Where Your Money Could Actually Change Everything: Understanding Climate Finance Gaps

One Earth just released a report that maps where climate funding actually flows, and the picture it reveals is both frustrating and full of possibility. Because when you can see where the gaps are, you can finally do something about them.

Let’s talk about what this means for real people—farmers trying to make a living, communities that need clean energy, Indigenous stewards protecting forests, and all of us trying to figure out where our efforts and resources can make the biggest difference.

The Big Picture: Following the Money

One Earth tracked nearly $400 billion in private investments and philanthropic grants across more than 10,000 U.S.-based companies and nonprofits working on climate solutions. They organized everything into three pillars: Energy Transition, Nature Conservation, and Regenerative Agriculture.

What they found won’t surprise you once you hear it, but it should change how we think about where help is needed most.

• Energy Transition gets 89% of all climate funding. This makes sense—we need to shift away from fossil fuels, and there’s a clear business case for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. The market understands these investments.
• Nature Conservation gets 4%. Four percent. For protecting forests, restoring wetlands, safeguarding oceans, and supporting the ecosystems that literally keep us alive.
• Regenerative Agriculture gets 7%. For transforming how we grow food so it heals soil instead of destroying it, feeds people instead of depleting resources, and supports farmers instead of bankrupting them.

This isn’t about making anyone feel guilty. This is about showing where opportunity exists to make a real difference.

What This Means for Your Everyday Life

Let’s bring this home to things that matter in daily life.

• Energy: The good news is that clean energy is happening. Solar panels are getting cheaper. Electric vehicles are getting better. The momentum is real. But here’s the catch—only 3% of energy funding goes to companies working to bring clean power to underserved communities. That means rural areas, low-income neighborhoods, and communities of color are largely being left out of the clean energy transition.

If you care about making sure your neighbors can afford their electricity bills, can access solar power, and don’t get left behind when the grid shifts to renewables—this is where focused support is needed.

• Nature: Remember during the pandemic when we all rediscovered how much we need parks, forests, trails, and green spaces? Those aren’t luxuries. They’re life support systems. They clean our air and water, prevent floods, store carbon, and provide habitat for the pollinators that help grow our food.

The Global Safety Net—a science-based plan to protect the most critical ecosystems—would cost about $600 billion annually. Current funding is around $140 billion. That $460 billion gap? That’s the difference between stable ecosystems and accelerating collapse.

• Food: This one hits close to home, literally. The food on your table comes from soil. That soil is being depleted faster than it can recover. Regenerative agriculture—farming that rebuilds soil health, supports biodiversity, and helps farmers thrive—needs $270-430 billion per year globally. It’s getting about $44 billion.

And here’s a detail that matters: almost half of agricultural funding goes to just three solutions, heavily weighted toward plant-based meat alternatives. Those are fine, but if the crops behind your vegan burger are grown in ways that destroy soil and biodiversity, we’re just shifting the problem around.

Meanwhile, practices like planting trees on farms (which provides shade, prevents erosion, creates wildlife habitat, and generates additional farmer income) receives less than 0.2% of agricultural funding.

The Indigenous Knowledge Gap

Here’s where the funding imbalance becomes especially stark: Indigenous peoples steward 39% of Earth’s remaining intact ecosystems. Research consistently shows that Indigenous-led conservation outperforms conventional models in protecting biodiversity and storing carbon.

Yet less than 6% of nature conservation funding supports Indigenous land tenure and governance.

Think about that. The people who have successfully protected ecosystems for generations while everything around them gets destroyed receive a tiny fraction of conservation funding. That’s not just unfair—it’s strategically foolish.

Organizations like Amazon Frontlines, which partners with Indigenous communities to defend their land and rights, and Native Conservancy, which protects Alaska Native lands through Indigenous-led conservation, are doing some of the most effective climate work on the planet. They need and deserve far more support.

What Actually Works: Solutions Already Scaling

This isn’t a story of what needs to be invented. It’s a story of what needs to be funded.

• Grid Alternatives brings solar power and job training to under-resourced communities, advancing environmental justice through hands-on installations and workforce development. They’re proving that clean energy access can be paired with economic opportunity.
• Trees For The Future trains farmers in Africa to restore land with Forest Gardens—diverse, sustainable farms that improve food security and income while healing the environment. It works. It’s happening. It needs more support to scale.
• Propagate plans, manages, and finances agroforestry systems that increase farm profitability while building soil health. Farmers can make more money while healing the land. The model exists.
• BoxPower deploys solar microgrids to deliver reliable power to off-grid and underserved communities. Clean energy doesn’t have to wait for massive infrastructure projects.

These aren’t theoretical solutions. These are organizations delivering results right now. The question is whether we’ll give them the resources to expand.

Why This Matters Beyond Climate

When we invest in these solutions, we’re not just addressing climate change. We’re:

• Creating jobs in communities that need them
• Lowering energy costs for families struggling with bills
• Protecting clean water and air for our children
• Supporting farmers so they can keep feeding us
• Preserving the forests and oceans that sustain life
• Honoring Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty
• Building resilience against floods, droughts, and disasters

Every gap in funding represents an opportunity to improve lives while addressing climate breakdown. That’s not guilt-tripping—that’s possibility.

What You Can Actually Do

If you’re a philanthropist or grant-maker, this report gives you a roadmap. The One Earth Solutions Finance Tracker (freely available online) lets you see exactly which solutions are underfunded and find organizations doing excellent work that need support.

Focus areas with the highest impact-to-funding ratio:

• Indigenous land tenure and governance
• Energy access for underserved communities
• Regenerative cropland practices (especially tree-based systems)
• Nature conservation and ecosystem restoration

If you’re an investor, consider that the most well-funded solutions aren’t necessarily the most impactful. Patient capital directed toward regenerative agriculture, community-based conservation, and distributed clean energy can deliver returns—financial, social, and ecological—that concentrated bets on a few energy technologies cannot.

If you’re someone who cares but doesn’t have millions to invest, you can:

• Support organizations working in these underfunded areas
• Advocate for policy that directs public funding to these gaps
• Share this information so people understand where help is needed
• Choose to support businesses and farms using regenerative practices

The Invitation

One Earth ends their report with this framing: “Visibility enables coordination. Coordination is how we meet the scale and urgency of this moment, together.”

Now we can all see the same map. We know where energy is flowing (89% to energy transition) and where it’s barely trickling (4% to nature, 7% to regenerative agriculture). We know that within those categories, some solutions are drowning in capital while others—often the most effective ones—are starving for support.

This isn’t about shame. You’re not a bad person if you didn’t know this before. Most people don’t.

This is about what happens next.

We have organizations ready to scale. We have farmers ready to transition to regenerative practices if they can afford to. We have Indigenous communities ready to continue protecting forests if their rights are recognized and supported. We have technologies ready to bring clean energy to every community.

What’s missing isn’t knowledge or technology or even willingness. What’s missing is funding flowing to where it can do the most good.

The solutions exist. The people to implement them exist. The science validating what works exists.

Now it’s about directing resources—money, time, attention, advocacy—toward closing these gaps.

That’s not overwhelming. That’s clarifying. Because for the first time, we’re not wondering what to do. We’re just deciding whether we’ll actually do it. Contact us today.