Giving Green: how top climate charities are chosen

When people think about acting on climate, two instincts usually kick in: offsetting your own emissions, or giving to charities tackling the problem at the source.

Marie D'Ovidio

Mieux Donner · 8 min read

The first disappoints more often than people realise: 85 to 90 % of carbon offset projects deliver no concrete emissions reductions.[1] The second can do the opposite, multiplying the impact of a gift: choosing the right charity can get you up to a hundred times more impact. Choosing well matters more than giving a lot. What's left is working out how to find your way through tens of thousands of climate projects: the answer comes down to two words, Giving Green. Every year, this research organisation surveys dozens of strategies and a wide range of charities, and recommends a handful.[2] That filter is what our own climate recommendations are built on. This article explains who they are and how the filter works.

Where Giving Green comes from

Founded in the United States in 2019, Giving Green is an independent research organisation that analyses strategies for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Dan Stein, an economist who worked at the World Bank and then as chief economist at IDinsight, an organisation specialising in impact evaluation, kept meeting people who wanted to give for the climate but felt lost in the complexity of the subject. He launched Giving Green from within IDinsight to do the legwork for them: finding what avoids the most emissions per dollar given. Seven years on, the numbers show how far it has come:

Source: Giving Green, About Us.[3] Individual gifts range from $0.30 to $10 million.

Two core principles make this research credible. The first is full independence: Giving Green accepts no funding from the charities it evaluates or recommends, which removes the most obvious conflict of interest.[4] The second is transparency: the entire methodology and every evaluation are public, including the uncertainties involved. The team even keeps an "Our Mistakes" page, where it documents its own errors.[5]

Why Mieux Donner relies on their work

Assessing climate impact is a full-time job, and it calls for sharp scientific and economic skills. You have to model avoided emissions, compare strategies as different as an advocacy campaign and an R&D programme, and revise your conclusions when the data changes. Giving Green's research team spends thousands of hours on it every year.[4]

Rather than duplicate that work in-house, we collaborate directly with their team, discuss their models regularly, and translate that rigour for the French-speaking public. There's one conversation we keep having between us: how do you present the benchmark of "one dollar given, roughly one tonne of CO₂e avoided" without smoothing over the uncertainty around it? Exchanges like these let us translate their research without betraying it.

There is also a shared history: Giving Green was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2020, the same programme Mieux Donner went through.[6]

Their method in 5 steps

A wide range of charities tracked, a handful recommended each year:[2] the process works like a funnel.

That last point deserves emphasis: the process never stops. A Giving Green recommendation is an annual snapshot, not a badge for life.

The heart of the framework: scale, feasibility, funding need

To decide whether a charity is worth backing, they look at three fundamental criteria:[10]

Scale: is the lever big enough? How much does this problem contribute to climate change, and how much could this strategy cut? A perfectly executed action on a tiny lever will still have only a small impact.

Feasibility: does it stand a chance of working? A strategy can be huge on paper and stall in practice. Giving Green weighs the odds that it will actually work, by asking what would happen anyway without this funding. It is the same counterfactual reflex that disqualifies most carbon offsets: paying for what would have happened without you is not impact.

Funding need: is money genuinely short? A strategy already covered by billions in public and private finance does not need your donation. Your euro goes furthest where it is scarce: that is the logic of giving at the margin.

No single criterion is enough on its own. The final recommendations are strategies (and, within them, charities) that satisfy all three criteria at once. Giving Green rounds out this framework with cost-effectiveness analyses, one more tool to check that the estimate holds up, even when the inputs remain uncertain.

The three criteria applied to a real case: next-generation geothermal energy

Source: Advancing Next-Generation Geothermal Energy, Strategy Report, Giving Green (Nov. 2024).[11]

What it looks like in practice: a short list and a fund

On the ground, Giving Green's conclusions come in two distinct forms.

Top Climate Nonprofits: a deliberately short list, fewer than ten charities a year, one or two per strategy.[2] The 2025-2026 list has five.[9] Giving Green does not rank them. The charities appear in alphabetical order, because the team believes the uncertainty involved makes it impossible to rank them fairly: each one meets the same cost-effectiveness bar of roughly one tonne of CO₂e avoided per dollar, in expected value.[13] Clean Air Task Force and the Good Food Institute, which we recommend, are both on the list.[9] We don't automatically feature all five: our selection also depends on what donors in France can access, and those conditions change. You will find the up-to-date list and the tax details on our climate recommendations.

The Giving Green Fund: a pooled fund for donors who would rather leave the allocation to the experts. Every dollar donated is regranted, with no overheads taken out, and the portfolio is reviewed each quarter against the latest research.[4] The fund has distributed $39.3 million since 2022.[4] It can support the Top Nonprofits, but also younger charities and urgent opportunities that have not yet made the list: Giving Green considers it its highest-impact option, at the cost of greater uncertainty. The sums involved give a sense of how rigorous the process is: annual grants range from $800,000 to $4 million for Top Nonprofits, and from $100,000 to $1 million for other grantees, selected through detailed proposals, by invitation only.[4] In early 2026, grants went to charities in India, Belgium, the UK, Canada, Germany, South Korea and the Netherlands:[4] a practical answer to a common objection, why give to American organisations?

In practice, the simplest route for a donation from France is through our climate recommendations: you support the charities selected by Giving Green, with the French tax deduction.

Give to the right place, not just more

Giving for the climate is not about buying back your tonnes of CO₂ as if you were settling a debt. It funds levers: a regulation that covers a whole continent, a technology that turns profitable ten years early. Finding the charities that pull those levers takes thousands of hours of research. Giving Green does that work, publishes all of it, and corrects itself when it gets things wrong. Ours starts where theirs ends: making those charities easy to support from France, tax receipt included. How much you give matters less than where it lands. And now you know where.

To dig into their method, Giving Green's full research process is online.

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