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As we have seen, young people are capable of delivering a big impact when they organise as activists and advocates. Despite this, very little funding is currently available to youth-led action. New quantitative analysis performed for this study reveals that only 0.76% of grants from the largest climate foundations make their way to youth-led climate justice intiatives. These grants are worth around $14.2 million per year by value, and it would require an additional $4.5m to take youth-led climate justice initiatives to 1% of the climate grants made by these foundations.
The figures presented below draw on data gathered by ClimateWorks Foundation Global Intelligence, which tracks grants made by foundations with large programmes on climate mitigation. To arrive at the figures below (which are repeated in Section 4 of the slide deck), the research team reviewed nearly 13,000 grants made by 74 of the largest climate foundations, focusing on grants made in 2019, 2020, and 2021. Filters and keyword searches were used to identify youth-led climate justice projects around the world.
The value of these grants is expressed relative to the number of 15-24 year olds in different countries (using U.N. population estimates). Clearly, the number of young people in a country is not the only criteria that can be used to determine where additional resources are most needed, but we believe it provides a useful perspective on the relative availability of grants. Even though youth-led climate justice work receives just 1% of all foundation climate mitigation grants made in the United States (in 2019-21) the funding available on a per capita basis in the U.S. is nearly 16 times higher than the global average.
