Our Funding Partners

Our funding partners are vital to our work tackling the climate crisis and ensuring a healthy planet for future generations. For over 15 years, we’ve helped a diverse network of donors maximise their collective impact on climate action in Europe and around the globe.

Why support climate action?

Reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will improve the lives of every single person on the planet. It is possible. Together with our funder and partner community, we’ve helped ensure Europe has continued making climate progress despite the war, the pandemic and the economic challenges facing the continent.

Climate action is at a critical moment. Vested interests threaten to keep fossil fuels in place for too long – with devastating consequences.

The science is clear: we still have this decade to unleash the deep systemic transformation needed to reach net-zero. But we must move more quickly to secure the ambitious action needed to stabilise our planet for current and future generations.

Smart philanthropy can tip the scales

Worldwide philanthropic funding addressing the climate crisis has more than tripled since 2015, but still accounts for less than 2% of global philanthropy. This doesn’t respond to the scale of the challenge we face.

Philanthropic investment – more patient, risk-tolerant and flexible than government and corporate funding – plays a crucial role in the transformation towards the net zero world we and our partners are building.

  • Worldwide philanthropic climate funding has more than tripled since 2015, but still accounts for less than 2% of global philanthropy, according to ClimateWorks Foundation.
  • In 2022, total philanthropic funding for climate crisis mitigation was effectively unchanged from 2021, indicating a concerning slowdown. To help address this, we are broadening our scope with new workstreams on nature, biodiversity, adaptation and resilience, with a special focus on climate finance flows.
  • In 2021, 126 of the largest European environmental foundations allocated a combined €1.6 billion to climate action in Europe. In comparison, the most recent annual profits of just five fossil fuel companies topped €184 billion.
  • Between 2015 and 2021, multilateral development banks, bilateral development agencies and governments committed more than US$45 billion to projects that will prolong the use of fossil fuels.
  • The level of investment in disinformation, greenwashing and maintaining the fossil fuel status quo is substantially higher.

Partner with us

By supporting the ECF, you are not investing in an organisation, but an ecosystem and a movement: a vessel for change. You can play a meaningful role in empowering our unique community to shape climate policies, hold governments to account, and forge bold new solutions to get us to climate safety. Let’s talk about how you can make a difference with the ECF.

Contact us

We’re grateful to the following funders for their generous support

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