Foto: Rede Comuá
Por: Graciela Hopstein and Mônica Ribeiro*
In recent years, especially at the COPs (Conferences of the Parties of the United Nations Organization) and at a number of domestic and international climate debate forums, much has been said about the importance of getting resources to the communities and territories that are most affected by the extreme effects of climate change. However, the biggest challenge is to make sure that they reach the grassroots groups, movements, and territories.
All over the world, including in Brazil communities, associations and civil society organizations have been developing local solutions to mitigate the effects of climate change, which affect mainly political minorities such as indigenous, black, quilombola, LGBTQIA+ communities, women, family farmers and the populations of peripheral urban territories.
Community philanthropy and socio-environmental justice philanthropy play a strategic role in taking resources to those groups in a simple, reliable way, supporting solutions that they locally develop themselves, promoting initiatives of prevention, adaptation and resilience to climate change.
In early June, during the F20 Climate Solutions Forum, the Comuá for Climate initiative was launched, as a strategy to consolidate the leading role played by independent philanthropy organizations in climate finance, which has long been implemented by the thematic and community funds that are part of the Network.
Climate justice is a concept that guides the work of the Comuá Network, based on values of inclusion, justice and the defense of rights in the actions against climate change, and works to finance local solutions, created by, for and with the communities, taking into account the specificities of the territories and needs of the groups involved.
The Comuá Network’s member organizations have already supported or co-created, together, hundreds of local solutions to mitigate climate change in different regions of the country, jointly with politically minoritized groups. Climate solutions are supported in all of Brazil’s biomes – which indicates an extremely widespread approach – with special emphasis on the Atlantic Forest and the Amazon.
These solutions are diverse and split among 12 fields of action. The majority are focused on Conservation and Biodiversity (19%), Adaptation and Community Resilience (16%) and Defense of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities (9%). As for the priority beneficiaries, the focus is on women, black people, LGBTQIAPN communities and young people, always with an intersectional approach.
A diagnosis developed with the Network (to be published in full in September) notes that between 2022 and 2023, 81% of the members of the Comuá Network raised their investments in the field of climate and climate justice. In 2023 alone, more than R$ 200 million were donated to address climate change, which shows that the organizations comprising the Network are strategic funders/supporters of civil society in the field of climate justice. Surely, the impacts of this support are powerful and significant in terms of the results achieved.
Despite this, the major challenge is funding, i.e. the lack of resources allocated to civil society, considering that local mainstream philanthropy does not give much when it comes to agendas associated with human rights, social justice and political minorities, and that international resources reach the country in trickles (only 12% of the funding from the Global North reaches the Global South and East, according to a HRFN report). However, philanthropy and international cooperation are still the main source of funding for independent philanthropy, accounting for 74% of the resources mobilized by the Network’s organizations.
So, the Comuá for Climate initiative is born out of the perspective of the organizations that already support local climate solutions financially, and it aims to provide greater visibility to the actions developed by independent philanthropy organizations to finance these solutions, highlighting their track record of action in the field of socio-environmental justice and human rights, their management capacity and assertiveness in getting resources to the grassroots, meeting the demands of the most vulnerable territories and groups.
The purpose of the initiative is to strengthen the political standing, collective actions and networking in order to build strategies, narratives and drive the production of knowledge in the field of climate philanthropy, driving and providing visibility to these agendas both in the non-government public sphere and in the national and international philanthropic ecosystems, seeking to constantly leverage donations to finance local solutions, focusing on the access to rights and the strengthening of democracy.
In 2024, the Transforming Philanthropy Month will be held to show the importance of the intersectionality with human rights and democracy brought by climate finance for local solutions, and the difference that the principles of community philanthropy – trust, protagonism of locally developed solutions, process simplification, and partnership – make in the assertiveness and reach of the distribution of these resources.
*Graciela Hopstein and Mônica C. Ribeiro – respectively, executive director and communications coordinator of the Comuá Network.
