Charitable giving to nature and environmental charities is small and in danger of declining, further eroding progress to net-zero.

Relative to other themes like human health, education and religion, the environment receives far smaller allocations of funding from philanthropic organisations.

For example, Giving USA’s latest report, revealed just 3.7 per cent of the $592.5bn in charitable giving in the US in 2024 went to the “environment and animals,” a similar figure to those in China and the UK.

The GFI (Green Finance Institute) Quarterly Report notes that there is a sense of frustration that environmental funding is not enough to create the systemic change needed for nature restoration, scaled nature-based solutions (NbS) and sustainable supply chains.

Questions of the efficacy of large carbon credit and landscape restoration projects, alongside the unravelling of a decade-long ESG and sustainability movement, are also exacerbating funders’ concerns about the value of environmental philanthropy according to the report.

Indeed, these philanthropic allocations for the environment are at risk of becoming even smaller, gaps left by the cuts to US domestic and international aid budgets are causing funders to take stock of their priorities.

The GFI proposes that a holistic, co-ordinated approach could help fill the void, with trillions of private sector investment. However, to reach the goal of institutional investment into nature at scale, the pathway needs to be resourced in its entirety.

This means philanthropic, public or private sector grants at every step taking a holistic and co-ordinated approach and making sure the relatively small amounts of grant funding can be turned into trillions of dollars of impact.

GFI believes that capital mobilisation into new projects needs a combination of clear policy and regulation, and credible opportunities for private capital. This way a holistic approach can ensure that the environment is not put at risk by reduced public giving.

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