The nearly thousand-strong Philanthropy For Climate movement has brought into focus the sector’s unique strengths and greatest challenges. The movement’s most recent report illustrates how.
A male polar bear walking on sea ice in eastern Spitzbergen, in the Svalbard archipelago, on April 9, 2025. OLIVIER MORIN / AFP
At its best, philanthropy is generous, collaborative, holistic, flexible, and bold. This can be seen in foundations making unprecedented resources available, and embracing increasingly trust-based and collaborative strategies, as well as the proliferation of pooled funds and local intermediaries, bringing resources closer to communities on the front lines. This has enabled communities, movements, government, and business to respond more rapidly to interconnected crises.
But at its most challenged, philanthropy can struggle to respond to problems that are interconnected, fast-moving, and systemic. Climate change illustrates this clearly. It is not simply another issue competing for attention, but a force that shapes outcomes across many of the issues philanthropy already seeks to address. Philanthropy risks treating climate as one issue among many, rather than recognising it as a lens through which challenges such as health, education, inequality, migration and community resilience become more visible and interconnected. Failure to act risks limiting philanthropy’s ability to achieve the outcomes it seeks across a wide range of issues.
What emerges from the Philanthropy For Climate: The State of the Movement Report is not only a picture of climate action, but of broader institutional change. A movement of over 990 foundations committed to integrating climate considerations into their work, the signatories are not simply adding climate as a new thematic priority. Many are using it as a lens to rethink how they deploy resources, invest their assets, engage stakeholders and rethink their operations. Climate is, in this sense, an entry point into more holistic, interconnected approaches to the complex challenges foundations already seek to address, from health to inequality to democratic resilience. It is not a question of whether your foundation’s mission overlaps with climate, but how it overlaps.
This report, published in June, comes at a moment of geopolitical fragmentation, declining development assistance, and growing pressure on civil society.
While the need for climate action continues to grow, many foundations are operating in increasingly complex environments. In some contexts, climate action has become more politicised. Civil society organisations face shrinking civic space, while foundations may encounter regulatory uncertainty, reputational risk, or heightened scrutiny when engaging on climate issues.
At the same time, many countries across the Global Majority are facing reductions in foreign development assistance, increasing the importance of strong domestic philanthropic ecosystems that can mobilise local resources and support locally led solutions.
Within this environment, collective action becomes even more important. Complex challenges require responses that no single institution can deliver alone. Shared frameworks, peer learning, and coordinated action help foundations navigate uncertainty while strengthening their collective impact.
Philanthropy For Climate responds to this moment by enabling foundations to act locally while learning, collaborating, and advancing together globally.
At the closing of this year’s Philea Forum, Nadejda Dermendjieva, Co-Director of the Bulgarian Fund for Women shared that ‘losing hope is a luxury. A privilege of the privileged. So we must not lose hope and we must fight and support those who can’t afford losing hope.’ The findings suggest that hope is justified: foundations are increasingly integrating climate across their work from governance to grantmaking. In fact, 98 percent of 450+ responding signatories are making progress towards the implementation of their commitment. Respondents are foundations of all shapes and sizes, working all over the world and across issues. This diversity reinforces one of the report’s clearest findings: climate action is not limited to specialist environmental funders. Foundations working across very different missions are finding that climate considerations strengthen, rather than distract from, their core objectives.
It will take courage to hold firmly to the progress we have made, and to build on it to move faster and further together. We must overcome a current malaise that, in the words of another Philea Forum plenary speaker Joshua Amponsem, ‘in philanthropy, the pressure to appear ambitious can outweigh the willingness to get close to complexity.’ Nonetheless, difficult times often create the environment for quantum leaps forward, and for philanthropy’s response to the climate crisis this moment could be one of them. Complexity should not be viewed as a barrier to action. Rather, it is a reminder that today’s challenges require more collaborative, adaptive and interconnected approaches than philanthropy has often relied upon in the past.
This is where the opportunity lies. Climate is not competing with philanthropy’s other priorities. It is helping reveal the connections between them. Foundations that engage with climate are often strengthening their ability to respond to the complex realities their communities already face, while becoming more intentional, aligned and consistent in how they deploy their resources, steward their assets, and pursue their mission.
The report also highlights the importance of transparency, learning, and accountability. Progress tracking is most valuable when it helps foundations to learn from one another, build confidence, and accelerate collective progress.
Philanthropy For Climate is designed to support exactly this kind of evolution: The movement provides a structured but flexible framework that enables foundations to act in ways that reflect their own missions, capacities and constraints, while contributing to a shared direction of travel.
For foundations not yet engaged on climate, this represents an all-important first stepping stone which can strengthen core objectives.
For those who are already a few steps in, the movement offers the opportunity to deepen ambition, share their learnings and partner with us on the next phase of collective progress.
At a time when challenges are becoming more interconnected and space for action is increasingly constrained, philanthropy has an opportunity to rethink how it works, collaborates, and generates and deploys its resources. Climate action is one pathway into that broader transformation.
We invite foundations to join this growing movement, learn from peers, and accelerate their own journey. The movement will gather at WINGSForum in Montreal, where philanthropy leaders from around the world will come together to explore how collective action can help philanthropy rise to this moment.
Benjamin Bellegy is Executive Director at WINGS. Delphine Moralis is the CEO of Philea.
