HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's a climate change organization you would recommend donating to?

14 points by kaptain ↗ HN
I'm looking to contribute to an organization focused on protecting the environment and fighting climate change. I'm looking at 350.org and other organizations online. The problem is that I don't get a real sense of how effective these organizations are. What's a good organization to donate to?

14 comments

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GreeniFi
Organisations run on a charitable basis in this space on balance tend to be less transparent on impact than organisations run as businesses, which are better focused on effectively managing and reporting impact[1].

Oikocredit is probably my favourite and investing in climate-smart agriculture at the moment. They should also give you your money back.

One thing to bear in mind is that adaptation at this point is as important as mitigation.

[1]The reason being that on balance they have more resources available for management.

kaptain
This is helpful. I agree about transparency in impact. I also understand that it is often difficult to measure that impact quantitatively when you are a charity. Business is easier because $ is easily quantifiable. I'm not so interested in getting my money back. I just want some reasonable assurance that it's going to something "effective".
thagerty
Sunrise Movement
kaptain
Can you describe how Sunrise Movement is effective in helping to mitigate climate change? (I looked at their website but I'm interested in quantitative data.)
ryanchants
Natural Resources Defense Council(NRDC)
kaptain
Can you talk about why NRDC is a good choice?
wmoser
I don't know if it's what you're looking for but there was a recent comment on another thread that mentioned ProjectWren [1] which is a PBC backed by YCombinator. While researching that came across Terrapass [2] for carbon-offset credits. While checking out the ProjectWren site discovered that apparently there are audit/verification companies that certify some of these projects [3,4] so they might act as a charity-watch type organization for climate change projects. Might have to cross reference, and there seems to always be at least some degree of trust that the money is being used as intended. I have no affiliation with any of these besides surfing the internet but I'm thinking about using ProjectWren specifically because of their affiliation with YCombinator, who again I have no personal relationship with as a company but I trust that at least the organization exists and does what they are saying and not fraudulent.

[1] https://projectwren.com/ [2] https://www.terrapass.com/ [3] https://verra.org/ [4] https://www.goldstandard.org/

scorecard
Citizen's Climate Lobby (CCL) does non-partisan lobbying for carbon fee and dividend in the USA, Canada and the EU. They lobby on the local and federal level, getting endorsements, tabling, getting bills introduced and writing articles and letters to newspapers. A list of CCL accomplishments is here: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/about-ccl/accomplishments/
mrfusion
Why not invest that money in a Prius instead? Or offer to replace someone’s diesel truck with a Prius?