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Frequently Asked Questions
You have questions, we have the answers.
General
Giving Green is a guide for individuals and businesses to make more effective climate giving decisions. We help you find evidence-based, cost-effective, and high-leverage strategies and organizations that maximize the positive climate impact of your money.
Most of our reports and recommendations are public. We also provide consulting services.
We currently offer two main guides:
1. For individuals and foundations
We offer recommendations on top climate nonprofits, a selection of organizations that we believe have proven track records or promising potential to pursue scalable and feasible climate impact strategies that are in need for more funding.
We also offer audience-specific recommendations, such as top Australian nonprofits for Australian donors.
2. For businesses
We offer a comprehensive guide on effective corporate climate action. The guide features four evidence-based strategies to maximize business climate impact, including recommendations on top climate nonprofits, catalytic climate technology funds, carbon removal suppliers, and high-quality carbon offsets.
In addition to our two main guides, we also provide an overview of common “sustainable investment” strategies for investors. These reports were last updated in 2021. With more funding, we can update this work to reflect the rapidly changing market. If you are interested in supporting this research workstream and making high-impact climate investment easier for everyone, get in touch here.
Climate change does not stop at borders. As outlined in our research process, we are interested in all impact strategies that reduce climate change, regardless of geography or approach. We look for nonprofits whose activities will have the greatest global impact.
That said, many of our recommendations are US-based. This is for two reasons. First, our predominantly US-based team can more thoroughly evaluate US-based nonprofits. We also acknowledge that this results in biases and blindspots. Second, we believe the US has a core comparative advantage in developing certain clean-energy technologies, which means that nonprofit advocacy in the US can eventually lead to large, far-reaching global effects.
That said, we understand that for many climate donors, it is important and meaningful to support initiatives in their own communities. Most of our organizations work internationally. Some of the organizations we recommend have branches or initiatives that operate in regions beyond North America, including Europe, Asia, and Africa. If you are interested in giving to an initiative in your region, we have ideas for you! Get in touch with us here.
If you want to take advantage of tax deductibility when donating from outside the US to US-based nonprofits, our partners may assist in facilitating tax-deductible climate contributions from international donors.
We do not rank our recommended organizations. While some may end up more impactful than others in the end, we doubt we will ever be certain enough about this to justify actively fundraising more for one over the others. Though this is unsatisfying from a truth-seeking perspective, it is in line with our value of humility.
At Giving Green, we believe in decarbonizing the future, not just offsetting the past.
For most people and institutions, we suggest you rethink the idea of buying carbon offsets. While well-intended, the offsetting framework can be limiting. Instead, we recommend donating to our top climate nonprofit recommendations. We estimate that these high-impact climate donation opportunities in policy advocacy and technology advancement are an order of magnitude more effective than the best direct emissions reductions projects, such as carbon offsets. For instance, compare our cost-effectiveness estimates for Good Energy, GFI, or Industrious Labs to the sale price of quality carbon offsets like those offered by Mash Makes or Tradewater.
If you are representing a business, we encourage you to explore our comprehensive white paper on higher-impact corporate climate action. If your business is required to adhere to ton-to-ton carbon emissions accounting, we also offer a select number of recommendations for high-quality carbon offsets, which are outlined in the white paper.
Giving Green is not an offset broker and does not sell any offsets on our own website.
Our research team is composed of experts in climate, policy, and impact evaluation. They spend thousands of hours each year assessing climate impact strategies and finding organizations that are making a difference. We highly value transparency in our work and we welcome critique and suggestions from readers, which we use to make our work better-informed.
Climate is complex. We acknowledge that our solution to the problem is just one of many. If our recommendations do not align with your giving, we hope our open-access research reports on key sectors and technologies can still be a resource. Our team can also offer one-on-one consulting and bespoke recommendations.
Research
We follow a five-step research process: identify impact strategies, assess impact strategies, longlist organizations, evaluate funding opportunities, and publish recommendations. We also use a combination of metrics and heuristics to guide our evaluation during this process.
You can find an overview of the five-step process on the How It Works page, or dive deeper into the full research process.
We need climate action on all fronts. Rather than definitively labeling our recommendations as “the best”, we use a combination of metrics and heuristics to inform our search for “best bets”: climate impact strategies and initiatives that, in our assessment, wield significant influence in addressing climate change with the necessary speed and scale.
Climate research is complex. Our process evolves as we explore new evidence and methodologies. We are committed to Giving Green's organizational values of truth-seeking, humility, transparency, and collaboration. We are transparent about our key uncertainties, and we document our mistakes.
We do not publish a list of all organizations we have assessed. On one hand, this is not in line with one of our fundamental organizational values: transparency. However, we have decided to keep this information confidential in order to balance transparency with two of our other values: collaboration and humility. We seek to be positive members of the climate philanthropy community, and believe that making the case for top recommendations is more impactful and more in line with our values than highlighting organizations that, though they may be quite effective, do not ultimately receive a top recommendation status.
You can visit our public research dashboard to see the list of climate impact strategies we have assessed or plan to assess.
We use quantitative cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) as an input into our assessment of different strategies and organizations. The weight we place upon CEAs depends on (a) the strength of other available evidence and (b) the confidence we have in our CEA. For many of our top recommendations, our CEAs include highly uncertain parameters that cause us to use CEAs primarily as plausibility checks. However, some of our offsets evaluations (e.g., BURN stoves) have relatively certain parameters and stronger quantitative evidence that allows us to use CEAs with greater confidence. See Giving Green’s Research Process for additional details.
In general, we are most focused on climate benefits—in the literal sense, reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases—and our decision making does not typically place substantial weight on other benefits, which we call “co-benefits”. However, there are instances in which a co-benefit may (a) attract additional funding (e.g., Good Food Institute’s work on alternative proteins may also have positive animal welfare effects) and/or (b) reduce human suffering (e.g., BURN stoves allow households to reduce spending on cooking charcoal). In these cases, we think it is useful to consider and highlight co-benefits.
We believe there are many highly cost-effective impact strategies that do not have risks of substantial adverse effects. Therefore, we deprioritize strategies that we think might have large and/or inequitably shared adverse effects.
We do not currently evaluate work in climate adaptation because we think our research process and our team’s skills are not directly transferable. Conditional on funding and research capacity, we may consider expanding into climate adaptation in the future, since we think there could be opportunities to fund important and impactful work.
Donating
You can support Giving Green’s top nonprofits in two ways:
Give to the Giving Green Fund.
Give directly to the organizations of your choice. Each recommendation’s donation page is linked here.
Thank you for joining our community of high-impact climate givers!
The Giving Green team conducts comprehensive research into the climate landscape to find organizations that we think are doing high-impact work. If you would like to support Giving Green’s research and operations, we accept donations online, via check, via bank transfer, through DAFs, and more. See more detail on how to support Giving Green’s operations here. If you would like to give in another way, reach out to us for support.
The Giving Green Fund takes in donations from donors like you, then gives that money to other organizations. Money given to the Giving Green Fund supports a portfolio of high-impact climate giving opportunities identified by our research team. Giving Green is the team doing the research, operations, and communications work behind the guides to climate giving on this website.
Money given to the Giving Green Fund is held by Giving What We Can and disbursed based on recommendations from Giving Green’s team. We recommend disbursements based on our understanding of the highest-impact available giving opportunities; usually, this means funds are distributed between our current top nonprofits based on our understanding of their funding need.
No. Giving Green does not take a cut of donations to the Giving Green Fund. Our operations are funded by individual and institutional donors who share our vision of making high-impact climate giving easier for everyone.
If you find our research and recommendations useful, consider donating to Giving Green’s operations. These donations will fund Giving Green’s research to find high-impact giving opportunities, as well as our communications effort to introduce our research to more climate supporters. We are an impact multiplier: every dollar donated to Giving Green has thus far translated into $15 raised for high-impact climate initiatives.
Giving Green is a project incubated by the 501(c)(3) IDinsight (EIN 27-4933181). This means that your money goes to IDinsight, and your gift (if you are in the United States) is tax-deductible.
The Giving Green Fund is hosted by Giving What We Can, which accepts tax-deductible donations in a number of countries through its funding partners.
Giving What We Can is a platform for and community of effective givers. Their team supports funds that can accept many individual gifts and then grant out sums to other organizations. Giving Green is not structured to be able to do this ourselves, but Giving What We Can hosts the Giving Green Fund at no fee to either us or you.
Practically speaking, this means that when you give to the Giving Green Fund, your money is initially going to Giving What We Can. We then work with their team to make grants to end recipients.
For checks, please make your check out to Giving What We Can USA Inc, leave a memo indicating use for the Giving Green Grantmaking Fund, and mail it to GWWC. GWWC's mailing address is listed here.
For bank transfers, IRA, or DAF, please get in touch with us for details.
You can also use Giving What We Can’s online portal to make and track your donations. Please follow the instructions here.
For donors to Giving Green: We use GiveLively to process and manage our online donations. This means that a receipt will come from hello [at] givelively [dot] org. You can change payment methods, view receipts, and cancel recurring donations using the GiveLively User Portal. (Or if you'd prefer, contact us and we can help!)
For donors to the Giving Green Fund: If you used Giving What We Can's online platform to make your gift, you can access your account through logging in at givingwhatwecan.org. For US-based donors, if you gave before April 1, 2024, your donation was processed through Effective Ventures; if you gave on or after April 1, 2024, your donation was processed through Giving What We Can USA Inc.
Consulting
Yes. Regardless of the amount that you are looking to give, we are always happy to have a one-to-one chat to better understand your motivations and constraints. Say hello here.
For deeper engagement, we can conduct bespoke research on a consulting basis for:
Individual and institutional donors that are looking for tailored recommendations
Businesses that wish to maximize their corporate climate impact
Have more questions?
We're here to help. Please don't hesitate to reach out to us through our contact page.