Everyone involved in climate philanthropy knows this is a critical moment for our mission. The next five to ten years will decide whether we can keep climate change within safe limits. And we all know we have not been dealt the easiest hand: polarised societies, unstable geopolitics, and economic stagnation are making a difficult task even harder, underscoring how solidarity is climate philanthropy's greatest asset.

What we still need to fully come to terms with is that the operational context is also becoming tougher. Heightened legal, financial, and political pressures against civil society organisations across geographies—often driven by organised and motivated opponents—limits our ability to act, both in perception and reality.

As a result, the community has spent much of 2025 reacting to the new context in a more inward-looking mode, by for example, shoring up governance structures and building financial contingency plans to protect against potential shifts of funding flows. That was necessary, and we are stronger for it, but it cannot set the tone for how we operate as a community for the decade ahead. We must utilize climate philanthropy's greatest asset, solidarity.

The task now is to get back on the front foot—together—and to find ways to drive progress in the face of more organised opposition to climate action. This means being more strategic about how the ecosystem of funders, strategic regranters, and frontline organisations is structured—what holds it together, where its strengths lie, and where we need to build new capacity and knowledge to stay relevant and recognize solidarity as climate philanthropy's greatest asset.

It is worth recalling how nascent climate philanthropy and the wider climate sector still are, only now entering its third decade. In the last decade especially, growth in funding—and in the number of organisations receiving philanthropic funding—has been rapid. Yet even with that expansion, climate still accounts for less than two percent of global philanthropic giving. Pooling resources and thinking collectively have always been essential to our effectiveness as a movement, ensuring we make the most of limited funds.

Read the full article about solidarity in climate philanthropy by Laurence Tubiana and Sonia Medina at Alliance Magazine.