CLIMATE IMPACT

WHY CLIMATE IMPACT?

Our Climate Impact fundraising launched on December 1st, 2020. We noticed a recurring theme in 22+ projects we already funded: climate impacts people, and people impact the climate. 

While climate change can feel like an abstract concept in day-to-day life, many around the world are recessing into poverty or in life-threatening situations due to changes in climate and environment. Today, approximately 2 billion people —one third of the global population—live in poverty or near the poverty line and face persistent threats to their livelihoods, including from climate change. Extreme changes in weather can cause heatwaves and drought or flooding and landslides, both of which threaten access to clean water and sustainable food sources.

A rise in natural disasters—both sudden disasters such as hurricanes and slow-onset disasters such as desertification and coastal erosion—are impacting global migration. Because of these sudden or slow-onset changes in the environment, the UN predicts that there could be anywhere between 25 million and 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050.

In 2009, a group of climate change researchers found that global warming is responsible for approximately 150,000 deaths around the world each year. The most common causes of climate-related fatalities are rising temperatures, declining air quality, extreme weather, and vector-borne illnesses (such as malaria, west nile, and zika virus–all transmitted by mosquitos). Experts fear that the fatality rate could double by 2030.

As we are working towards a more just and beautiful future, we recognize that is impossible to achieve without addressing the impact a changing climate has on less developed countries. The most vulnerable people around the world are feeling the burden of climate change more starkly than those of us in the United States who bear a greater responsibility to contributing to climate change.