1 in 5 people is malnourished. We’re seeing threats to people worldwide — and to decades of progress.

Speed is a critical component to bring to this fight, but sadly, philanthropy’s slow turn to climate has been well documented. Funding for climate change mitigation represented less than 2 percent of all philanthropic giving as of 2022, amounting to between $7.8 and $12.8 billion.

Collectively, we clearly need to invest more. But capital alone is not enough, and it’s also finite. Our institutions and our partners must think and work differently — and more quickly — to deliver results for the people we serve amid climate change.

The very nature of the challenge we are up against demands that we set our strategies, invest, and measure things differently. Climate change is urgent, complex, and ever-changing. Therefore, in the context of The Rockefeller Foundation’s five-year, $1-billion commitment to advancing solutions that are good for people and planet, we’ve been making changes to how we work and how we generate evidence and measure our impact.

We’re not waiting for perfect information or complete answers in order to take action. We must leverage the best existing evidence and wisdom in setting our strategies and making investment choices. Sometimes this requires supporting long-term, rigorous research or studies. In most cases, though, it means employing fit-for-purpose data collection and analysis that allows us to maintain an ear to the ground — on early signals of traction or engagement around new ideas — so that we can reflect on timely insights to adapt throughout the lifecycle of our work.

We are thinking more expansively about impact in a way that accounts for the multi-sectoral, global challenge we’re up again. Climate change doesn’t exist neatly within the bounds of any sector or country; it is global in scale and varied in its sources and potential solutions. We therefore need to conceive of our impact not solely in technical terms (i.e. does this thing work or not?), or in terms of who can claim credit for that impact (i.e. can the grantee or project that we funded take “credit” for the impacts?), but in terms of the contributions that organizations are making toward collective efforts to transform the very systems that have created the climate crisis and exacerbate its impact on people. We need to keep focused on how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and on the materiality and sustainability of the impacts that are being generated.

Our strategies must be as adaptive as climate change is dynamic. What we’re up against is continually changing. We cannot become wedded to predefined ideas of success or get boxed in too narrowly by a few quantitative metrics. While we can and should galvanize around shared guiding stars, we also need to be attentive to a broad suite of outcomes, especially the interrelationship between outcomes for the planet and outcomes for people at the front lines of climate change.

Critically, evaluative work must bring in timely insights that enable our work to continuously evolve. And because we know learning doesn’t happen automatically, within The Rockefeller Foundation, we’re practicing regularly pausing and reflecting to learn with our grantees and partners, and admitting when actions aren’t working and it’s time to pivot or stop. As busy as we all are, it requires discipline to carve out the time needed to bring people together within and across teams to learn, and grapple with the tensions inherent in philanthropic work.

To further collective action, we have to be collective learners. The challenges to humanity’s well-being are stacking up and speeding up. Only by openly sharing results sooner and more transparently can funders, implementers, and policymakers learn from each other fast enough to double down on promising approaches and quickly pivot when necessary. By pooling knowledge, investors can crowd-source attention and resources to the most impactful climate solutions and avoid wasting time and resources on redundant efforts or ineffective projects.

In 2022, we spoke with many peer foundations about impact reporting practices. We learned that public impact reporting is far from the norm. Common refrains were: “It takes too much time and effort,” “we don’t have the right data,” “there’s no clear demand for this kind of information from us,” and “we report to our Board, but not externally.”

Today, philanthropies cannot afford to continue this reticence. We need to embrace the often uncomfortable posture of sharing results and learnings routinely and publicly. Including when we fail. Failure is a critical part of innovation and transformation. If philanthropies don’t fail every so often, they aren’t using their capital catalytically enough. Besides, recognizing missteps can lead to significant insights. The BRAC Failure Report 2022-2023 bravely shares where the Social Innovation Lab fell short, and encourages failing fast and learning from these failures to drive future success. Philanthropies can and should do more of this sort of analysis and admission.

To address climate change with the urgency, dynamism, and scale required to improve people’s lives and livelihoods, we all must learn faster — and together. We invite you to join us and our partners and peers in evolving our collective practices surrounding evidence generation and use in the context of climate change.