Loss & Damage Youth Grant-Making Council - a climate justice case study

Abstract

ABSTRACT Climate justice has emerged as a key theme of the global climate crisis. It is widely agreed that significant funding is required to address climate challenges, but despite developed countries committing at the Paris COP meetings to providing US$100 billion annually, pledges and actual commitments have fallen well short of this goal. Moreover, the $100 billion annual commitment itself falls short of the US$6 trillion now estimated to be necessary for responding to the global climate challenge. Recently the discourse about climate justice has increasingly argued that this is a climate finance issue. This raises important questions about who will pay for mitigation and adaptation efforts undertaken by the countries that need it most – those at the forefront of the adverse impacts of climate change. Climate philanthropy offers an innovative way around this bottleneck, and is a promising vehicle of climate finance as it offers a range of financial and non-financial benefits. This article examines a case study of the Loss and Damage Youth Grant-making Council (LDYGC), a climate philanthropy initiative focused on engaging youth in responding to the climate crisis by providing grants through a competitive process.