The Climate Pledge is calling for the philanthropy community to come together and allocate more than $1 billion in new funding for climate change by the end of 2021. Announced at the AVPN 2020 annual conference, the Climate Pledge has been designed to help trigger and track new funds for environmental action, as well as make it easier for donors new to climate philanthropy to get involved.

‘Similar to the current pandemic, climate change is an ‘all of us, everywhere’ challenge and we need our community to step up its game as well’, said Ivan Tse, Chair of the Tse Foundation and Founder of Global Friends Philanthropy, who was among the first to participate in the new Pledge. ‘I am fully convinced that collective action, especially among philanthropic and climate investment actors, can have vital impact.’

The Climate Pledge will neither collect nor direct funds to any specific organisations, but rather will act as a mechanism to support the sector in stepping up its commitment to climate action in the same year that national governments are being called upon to increase their commitments through the COP process.

Financial pledges will be tracked with help from Candid beginning at a minimum of $100,000. Foundations can sign the pledge online at climate-pledge.org.

‘Climate change is a big, scary, serious problem, but the tools to combat it do exist and they’re big enough tools to do the job,’ said Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown. ‘Different kinds of leadership are going to have to emerge to force change to happen.’