A community in the mountains of Nepal battles an outbreak of dengue cases, far more frequent now due to changing weather patterns.

A pregnant woman in rural Uganda joins a growing list of mothers giving birth prematurely due to the impact of extreme heat.

These are not scenarios from the future. These are among some 3.3 to 3.6 billion people worldwide – more than 40 percent of the global population – facing heightened health risks now as a result of climate change’s fingerprints, particularly rising temperatures and more frequent and severe storms.

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Given that 50% of the global population relies on rice for 80% of their dietary needs, this is a matter of global significance. Moreover, disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts have sent food prices skyrocketing and pushed millions into hunger and poverty.

Researchers, agronomists, technologists, and policymakers are striving to find solutions, but so far only achieved small-scale pilots in different countries. To make big bets and think large scale, we need a digital innovation hub for low-carbon rice. This could be a pivotal force in promoting digital solutions to incentivize smallholder farmers to adopt climate-smart agriculture practices.

The post A Digital Innovation Hub for Climate-Friendly Low-Carbon Rice appeared first on The Rockefeller Foundation.

These specialized food programs aim to treat or prevent diseases through nutrition, providing patients with meals or groceries targeting their specific health needs.

“As a recipient of medically tailored groceries, I can say that Food is Medicine helped bring me joy and nourishment while relieving the symptoms of my disease and the food insecurity my family and I were experiencing, Lawson said.“

The post Food Is Medicine Enhances Health While Slashing Health Care Costs appeared first on The Rockefeller Foundation.

Recently, we had an opportunity to expand our impact in two projects in Burundi, an East African country of about 13.2 million people that is the second poorest in the world. The country’s economy is dominated by small-scale, rain-fed, subsistence agriculture, which employs about 90 percent of the labor force.

Climate shocks in Burundi – including rising temperatures, droughts, and irregular rainfalls – impact food availability. Some 55 percent of children under the age of 5 are chronically malnourished.

The Rockefeller Foundation, through its grantee the World Food Programme, supported an initiative to shift its school feeding programs towards more nutrient-dense meals such as fortified whole grain maize meals and high iron beans.

In support of this initiative, we visited Rukuruma I & II schools in Bujumbura Rural Province in Burundi, with some 1,580 students who were receiving meals prepared with fortified whole grain in partnership with the Fortified Whole Grain Alliance.

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Today, Lewis is the President of the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii), a collaboration between fashion industry stakeholders that identifies, funds, and measures the impact of sector decarbonization solutions. Aii developed from two convening work streams within the fashion industry: the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which measures social and environmental supply chain impact, and Clean by Design, a program in which brand retailers nominated local factories for efficiency improvements.

Before leading Aii, Lewis was President of C2CPII and Director of Sustainable Strategies for The Mohawk Group.

How is your work helping to address the climate crisis?

As a global industry, fashion has its hands in so many other critical areas for addressing carbon, like land use, agriculture, renewable energy, biomass, and logistics. And what’s unique about fashion is that it has a big megaphone: it’s visible, it’s relatable. Even people uninterested in fashion still wear clothes. Fashion is able to bring a storytelling component to the climate conversation that can make it more compelling to the average person. My job is to legitimize this storytelling with real, verified, measurable impact.

I’ve always been interested in the role of corporations in driving change. Capitalism can scale solutions faster than regulation, and so the two together become pretty powerful. But I recognized early in my career that the disconnect between corporate social responsibility, corporate sponsorship, and corporate philanthropy meant that we weren’t always aligning how we produce our goods with our messaging. For example, cosmetic companies who funded breast cancer awareness month have used carcinogens in their products.

To reconcile this disconnect, Aii has started the $250 million Fashion Climate Fund, which aims to subsidize supply chain decarbonization efforts. We put together two reports on carbon in the industry, and we’ve estimated that a $1 trillion funding gap stands between today’s industry emissions and our 2030 environmental goals. The fund, with contributions from brand retailers like PVH Corp., Lululemon, and H&M Group, will finance renewable energy transitions and help scale sustainable materials. Through it, we predict we’ll be able to unlock a total of $2 billion in the coming years, which could remove up to 150 million tons of carbon dioxide from the apparel supply chain.

The post Lewis Perkins on How to Decarbonize the Fashion Industry appeared first on The Rockefeller Foundation.

This theme underlies her work today. Katie is Executive Director of Equation Campaign, a 10-year funding initiative (2020-2030) working to disrupt the oil and gas industry and invest in the power of people on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Prior to this role, she was a founding director of EarthRights International, a nonprofit with expertise in human rights, the environment, and corporate accountability.

Katie came to the Bellagio Center for a residency in 2018 and for a follow-up convening in 2019 to advance the book The Revolution Will Not Be Litigated, a definitive manual on what it takes to catalyze, support, and sustain social and environmental justice movements.

How is your work helping to address the climate crisis?

We’re in a moment in history where there are multiple, existential threats. But these problems – the climate crisis, the racial justice reckoning, and Covid-19 – are not going to be solved with the same thinking, strategies, and tools that caused the problems in the first place. The pillars of power – government, economics, law, and media – are built on and perpetuate a presumption that growth is good, and more is better.

Equation Campaign, in contrast, is focused on confronting power: trying new things, doing what hasn’t been done, and funding what hasn’t been funded. We find under-the-radar strategies for social change – they may not even mention the word “climate” – which aren’t part of the strategic focus of climate philanthropy, climate organization, and climate campaigning, and yet are still integral.

These strategies are explicitly about disrupting and dismantling the power of the fossil fuel industry. We’re funding, for example, litigation in Louisiana to protect the unmarked burial grounds of enslaved people, descendants of enslaved people and freed men and women who might live next to where the industry is trying to expand. We’re funding community groups in Cancer Alley working with archeologists and using satellite imagery to find the grave sites, while simultaneously funding lawyers filing cases to protect the land under novel legal theories, such as historic preservation, cemeteries laws, and the 14th Amendment.

These trailblazing cases could pave the way for similar cases all over Louisiana, and I hope they do, because – let’s be honest – the entire state is a burial ground thanks to slavery, and it’s also ground zero for industry expansion in the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana is known as a carbon bomb. If we don’t stop the expansion there, we’re toast – literally.

And these kinds of legal strategies have been successful – the Byhalia Pipeline in Tennessee was canceled after months of litigation, organizing, and community advocacy. It was won by descendants of freed men and women who exercised their legal rights to defend their communities.

The post Katie Redford on the Importance of Grassroots Action and Advocacy in Climate Change appeared first on The Rockefeller Foundation.

The scale of the global climate finance gap led the ILN to convene high-level leaders across the private, public, and philanthropic sectors to identify and co-develop climate financing solutions at the Bellagio Center in 2023. This meeting established a new investor-led consortium which has made a three-year commitment alongside the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen to accelerate pension fund and institutional investments in emerging markets in climate critical areas such as energy transition and sustainable infrastructure.

Amy was also a delegate on the first G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council and member of the Women’s Forum on Economy and Society. She teaches on social impact, gender equality, and humanitarian action at Duke University and George Washington University.

How is your work helping to address the climate crisis?

We have consistently overlooked the role of institutional investors in driving positive impact in climate change and sustainable development. They’ve also been invited to the table too late: we need to bring them in early to help design solutions, not just come together at the end to critique them.

The ILN provides an opportunity for private capital to collaborate and leverage its leadership in the global marketplace, without having to compromise its fiduciary responsibilities. The aim is to unlock capital for projects that align with the Paris Agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goals in emerging markets.

The ILN is particularly unique for a few reasons. First, its members are aligned on their values and join with an orientation for impact. The second is that we are CEO-driven, and with only 14 members we can easily tap into our leadership expertise to scale our impact. The third is that the ILN is run with a private-sector mindset. We are not a talk-shop and things don’t spin in committee for very long – we want to make things happen. We ask ourselves daily: Is this aligned with our strategy? Are we delivering value for our members and positively influencing the sector? If not, then we pivot.

In 2021, we produced the paper “Investing in Emerging and Frontier Economies: How Blended Finance Can Make the Most of Public Funding” with The Rockefeller Foundation. It articulates a clear institutional investor perspective on why private capital isn’t flowing into emerging markets and what more could be done to unlock it. The paper attracted senior-level actors across the development finance and philanthropic ecosystems, which led to our Bellagio convening.

A key outcome of our convening was a three-year commitment from a catalytic group of ILN CEOs to focus on deepening private-sector financing to better meet our profound global climate challenges. This investor-led consortium is directed by ILN members and investment managers CDPQ, Natixis, and Ninety One, and supported by the U.S. Treasury and Sustainable Markets Initiative. Without this commitment, Bellagio could have been a one-off meeting. But this is serious work; it will take time, effort, and concentrated attention.

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Following this firsthand experience of environmental crisis, Mary moved to California after graduating in 1971 and became a public interest lawyer specializing in air pollution. Today, Mary is an environmental regulator and former Attorney Chair of the California Air Resources Board (CARB), a post she has held twice (1979-1983; 2007-2020). She has also served as California’s Natural Resources Secretary; Senior Staff Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council; Assistant Administrator for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and head of the Institute of Environment and Sustainability at UCLA.

Following this 50-year career, Mary came to the Bellagio Center in 2023 to work on a book about her experiences as one of California’s top air pollution and climate officials, Lessons from the Front Lines of the Battle Against Climate Change, which does not yet have a release date.

How is your work helping to address the climate crisis?

When I finished law school in the early 1970s, the basic environmental laws of our country were being introduced: the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act. I got a job with a new group called the Center for Law in the Public Interest (CLIPI), where we grappled with basic questions about how these new statutes could be enforced and who could sue on behalf of affected communities.

That’s when I began to specialize in air pollution law. Air pollution is in many ways, by its very nature, an environmental justice issue. Pollution disproportionately affects children, old people, and those without access to the best housing. Polluting sources tend to be concentrated in low-income communities and communities of color. Pollution is also a classic case of misusing resources, where, primarily as a result of burning fossil fuels, you end up impacting the health of people who didn’t cause the problem to begin with.

I set out to see how we could use the Clean Air Act to remedy pollution in Los Angeles. CLIPI had some successful cases. Keith v. Volpe, which we filed in 1972, intended to stop Century Freeway from being built – the new road would take out thousands of working class homes and cause even more pollution. It took 17 years, but after winning the first court order we ended up with replacement housing for displaced residents and a new light rail transit line down the center of the freeway.

My first solo case, representing the downwind cities of Riverside and San Bernardino, forced the EPA to reject California’s weak plan for reaching public health standards created under the new Clean Air Act, and to come up with a much more aggressive regulatory approach.

It’s been a natural progression from working on air pollution to working on climate, as it’s become obvious that many of the same sources have caused both sets of problems and that many of the solutions are the same. My new book analyzes past successes and failures in the public arena and provides practical advice on how young people who are depressed about the climate crisis can effectively take charge and prevent the worst impacts.

The post Mary Nichols on Tackling Air Pollution in California appeared first on The Rockefeller Foundation.

That idea ultimately became the International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO), which is hosted by UNEP. IMEO was officially launched at the 2021 G20, becoming the key institution for implementing the Global Methane Pledge. The Pledge aims to reduce methane emissions to at least 30% below 2020 levels by 2030. At COP26, IMEO launched the Methane Alert and Response System (MARS), a satellite initiative that scales up global efforts to detect and act on major emissions sources.

At the Bellagio Center in 2022, IMEO convened its partners to strategize toward its methane reduction ambitions and to assess whether IMEO was on the right track. The meeting also led to partners committing substantial extra funds for IMEO, which signaled their support.

In addition to his work with IMEO, Roland is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, the author of several books, and an independent advisor on issues of complexity, resilience, and energy transition.

How is your work helping to address the climate crisis?

I’ve been involved in methane for two decades. The first decade I worked for Shell, and the second decade I’ve spent fixing my karma, working on reducing methane emissions both with the Environmental Defense Fund and UNEP. Methane is the second-largest contributor to climate change after carbon dioxide. Curbing methane emissions is the single fastest way to tackle climate change in the short term.

What’s unique about IMEO’s theory of change is that we’re an agent-centric initiative. This means that in order to reduce methane emissions we have to ask, “Which person needs to do something different on Monday morning than they did on Friday night?” Policymakers, ministers, and CEOs don’t reduce emissions; they change the context. It’s the gas plant manager who walks into the factory and changes a valve who makes a difference. So we ask: what will get the plant manager to change their behavior? How can we reconfigure the environment around that individual so they start acting differently?

A critical aspect is data. Data in the climate space is poor, because almost all of it is allocated from above – literally. We measure what’s in the atmosphere, we allocate it to countries, companies, and sites, and then we’re surprised that these people don’t take responsibility for those numbers which rain down on them. So, at IMEO we turn it around: we want gas plant managers to take measurements in their own installations, and then we check it against satellite data. If we don’t increase the agency of these people, we won’t reduce emissions.

IMEO is looking at the entire spectrum of methane emissions, across energy, agriculture, and waste. But it’s the energy sector that’s most straightforward: it’s only a couple thousand people in the world who need to do something differently. In the energy sector alone, we could realize a 45% reduction in emissions by 2025 and up to 75% by 2030.

The post Roland Kupers on Accelerating Global Methane Mitigation appeared first on The Rockefeller Foundation.

This is the backdrop for the upcoming sixth book collaboration between academics Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor: Driving Green Justice, which they worked on during a recent Bellagio Center residency.

The pair have been working together for 25 years. Chris Benner is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology, the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship, Director of the Everett Program on Digital Tools for Social Innovation, and Director of the Institute for Social Transformation, all at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Manuel Pastor is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Equity Research Institute and is the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change.

How is your work helping to address the climate crisis?

Manuel: The intellectual journey that Chris and I have been on together has centered on re-fashioning economics so it actually serves people. We want to take this dismal science that says there’s a world of scarcity, conflict, and individualism and open it up to the reality of mutuality, community, and belonging.

Traditional economics says that equity is antithetical to prosperity, but in fact, equity is essential to prosperity. Driving Green Justice is the first time we’ve directly taken up equity in the context of climate change and the transition to a clean-energy economy. We highlight why you can’t transition effectively and sustainably without taking into account the legacies of disadvantage, contemporary lack of participation, and potential future disparities.

Chris: Our connection to the climate crisis comes back to the inspiration and leadership of community organizations. Our work in the Salton Sea region started alongside the organization Alianza Coachella Valley, who asked us to help them craft an economic development strategy rooted in inclusivity for the broader region.

Lithium provides a tremendous economic opportunity for this community. It is essential for EVs, and the predicted demand for lithium will surge more than five-fold by 2030. But it’s not just lithium you need in EVs – you need other minerals like copper, cobalt, manganese, and zinc. So as we move from a fossil fuel-based transportation system to a materials-based transportation system, we have to ask how the communities living near these materials will be impacted by increasing extraction.

Manuel: And that’s what’s at stake in Imperial Valley. This region has been an environmental disaster zone, a place of real economic disadvantage – baked in by an agricultural industry that depends on low wages. This is also a place of structural racism, with the continued political disenfranchisement of a population that’s 85% Latinx. So the fundamental question is, will there be widespread community gains that right past wrongs, or will there simply be a repeat of what we’ve seen before: private actors benefiting from public policy without returning public benefits?

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