Mehr als nur „Green Grants“: Nachhaltige ökologische Wirkung schaffen

A donor considering climate technology should ask the same question. Is the grant enabling work that would otherwise not happen, or merely subsidising a company capable of raising commercial capital elsewhere?

Nature conservation cannot be managed as a collection of isolated projects Environmental donors often prefer projects with a clear beginning, budget and result. Ecosystems do not organise themselves that way.

A river restoration may depend on agricultural policy upstream. The survival of a bird population can require cooperation across several countries. Sustainable fishing involves livelihoods, enforcement, food markets and marine science. Progress in one location may disappear if the wider system remains unchanged.

The Geneva-based Oak Foundation illustrates a broader, systems-oriented model. Its Environment Programme focuses on marine food systems and livelihoods, nature and people, and regenerative landscapes, while its separate Global Climate Initiatives programme addresses climate at a wider level. In 2025, Oak reported total grantmaking of USD383 million across its programmes, including USD31.8 million for the Environment Programme and USD38.1 million for Global Climate Initiatives.

The important feature is not the size of the foundation, which few donors can reproduce. It is the recognition that environmental change often requires grants to organisations working at different levels: local implementation, research, campaigning, policy and coordination.

Smaller donors can follow the same logic without creating a global programme. A Swiss family concerned about river ecosystems might fund a local restoration partner, legal or policy work addressing water use, and long-term scientific monitoring. Pooling capital with other foundations may be more useful than placing the family name on a standalone project. Collaboration is less visible than ownership. It is often more appropriate to the problem.

Food systems show why environmental and social goals cannot be separated

Environmental philanthropy becomes weaker when it treats people as an obstacle surrounding nature. Efforts to protect forests, reduce chemical inputs or change fishing practices affect incomes, food security and local political power. A conservation plan that looks compelling from Zurich or Geneva may fail because it asks communities to absorb the cost while benefits accrue elsewhere.

Biovision, founded in Switzerland, has built its work around agroecology and the relationship between ecological health, food production and livelihoods. It supports programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, Switzerland and international policy, with the stated aim of creating food systems capable of producing healthy food in environmentally and socially responsible ways.

Its approach is useful because it moves beyond paying farmers to adopt one approved technique. Biovision combines practical agricultural work with research, training, market development and policy advocacy. Its projects have supported methods such as Push-Pull agriculture, which uses ecological interactions among plants and insects rather than relying exclusively on synthetic inputs, while its wider work seeks to influence the conditions under which agroecological businesses and farmers operate.

This does not mean that every environmental donor should fund agriculture. It shows why the unit of analysis matters. Supporting one farm may produce a useful demonstration; changing training, markets and agricultural policy can determine whether the practice spreads.

The same principle applies within Switzerland. A foundation interested in healthy soils should not begin and end with public awareness. It may need to support farmer-led trials, independent evidence, procurement changes and policy work that makes improved practice economically viable.

A foundation’s investment portfolio can contradict its grants

A donor may distribute five percent of a foundation’s assets to environmental work while investing the remaining endowment without reference to climate or biodiversity.

That contradiction is receiving greater scrutiny. The International Philanthropy Commitment on Climate Change asks foundations to consider climate not only within grantmaking but through governance, investment, operations, learning and transparency. Swiss guidance has similarly encouraged foundations to examine fossil-fuel exposure, educate boards and consider how climate affects programmes outside a formally environmental portfolio.

The answer is not automatically to move the entire endowment into products carrying a sustainability label. Environmental investment data remain inconsistent, and portfolios can acquire higher fees or concentrated risk without delivering additional ecological benefit.

The foundation should nevertheless know what it owns. It should be able to explain how investment managers assess climate transition risk, deforestation, pollution and stewardship. Where an investment conflicts directly with the foundation’s mission, trustees need a reason stronger than the convenience of the existing mandate.

There is also a difference between aligning the portfolio and using it actively. A foundation may exclude particular sectors, invest in climate solutions, engage with companies or accept concessionary returns where this directly supports its purpose. Each approach carries different financial and impact implications. The investment policy should follow the mission rather than serve as an exercise in appearing consistent.

Funding institutions may matter more than funding innovation

Environmental philanthropy is drawn towards new solutions: a material that stores carbon, a platform measuring biodiversity or a method of producing food with fewer inputs. Innovation offers a tangible story and the possibility of dramatic success.

The less attractive funding request may come from an organisation that needs a finance director, improved data systems or enough unrestricted income to retain experienced staff. Yet weak institutions cannot deliver strong environmental programmes for long.

Swiss philanthropic research has found that traditional project funding remains dominant among grantmaking foundations. This preference can leave recipient organisations with well-financed activities and underfunded operations.

Environmental work is especially vulnerable because outcomes take time. Species recovery, ecosystem restoration and policy reform do not fit neatly into one-year funding cycles. Organisations need the capacity to learn, alter methods and sometimes report that an intervention did not work.

Multi-year, flexible grants may therefore create more value than a larger restricted project grant. They also require donors to surrender some control, which is often the more difficult philanthropic decision.

A serious donor should ask an environmental organisation what it needs to remain effective, not only which new project it can invent for the foundation.

MAVA shows how a donor can plan to disappear

Foundations are often designed to exist indefinitely, even when the donor’s capital could create greater value if deployed more rapidly.

The Switzerland-based MAVA Foundation chose a different path. Established in 1994, it worked across the Mediterranean, West Africa, Switzerland and sustainable economic systems before ending grantmaking in 2022. Its final strategy deliberately prepared 24 partnerships for a future without MAVA, combining conservation funding with organisational support, evaluation, leadership development and efforts to strengthen networks among partners.

The closure was not a simple expenditure of the remaining endowment. It forced the foundation to confront a question that permanent institutions can postpone: what will continue when the donor is gone?

That required helping partners diversify funding, preserve knowledge and sustain collaboration. MAVA also published evaluations and lessons from almost three decades of work rather than allowing its experience to disappear with the organisation.

A spend-down model will not suit every environmental foundation. Some problems require permanent institutions and patient capital. The lesson is that duration should be chosen deliberately. A foundation should not continue because administrative permanence has become its unspoken objective.

Donors facing a time-sensitive ecological crisis may reasonably conclude that capital deployed over 15 years is more valuable than a smaller annual distribution maintained forever.

Measurement should influence decisions, not decorate reports

Environmental donors are right to ask what their money achieved, but measurement can become reductive.

Counting trees planted says little about survival. Reporting hectares protected does not reveal ecological quality or enforcement. Tonnes of avoided emissions may depend on assumptions that are difficult for outsiders to inspect.

The solution is not to abandon measurement. It is to match evidence to the decision.

A foundation funding an early-stage experiment may need to know whether implementation is feasible and whether affected communities accept it. A mature programme should provide stronger evidence of outcomes. Policy work may require contribution analysis rather than a claim that one grant caused a legislative change.

Donors should also finance measurement. It is unreasonable to demand sophisticated ecological evidence while refusing to pay for monitoring, data expertise and time.

Most importantly, findings must alter funding. If repeated evaluation shows that a favoured programme produces little durable benefit, the foundation should be willing to stop. Strategic philanthropy loses meaning when measurement is used only to confirm the donor’s original intuition.

Where a new Swiss environmental donor can be useful

The donor should begin with a map rather than a foundation deed.

Who already funds the issue? Which organisations hold relevant knowledge? What does government finance, and where are statutory responsibilities being neglected? Which solutions can attract commercial investment, and which public goods will remain unfunded without grants?

The next step is to choose the donor’s role. It may be early risk capital for climate innovation, long-term support for conservation organisations, a convenor across fragmented institutions or a backer of policy and legal work that other funders avoid.

Local expertise is indispensable. A donor concerned with alpine ecosystems should involve landowners, municipalities, researchers and conservation practitioners before designing the programme. Those relationships will introduce disagreement and slow the initial process. They will also expose assumptions that would otherwise become expensive mistakes.

The donor then needs to decide how much control is genuinely necessary. A donor-advised fund, an umbrella foundation or a collaborative fund may provide a better structure than a new standalone foundation, particularly when the capital is limited or the family lacks environmental expertise. Switzerland’s umbrella foundations held CHF1.6 billion in fund capital at the end of 2023 and distributed CHF78.6 million to 2,157 projects, with environmental protection among the most commonly supported fields.

A new institution should be created because its governance, time horizon or specialised capability adds something existing structures cannot provide, not because founding one feels more substantial than joining somebody else’s work.

Environmental philanthropy is sometimes presented as the freedom to act where politics and markets move too slowly. That freedom is real, but so is the responsibility attached to it. Private donors can test ideas, fund unpopular evidence and support institutions whose benefits extend far beyond one electoral or investment cycle.

They can also impose fashionable solutions, underestimate local knowledge and confuse personal conviction with proof. The difference is not generosity. It is whether the donor is prepared to listen before designing, fund the unglamorous work around the intervention and change course when the evidence becomes inconvenient.

Switzerland does not lack foundations or environmental ambition. The opportunity lies in using its philanthropic capital where independence and patience genuinely alter what is possible. A donor announces a new environmental foundation, appoints a respected board and selects an issue broad enough to sound urgent: climate, biodiversity, sustainable food or the protection of nature. The first grants are generous, the launch attracts attention and the annual report is filled with photographs of forests, farms and clean technologies.

Several years later, a less comfortable question emerges. What changed because this particular foundation existed? The answer is rarely captured by the amount distributed. A restored wetland may depend on public authorities long after the original grant ends. A climate technology can work in a pilot and fail to find customers. An environmental organisation may deliver an excellent project while remaining too financially fragile to retain staff. A donor can support ambitious research without altering the policies or commercial incentives that keep producing the original problem.

This is the tension at the heart of environmental philanthropy. Private wealth can act earlier than government, tolerate greater uncertainty than conventional investors and support work that has no immediate commercial return. It can also concentrate influence in the hands of donors who are not elected, who may favour visible interventions over less glamorous institutional work and who are sometimes tempted to treat environmental systems as if they were companies awaiting a sharper strategy. Switzerland is an unusually important setting for that debate. It had 13,782 active charitable foundations at the end of 2025, after 325 were created and 253 dissolved during the year. Environmental protection is also among the fields most frequently supported through Swiss umbrella foundations. Yet the scale of the sector does not tell donors whether another foundation, climate fund or nature programme is necessary. It tells them that Switzerland already has a dense philanthropic infrastructure through which capital can be coordinated, duplicated or wasted.

The best environmental giving begins not with a personal desire to leave a legacy, but with a precise account of where public finance, commercial investment and existing philanthropy are failing.

Switzerland offers fertile ground, but not a blank page

The Swiss foundation environment is attractive for familiar reasons. The legal system is stable, there is a mature wealth-management industry, and donors can find foundations, academic institutions, international organisations and environmental NGOs within a relatively small geographical area. Geneva connects philanthropy with multilateral institutions, while Basel, Zurich and Lausanne offer strong scientific and financial networks.

That concentration can make starting a foundation seem like the natural expression of serious intent. It may not be the most effective one. A donor focused on alpine biodiversity, for example, enters a field already occupied by public authorities, research institutions, conservation organisations and local land users. The additional money is useful only when it addresses something the existing system cannot fund adequately: patient monitoring, coordination across cantonal boundaries, legal expertise, experimental land-management methods or the organisational capacity of a small group doing indispensable work.

The distinction matters because environmental projects are easy to make attractive in isolation. A foundation can finance the restoration of a habitat, count the hectares involved and publish the result. The harder work is ensuring that the land remains protected, the municipality maintains its commitments and the ecological gains are not offset elsewhere.

Good philanthropy pays for the conditions around the project, not merely the project itself.

Grants are most valuable where markets cannot yet go

The language of environmental finance increasingly blurs grants, impact investing and ordinary commercial investment. All three can be useful, but they should not be treated as interchangeable.

A grant is appropriate when the desired public benefit cannot generate sufficient revenue, when an organisation is testing an uncertain intervention or when the work involves advocacy, scientific monitoring or community participation that no investor can sensibly own.

Investment capital belongs where there is a plausible business model and a credible route to repayment or return. A donor may choose to accept below-market returns or higher risk, but the investment should still be judged as an investment. Calling commercial capital philanthropic because the underlying company works on climate does not make the financing additional.

The Swiss Climate Foundation offers a practical example of philanthropy occupying the space between an idea and an investible business. Since 2009, it has supported climate-related innovation by SMEs in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. By late 2025, it had approved more than CHF42 million in support, including over CHF22 million for more than 220 innovation projects. In its first 2025 funding round alone, it awarded more than CHF1.4 million to 11 projects, including building-renovation systems, clean-energy technologies and industrial solutions.The value is not simply that these businesses received less expensive capital. The foundation’s own 2025 impact review found that 23 percent of supported SMEs said their innovation project would not have proceeded without the funding, while another 41 percent said it would have been seriously delayed or reduced. These are self-reported results rather than an independent economic evaluation, but they indicate the type of gap philanthropy can fill: the point at which a technically plausible solution remains too early, small or uncertain for conventional financing.