5 reasons why aviation and shipping need more climate funding
Giving Green is an organisation that looks at different potential climate causes individuals can donate to and rates them for effectiveness. This year their team has spent thousands of hours researching high-impact climate initiatives and found that one of the most effective ways to support the fight against climate change is by giving to reduce aviation and shipping emissions.
We’re thrilled that Opportunity Green has been selected as one of Giving Green’s top recommendations for 2023. Why have we been selected – and how does giving to shipping and aviation help tackle the climate crisis? Here are five good reasons…
1. Shipping and aviation account for a lot of emissions
As Giving Green state clearly:
“Currently, aviation and maritime shipping constitute 6% of global emissions. However, given the rate of demand increase paired with lagging decarbonization efforts, these sectors are projected to account for more than 30% of global emissions by 2050 if left unmitigated while other sectors decarbonize.”
Giving Green has produced a really excellent ‘deep dive’ on how to decarbonise aviation and shipping for those who really want to dig into this in depth.
2. Philanthropy has neglected these sectors
For those reading this who are not in the charity/NGO sector, you might not know how climate charities like Opportunity Green are funded.
Essentially, people who want to give to charity either give directly to their designated charity or they set up their own foundation, which then distributes the money between charities. In climate, often money is given out by foundations which have their own strategies on what needs to be done to reduce climate change.
For a long time, aviation and shipping have been seen as sectors without decarbonisation solutions, so they were often left out of strategies as they were seen as too difficult. This has started to change with more philanthropic dollars supporting shipping decarbonisation – though still underfunded compared to its emissions – but that has not been matched on the aviation side to date.
3. There are solutions – they are just not being implemented
Shipping and aviation have few decarbonisation options, but Giving Green has recognised that “alternative fuels, especially e-fuels, are technologies that could play an outsized role in decarbonizing these sectors.”
Giving Green has also found policy advocacy to be among the most viable philanthropic strategies, which means funding climate charities (like Opportunity Green) to work with policymakers and the industry themselves to get appropriate policies in place.
That’s why Giving Green is very excited about the SASHA Coalition, the Skies and Seas Hydrogen-fuels Accelerator. The SASHA Coalition is dedicated to bringing together the shipping and aviation industries to highlight and advocate for the vital role that green hydrogen and direct air capture (DAC) must play in their decarbonisation journeys. The SASHA Coalition exists to put these sectors at the forefront of EU and UK policy around the future uses of what will be limited supplies of green hydrogen and DAC.
“We have high certainty that governments will adopt policies to promote enabling technologies such as alternative fuels given cross-sector applicability and, in some cases, economic potential,” says Giving Green’s report. “Green hydrogen will be critical to the decarbonization of heavy industry in addition to transportation.”
4. There are key threats looming that need to be headed off
Political attention and policy are increasingly being turned towards ‘e-fuels’, made using green hydrogen, and the critical role it can play as a viable solution in transitioning hard-to-abate sectors from fossil fuels. However, this is competing with calls from some sections of the aviation industry for more biofuel production and in the shipping sector for an expanded use of fossil gas.
Giving Green’s deep dive looks at some of issues with biofuels in more depth:
“There are concerns about overreliance on biofuels. One reason is that there is high uncertainty when calculating full life cycle emissions and ecological impacts of biofuels and biofuel production, and it is our impression that this continues to be an area of investigation. Another is that there are concerns that growing demand will result in increased land use for dedicated energy crops, detracting from land used for growing food, consuming water and other resources, and perpetuating impacts of further land use change. For a decarbonization scenario heavily reliant on biofuels, it is estimated that by 2050, 20-40% of sustainable biomass stocks will be used for biofuel production – the majority for the aviation sector.”
5. It’s a high-impact giving strategy that has room for more funding
I’ll be talking about why giving to shipping and aviation climate projects is a smart strategy on an upcoming webinar, hosted by Giving Green. If this is something you want to know more about, join the webinar. Alongside other climate NGOs, we’ll be showing impact-minded climate donors where your giving can have an outsized impact.
Sign up for the Giving Green webinar on Wednesday here.
I’ll leave you with these final words from Giving Green’s report:
“In summary, aviation and maritime shipping are projected to account for more than 30% of global emissions by 2050 if left unmitigated. Given the evaluation of philanthropic strategies, the relevance of the strategies to many of the critical pathways in our theories of change, and the relatively low level of funding these sectors have received, we think it is important for more philanthropic funding to be directed toward aviation and maritime shipping.”
Read Giving Green’s deep dive on Opportunity Green for a full analysis of our work on aviation and shipping and why we are rated as one of their top recommendations.
