New Delhi: There’s a huge gulf between India’s climate commitments and the money needed to achieve them. Public funding and foreign contributions are not enough.
A new emphasis on Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) goals has motivated Corporate Social Responsibility to direct resources toward climate goals, but even this has been underwhelming. Now, a new line of Indian philanthropists is slowly wading in to do their bit to close the trillion-dollar funding gap.
The newest crop of family philanthropists has shown an overwhelming interest in contributing to sectors like climate change, the latest India Philanthropy report, published by Dasra and Bain & Company in February, says. The EdelGive Hurun India Philanthropy List of 2022 found that donations to environment and sustainability rose by 46 per cent compared to 2021.
But impressive as a 46 per cent rise in donations might sound, it still only amounts to around Rs 193 crore—a drop in the ocean compared to the trillions India needs to catalyse real change, experts say.
“Traditionally, philanthropic funds have gone to sectors like education and health because climate change wasn’t viewed as a problem on the social agenda,” says Dhruba Purkayastha, Climate Policy Initiative’s India Director, adding, “This is slowly changing, but it isn’t organised, nor is it at the scale India needs.”
This need has fuelled initiatives like the India Climate Collaborative (ICC) and the ClimateRISE Alliance, which seek to define what the climate crisis means for India, while streamlining funds for effective action.
As the government tightens the scrutiny on foreign funding, domestic philanthropies and non-profits are stepping up to the challenge of making India climate-change-proof.
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India Climate Collaborative
The India Climate Collaborative emerged when some of India’s most prominent philanthropists and industrialists put their heads together and decided that abating climate change over India deserved more philanthropic attention.
“I often joke when I say that at the India Climate Collaborative, we’re trying to build the plane while we fly it,” says Shloka Nath, India Climate Collaborative’s CEO.
While approaches to business like ESG exists, their impact is not adequately felt, research shows. The India Climate Collaborative aims to provide a more efficient means of directing industry resources, which often prioritise areas with immediate results, towards initiatives addressing climate change.
The India Climate Collaborative’s work involves finding suitable donors, determining which projects have the most impact on the climate, and assessing which areas need funding most urgently—all while making a case to donors about why they should invest their money in climate action, as opposed to more traditional sectors.
“We can’t give money to one stakeholder for one project, and expect the whole system to change, and the climate crisis calls for systemic change,” says Nath, “But what’s really helped is that every stakeholder understands that business as usual just won’t work, and so there’s a willingness to collaborate.”
Since it started its operations in 2020, the India Climate Collaborative’s work has resulted in commitments to climate projects worth $13.6 million (Rs 115 crore), and has engaged with over 40 domestic and international donors.
In Odisha, the India Climate Collaborative was working with SELCO Foundation to pilot three cold storage projects that are powered by decentralised renewable energy (DRE), which could help establish a market for such products. It also partnered with the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) to come up with a climate risk atlas for India, to map out vulnerabilities in each district.
Funding needn’t come from just foundations, Nath says. The India Climate Collaborative seeks to leverage all grant-making capital out there, including Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds and donations from high-net-worth individuals.
“We always say that if the India Climate Collaborative does its job right, then everyone else gets to work on climate,” Nath adds.
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Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies
Rohini Nilekani started her journey as a philanthropist in 2001 by setting up Arghyam, an NGO focussed on sustainable water use and sanitation. Since then, she has focussed more widely on biodiversity and conservation issues, says Gautam John, CEO of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.
According to him, Nilekani’s curiosity from the time she was a practising journalist, and her passion for wildlife conservation, has held her in good stead in deciding which areas to invest in.
In 2022-2023, the foundation gave away away Rs 50 crore in grants for projects dedicated to biodiversity and conservation, up from Rs 7.44 crore the year before. Some of its recipients include the Wildlife Conservation Society of India, Keystone Foundation, which strengthens the resilience of species and landscapes, and the advocacy group Youth Conservation Action Network, among others.
Nilekani also sits on the Board of Trustees for the award-winning environmental think tank Ashoka Trust for Environment and Ecology (ATREE), to whom she had pledged Rs 50 crore as a grant in 2021.
“The climate change question is something that governments are involved in because of international obligations and negotiations, and businesses have a strong interest in it because of credits and ESG. So, conversations with sarkaar and bazaar (government and the private sector) exist, but not so much with samaj (public),” says John. A corollary of that realisation was that there weren’t enough philanthropies investing in bringing the climate conversation to the samaj, which seeded the idea for the India Climate Collaborative.
“We’re particularly good at supporting work that we see as important and missing, but is at high risk of failure at the start. Our early support can garner additional support later, as it becomes more and more mature and garners more metrics of impact,” says John.
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Rainmatter Foundation
Rainmatter Foundation has dedicated its entire endowment of $200 million (Rs 1,600 crore) to initiatives centered around climate change and environmental issues, making it the biggest domestic philanthropy committed to the cause.
The forces behind the foundation are Nithin Kamath, CEO of online brokerage company Zerodha, and its CTO Kailash Nadh.
Since it was set up in 2019, Rainmatter has grown to support 75 non-profits working across three focus areas: ecosystem resilience, “re-wilding” spaces, and improving local production and consumption.
“Early on, we decided that we’re not going to do this to assuage our own conscience. So that means staying away from one-off projects, and looking at this as one large puzzle with long-term investments,” says Sameer Shisodia, Raimatter’s CEO, who gave up a career in the tech industry to pursue sustainable farming. He joined Rainmatter in 2020.
He says he is excited by what he calls an emerging “space-based” approach to solving the climate crisis. One of Rainmatter’s grantees, Lipok Foundation, is piloting a project among five Gram Panchayats in Marathwada, Maharashtra aimed at replacing goods sourced from “outside” with those that are locally produced.
Rainmatter also supports projects intended to strengthen democratic values, and has an arm that does for-profit investing in companies that align with its goals. Last year, it provided a grant to Civis, a civil society organisation that promotes public engagement in the lawmaking process, to disseminate information about public consultation for environmental laws.
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Raintree Family Office
Raintree Foundation is knee-deep in a nine-year-long quest to develop a sustainable land management model in Pune, Maharashtra. The idea, founder Leena Dandekar says, is to move away from traditional models of philanthropic donations, which focus on just cheque-writing and building infrastructure.
“My daughter wanted to do something to mitigate man-animal conflict, and my son was talking about things like increasing carbon sequestration. So doing something for the environment and climate was very much in the vein of what the family wanted to do,” Dandekar said.
The Foundation was formed in 2018, after Dandekar exited the family business – the famed Camlin group best known for producing stationary supplies. It is supported by the Raintree Family Office, a venture capital firm, also led by Dandekar, which prioritises investments in companies and organisations which are environmentally conscious.
The Foundation has partnered with NGOs like wildlife and ecosystems specialist Srushti Conservation Fund, Samyak India, which focuses on health and gender, Acwadam for ground water management, Bapu Trust for Research on Mind & Discourse for mental health, and Jaljeevika to implement its unique sustainable development model in Pune’s Velhe block, which is nestled in the Western ghats.
The Velhe block project is in its fifth year, and is making interventions across 10 key areas, like water security, environment conservation, solid waste management, employing renewable energy, and institution strengthening, among others.
Dandekar says the interventions are community-led. The Foundation’s engagement with education and health, for example, are limited because communities didn’t express a need for interventions in those areas, Dandekar says.
She believes the Foundation has enough data to replicate the model in other parts of Maharashtra, but funding for it will have to be supplemented from sources outside the family corpus and the team is growing to include more climate specialists.
Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation
The Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation, chaired by Godrej & Boyce’s Jamshyd Godrej, sees itself at the intersection of philanthropy, policy research and stakeholder dialogue to promote renewable energy and reduce emissions.
Founded in 2009, Shakti’s name comes up as a donor for some of India’s most leading think tanks and NGOs working in the space of climate change and action – from the CEEW to TERI. Last year, it decided to launch a new brand identity “keeping pace with India’s ambitious net zero emissions pledge.”
In one of its newest ventures over the last year, Shakti set up the Accelerating Civil Society Organisations Towards Climate Mitigation and Technical Excellence (ACCLIMATE) Challenge Fund, which will provide civil society organisations with grant funding to pilot programmes on a range of issues, like green hydrogen, cooling technologies, and climate finance.
Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation declined to be interviewed for this story.
This is the second article of a two-part series.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)