In June 1972, Maurice Strong led a bicycle convoy of delegates into the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the first global conference to focus solely on environmental issues. If you did not immediately recognise the name of the former president of the Canada External Aid Agency, you might very well be forgiven.

While Strong played a pioneering role in taking the environment movement global, his name recognition cannot compete with the gravitas of the 2024 NYC Climate Week attendees, which included prominent philanthropists, business leaders and government officials, most of whom arrived by private aircraft and motorcade, rather than bicycle. While the historic conference in 1972 Stockholm was a close-knit affair, primarily attended by government delegates from 122 countries, the climate mega event in New York boasted a total of 900 events and brought an estimated 100,000 visitors to the city. Climate, in other words, is big business.

Previously on the margins of 20th-century philanthropic agendas, climate has since been redefined by an increasingly global coalition of foundations and funders supporting climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience. The ClimateWorks Foundation, a leading catalyst and intermediary for climate action, estimates that foundations tackled the climate crisis with contributions in the amount of $3.7 billion in 2022^[1]. This represents a sharp increase from 2015, when the organisation first started tracking this data and climate funding stood at $900 million. The contrast is even more stark when compared with total US foundation giving of around $100 million annually between 2000-2005.

Climate is big business.

Although Hewlett announced a record-breaking five-year $600 million climate pledge in 2017, by now, the foundation is no longer the biggest climate spender. In fact, climate philanthropy has become a much more crowded affair as of late, with billionaire mega-donors Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott, Steve Ballmer, and Eric and Wendy Schmidt joining the fray. A host of West Coast funders not named Hewlett and Packard have also stepped up their investments in promising climate adaptation solutions, foremost among them the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as highlighted by their $1.4 billion pledge in 2022 to help support the world’s poorest farmers^[2].

On the East Coast, the Rockefeller Foundation went ‘big’ on climate in 2023 when it committed over $1 billion to advance the global climate transition – an ironic turn of events in the institution’s storied 111-year history when considering that its founder, John D. Rockefeller, once controlled more than 90 percent of petroleum production in the United States^[3]. Another prominent East Coast climate leader, Bloomberg Philanthropies, recently launched a $200 million initiative aimed at addressing homegrown climate challenges by helping 25 US cities develop customised climate solutions.

And yet, dollar amounts represent only a fraction of the broader story of how environmental philanthropy has evolved.

Long before Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, reoriented the organisation to focus on the intersection of ‘climate and human opportunity,’ boldly declaring that ‘current efforts to help people mitigate and adapt to climate change are insufficient,’^[4] a patchwork of foundations and nonprofits with less grandiose aims had been quietly laying the groundwork for climate philanthropy’s current mainstream acceptance. Long before Jeff Bezos finally committed a small portion of his immense wealth – at the time of writing Bezos’ net worth stood at a staggering $205 billion – to his $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund in 2020, climate activists had already been engaging in policy advocacy and grassroots organising for decades prior, often but not always with foundation support and certainly without the fanfare and promotion of a multi-billion dollar organisation.

The American environmental organisation Sierra Club, created by famed naturalist and ‘Father of the National Parks’ John Muir in 1892, is one such example. Bill Hewlett and David Packard, founders of the HP Company, both avid outdoorsmen and lovers of nature in their own right, were members of the Sierra Club long before they formed their foundations during the 1960s. The foundations’ connection to the Sierra Club, and environmentalist causes more generally, were ultimately fused into their founding principles.

The Sierra Club serves as a powerful reminder that American conservationism had been making significant strides for over a century before grassroots efforts coalesced into a mainstream environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking publication Silent Spring in 1962, the celebration of the first Earth Day in 1970, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency that same year, or the founding of the global environmental activist network Greenpeace in Vancouver in 1971, are not isolated or overnight events – they are deeply rooted in a rich historical context and precedent.

Private foundations catalysed or capitalised on these regulatory changes and shifts in public sentiment by launching or expanding specialised environmental programs, originally with a strong emphasis on conservation and ecology. The transition from conservation to climate unfolded gradually for some organisations during the 1990s and early 2000s, as funding for climate change research, along with investments in renewable and sustainable energy solutions, grew and fragmentation of the field declined.

Foundations also stepped up their efforts to influence US energy policy. The creation of the Energy Foundation in 1991, funded by the Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations and the Pew Charitable Trusts, exemplified philanthropy’s commitment to actively engage in and shape the transition to a sustainable energy future with greater financial investments. However, this engagement increasingly took place along more partisan lines. While preservation and conservation^[5] causes historically drew support from across the political spectrum, climate philanthropy has assumed a left-leaning character due in part to the political profiles of the philanthropists and organisations it attracts.

Nor was this climate movement limited to a domestic audience. Beginning with the 1994 ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the involvement of non-governmental actors in supporting the goals and implementation of climate treaties – from Kyoto to Paris – became a more common occurrence, pushing foundations’ established roles as intermediaries between government and civil society to the international policy-making arena.

With the benefit of hindsight, how might we evaluate more than 50 years since the 1972 globalisation of the environmental movement and its evolution towards climate? The philanthropic community has effectively mobilised resources to advance innovative clean energy solutions and advocate for green policies, while also raising public awareness about the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities.

At the same time, the transition to a socially just and low-carbon climate future, by nature, has been economically and socially disruptive while also lacking the tangible, easy-to-measure results of John Muir’s activism which helped establish the Sequoia and Yosemite national parks. The sheer scale of climate funding by politically motivated billionaire donors has only fueled this opposition.

Historical perspective can unveil lessons on how the politically divisive issue of climate might return to the (carbon) neutral grounds of its environmental predecessors. Foundations have long played a vital role in shaping the historical arc of environmental philanthropy, from early conservation efforts to the rise of global climate action. Participants at the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 29) in Baku would benefit from examining this historical evolution, as future directions are significantly shaped by the paths already travelled.

Asher Orkaby is an international historian and is currently working on a history of west coast philanthropy. Tim Mueller is founder and managing director of Chester & Fourth, a Canadian advisory firm.

Thumbnail image credit: “Untitled” By United Nations [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via Flickr.