Our Climate Change Giving Fund in H1/2024

August 2024 was the warmest August on record (tied with August 2023), ending the hottest summer (June to August) on record - both globally and in Europe. The water temperature in the Mediterranean Sea also reached a new high for the second year in a row, with a mean surface temperature of 28.9°C on a day in mid-August.

The unusually warm Mediterranean has in turn led to excessive moisture, causing the storm “Boris” (“Annett” in Germany) to produce up to five times the average amount of precipitation for September in just four days, causing flooding in large parts of Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania. According to scientific analysis, the storm was made twice as likely by human-induced climate change.

This makes it all the more important to advance the transformation towards climate neutrality as quickly as possible, as the organizations supported by our Giving Fund. In the first half of the year, we were able to support high-impact climate charities with a total of 1.4 million euros. We would like to thank all our donors for their valuable contribution to effective climate action.

The Fund supported our lead organization Carbon180 with 150,000 euros, while the other recommendations Clean Air Task Force, Future Cleantech Architects and The Good Food Institute each received 300,000 euros from the Fund. Half of the funding for the Clean Air Task Force is earmarked for the Tempo project, with a particular focus on work in Germany. With the remaining 350,000 euros, we supported the organization Food Frontiers on the recommendation of the Founders Pledge. 

Food Frontier

Our food system generates 25-30% of global emissions and is the leading driver of land clearing and biodiversity loss. Meat and dairy production account for the largest share of this footprint due to the highly emissions- and land-intensive nature of industrial animal agriculture.

To sustainably feed the world’s population, the world’s leading environmental and economic authorities emphasize the need to diversify protein supplies and reduce reliance on industrial animal agriculture systems. This is particularly important in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, home to 60% of the world’s population, where animal protein consumption is growing.

Food Frontier works to advance alternative protein solutions in Australia and New Zealand, a regional hub for premium agri-food R&D, production and export. As the region’s independent think tank on alternative proteins, Food Frontier seeks to drive dialogue and decision-making to accelerate market development of plant-based, fermented, and cultured proteins.

Since 2017, Food Frontier’s major conferences, forums, and presentations have engaged tens of thousands of business leaders, policymakers, and innovators - building knowledge, facilitating partnerships, influencing policy, and stimulating new investment. Their research on economics, markets, consumers, the environment, and nutrition has reached an estimated 80 million people through the media.

Support from our Giving Fund will enable Food Frontier to continue this work, with a focus on influencing increased government funding for the scale-up of alternative proteins and increasing the availability of alternative protein options in domestic and export markets.

Project Tempo

If countries delivered against the emissions targets they had set, we would be on a pathway to 1.8 to 2.1°C of global warming. On the trajectory of current policies, that rises to 2.7°C. This “ambition-action gap” has emerged because the policies we need are often undeliverable within the constraints of politics. Project Tempo aims to address this problem by developing transformative - but politically viable - strategies.

A non-partisan non-profit, Project Tempo provides European and national-level voter research and modeling, focused on the groups of voters who are disproportionately driving political outcomes. They provide evidence-based advice to policy makers, industry, and non-profits on how to design and present policies, setting out pathways to accelerate the delivery of solutions that are both technically necessary and politically palatable.

While much of projected emissions growth comes from low and middle-income countries, Europe has a key role to play as an enabler. It is a leader in climate diplomacy, a regulatory superpower, an innovation center, and a first-mover market. By unlocking policy implementation in Europe, they aim to unlock faster progress globally.

The support from the donation fund will be used to support a new research program in Germany, according to Project Tempo Index currently the country with the greatest potential impact for action. Working with partners, the program will include focus groups, surveys, policy development and testing, and the creation of data tools such as a multilevel regression and post-stratification analysis (MRP) that will enable estimates of attitudes down to the state and constituency level.