New Giving Green initiative (beta) featured in Vox

Ahead of Giving Tuesday, IDinsight’s new Giving Green initiative (beta) was featured in Vox’s list of recommendations about where to donate to effectively fight climate change.

Giving Green is designed to help donors, businesses, and individuals answer a simple question: “How can I best allocate funds to fight climate change?” While the question is simple, it has no simple answer.

A new project at IDinsight seeks to identifying greenhouse gas-reducing giving opportunities backed with the best available research and evidence, so donors can actually move the needle on climate change. We broadly recommend two categories of donations: short-term donations, which seek to cause immediate, verifiable decreases in GHG emissions; and long-term donations, which seek to make bigger, riskier bets to address climate change that have a longer timeframe.

Our initial analysis has so far produced one short-term opportunity: BURN’s fuel efficient stoves in Kenya. BURN’s impact on fuel usage (and therefore greenhouse gas emissions) was validated by a recent randomized controlled trial or RCT), which sets it apart from the mixed results of other cookstove providers. Additionally, these stoves provide households with major economic benefits due to reduced fuel costs for cooking. You cannot purchase offsets linked to BURN stoves directly online, but you can do so by contacting BURN at carbon@burnmfg.com. Alternatively, you can make a donation to BURN directly here.

We feel comfortable making three long-term recommendations based on outside research. A report by Founder’s Pledge recommends two top charities in the fight against climate change: the Clean Air Task Force, which does policy advocacy with the US government on environmental issues; and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, an international non-profit that incentivizes forest conservation. You can donate to these two organizations directly through their websites. Let’s Fund has conducted research into effective giving for climate change, and recommends donating to The Clean Energy Innovation Program at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a think tank that focuses on clean energy policy. You can donate through the Let’s Fund donation mechanism.

Giving Green is a new initiative and a work in progress. We are actively looking for support to continue this work in order to provide more and better-researched donation options. Please email us at givinggreen@idinsight.org if interested.