Select Page

Funding Opportunity

Extreme weather and what to do about it

Opportunity Summary

As climate change introduces new risks to all sectors at all scales, societal stability faces emergent threats. Extreme weather threatens to impact local areas at such intensity, with such frequency, that the response and recovery mechanisms we take for granted may no longer function as expected. In many places, these effects are already evident: southeastern US communities being impacted by the most recent hurricane while still recovering from a previous one, climate migration from Central America to the US following successive episodes of severe drought and dramatic flooding, and more.

Social, economic, and cultural stability requires both long-term investment in whole-of-society emissions reduction and short-term effective responses to extreme weather threats. The integration of the United States response system depends on regional integration and functionality, which is at risk in an era of accelerating climate chaos. An affected region cannot rely on other areas of the country when they are similarly impacted by climate-exacerbated extreme weather.

The contours of the climate crisis have been mapped increasingly thoroughly in the nearly five decades since the problem was first widely recognized. A gradual increase in average temperature (the global average creep toward…or past…1.5 degrees) also increases violent weather, which is experienced by people in places anything but gradually. The warming of the oceans and the poles drive weather patterns to unprecedented destructive energies.

Public awareness is growing rapidly about the connections between climate change and increasingly frequent, intense, long-lasting, and disruptive extreme weather events. The CO2 Foundation focuses on helping leaders in all communities understand effective climate responses as the threat assessment continues to evolve.

We invite you to connect with our Executive Director to discuss our current funding priorities before submitting a proposal.

Applications that are received before
10/15/2023
will receive priority.

We anticipate funding projects which:

Share knowledge: Educate the public about the connections between extreme weather and climate change, risks their communities face, and resilience strategies.

Enhance stability: Develop academic and practical approaches to enhancing organizational and political stability in the face of climate-exacerbated disasters.

Deploy strategically: Facilitate effective responses to increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events.

Via the following activities:

Conferences: Convening diverse practitioners–including organizational decision-makers, emergency managers, scholars, scientists, elected officials, and/or concerned citizens–to share their best efforts on these issues. Past grantees include EcoAdapt.

Journalism: Reporting on extreme weather impacts and future risks, training journalists to effectively convey the connections between extreme weather events and climate change, and sharing community-scale and society-wide responses. Past grantees include Knee Deep Times and Yale Climate Connections.

Scholarship: Scholarly work on the connections between climate change and extreme weather, with a focus on short-term practical application. Past grantees include World Scientists Warning and Climate Central.

Who Should Apply

Funding is available to nonprofit organizations that are either registered as or fiscally sponsored by a U.S. 501(c)(3) organization.

Process and Timeline

Prospective grantees should submit a letter of inquiry (LOI) to have their proposal considered. Under this funding opportunity, the Foundation will prioritize LOIs received by October 15, 2023. LOIs are screened in-house, and full proposals may go through an external review process.