A group of nine charities and wealthy families in Canada have pledged C$405 million to support climate solutions over the next decade, part of a bid to triple Canadian climate philanthropy by 2030 and catalyze the “giant leaps” necessary to meet the country’s climate goals.
Canada’s largest-ever philanthropic commitment to climate action includes $150 million from the Trottier Family Foundation, $100 million from the Peter Gilgan Foundation, $18 million from the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation, and $15 million from the Chisholm Thomson Family Foundation, the Globe and Mail reports.
Carbon capture entrepreneur and geophysicist David Keith and Kirsten Anderson have pledged $10 million, the Vancouver-based Sitka Foundation $6 million, Toronto-based Vohar Miller Foundation $5 million, and longtime climate advocate Allan Shiff $1 million.
All the donors have been previously involved in supporting climate solutions in some capacity.
“We know that solutions exist in decarbonizing our economy and we are playing our part in helping Canada get there,” Trottier Family Foundation Executive Director Éric St-Pierre wrote on LinkedIn. “While $405M may seem significant, it’s important to recall that climate philanthropy in Canada is currently only 0.9% of total philanthropic giving. We need other high-net-worth families and foundations to join us and help address this challenge. Solving the climate crisis in Canada will inevitably better all Canadians.”
[Disclosure: Energy Mix Productions is grateful and proud to be partly funded by the Trottier Family Foundation.]
The fund includes $100 million previously announced by the Ivey Foundation, Canada’s sixth-oldest family foundation, which announced in late fall, 2022 that it will spend out its entire endowment and close its doors in 2027.
Ivey had already done a great deal to advance climate action in Canada, helping to launch organizations like the Transition Accelerator, the Canadian Climate Institute, the Institute for Sustainable Finance, Efficiency Canada, Farmers for Climate Solutions, and the Canada Climate Law Initiative.
“We’re not presenting this in a way that we’re trying to be alarmist, but the reality is that we are moving far more slowly than we need to be moving on these issues,” Ivey Foundation President Bruce Lourie told The Energy Mix at the time. “I hear the word ‘ambition’ a lot, but we don’t need to increase our ambition. We need to increase our action. Politicians like to talk about ambition, but we like to talk about getting things done.”
Lourie cited green infrastructure, building retrofits, grid decarbonization, and new transmission lines as areas where the country must move farther and faster.
“We need to do a whole lot of stuff that is very, very easy to understand, very tangible, but we’re just not doing a very good job of it in Canada right now,” he said. “The world’s not doing a great job, but Canada is doing a much poorer job than a lot of our peer countries. So we’re hoping that with our initial resources, we can help accelerate the pace and scale of the transformation we need to make.”
The Globe says Lourie created the Clean Economy Fund (CEF) to kick-start that effort. The Fund will now coordinate the $405-million campaign, which will back climate solutions that work across multiple and intersecting sectors.
The hope is that the $405 million is only the beginning, however.
Canadians gave only $106 million in climate philanthropy in 2022, CEF Executive Director Eric Campbell wrote in a September blog post, adding that the 0.9% of Canadian philanthropic giving devoted to climate is “well below the already-low global average of 1.6%.” While that difference might be attributable to donors’ pessimism about solving climate change, or their sense that governments and businesses should be taking the lead, he said the CEF thinks it mostly reflects the climate emergency’s recent arrival as a societal issue that warrants philanthropic support.
“Sure, climate change has emerged as a top issue for Canadians over the past 25 years, but it’s less familiar and less entrenched than the more popular philanthropic causes,” led by education and research, health, and social services, he said. And “being a newer issue on the public radar is that the entry-points for giving philanthropically to climate solutions are fewer, less familiar and less evolved. People looking to give charitably are likely to feel more comfortable with the well-trodden pathways provided by universities and hospitals than the younger and still-developing entry points offered by climate organizations.”
Campbell said the Clean Economy Fund hopes to correct that balance—not only as a conduit for funding, but with research, advice, and convening to “help climate philanthropy get smart.” The CEF’s target is to triple annual giving in response to the climate emergency from $106 million in 2022 to $325 million in 2030.
“That may seem a tall order, but it is necessary given the scale of the climate crisis we face,” he wrote. “Tripling the amount of climate philanthropy could, in effect, triple the amount of innovation, triple the amount of advocacy and mobilization, and triple the size of the giant leaps we can take.”
