Mitigation Research

Giving Green's Research Process

This page is an overview of Giving Green’s current research process, which we expect to continue to update over time. We hope this increased transparency helps donors make more informed decisions, and also opens us up to additional scrutiny to improve our work. This page may be especially useful for those interested in digging into the details of our work. If you have any questions or feedback, we invite you to contact us.

High-level process

Giving Green’s mission is to improve human & ecological well-being by mitigating climate change. Our theory of change involves directing more funding to our recommended high-impact climate strategies to reduce climate change. We follow a five-step research process: identify impact strategies, assess impact strategies, longlist potential organizations, evaluate specific funding opportunities, and publish recommendations.

Evidence sources

We rely on three broad types of evidence: data (e.g., emissions, philanthropic funding), literature (e.g., academic journals, industry reports), and external input (e.g., climate researchers, policymakers). The type of evidence we use, as well as how we use it, depends on its availability and the research stage.

Step 1: Identify impact strategies

As a first step, we want to answer the question: What are potentially promising impact strategies? Regardless of geography or approach, we look for very rough indications that a strategy may be a promising fit for Giving Green (e.g. expected high impact of the marginal dollar). The output of this step is additions to our research prioritization dashboard.

Step 2: Assess impact strategies

At this stage, we move from identification to evaluation. We seek to answer the question: What is the scale, feasibility, and funding need of an impact strategy? For scale, we want to know how much a specific problem is contributing to climate change, or how much an impact strategy could reduce it. For feasibility, we want to determine an impact strategy’s likelihood of achieving success given additional philanthropy finding. And for funding need, we want to understand (a) whether climate philanthropy funding opportunities exist and (b) how much an impact strategy is constrained by philanthropic funding. At this early stage in our analysis, we use a combination of metrics and heuristics to qualitatively rank these criteria as low, medium, or high, and use these rankings to decide which impact strategies to prioritize for additional research.

Shallow dives and deep dives

We subsequently evaluate prioritized impact strategies at two depths: shallow dives and deep dives. These dives move beyond qualitative rankings, and also consider major co-benefits and adverse effects. At this stage in our analysis, we also introduce two analytical tools: theories of change and cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs). Theories of change to help us map out and assess an impact strategy’s pathway. We use CEAs as an input into our comparison of the cost-effectiveness of different strategies and organizations. Depending on the certainty of our inputs, we may use CEAs to identify or confirm important parameters, assess whether it is plausible that a donation could be highly cost-effective, and/or estimate the actual cost-effectiveness of a strategy or organization.

Step 3: Longlist organizations

As we focus in our analysis on a specific impact strategy, we seek to answer the question: Are there promising organizations that may have funding needs? We longlist organizations to map out the universe of funding opportunities for a given impact strategy, and roughly assess organizations based on their focus (how much it aligns with a strategy), effectiveness (whether an organization could be highly effective), and size (operational scale and potential funding need)

Step 4: Evaluate funding opportunity

At this stage, we seek to answer the question: Does an organization have a cost-effective theory of change with specific funding needs? For a given impact strategy, we generally evaluate three to five organizations using the same shallow and deep dive formats outlined above. After completing a deep dive, we decide whether an organization should receive a top recommendation status.

Step 5: Publish recommendations

At this final stage, we publish summaries of our deep dives that seek to answer the question: Why is this likely to be among the most cost-effective funding opportunities?

Recurring step: Reassess existing recommendations

As an ongoing step, we update our existing recommendations annually. We seek to answer the question: has anything changed about an organization or its context that would cause us to longer list it as a top recommendation? We assess implications for an organization’s scale, feasibility, and funding need, and maintain or remove our recommendation, accordingly.

Key uncertainties

Our research process has evolved over time, and we continue to have uncertainties about our approach. These include: whether and how we should prioritize a diversity of recommendations, how to best define and estimate changes in well-being due to climate change, an appropriate balance of research breadth versus depth, how to avoid false precision, and how to balance transparency with other considerations.

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