Funder Commitment on Climate Change – 2025 update

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• Educate and Learn: We will make opportunities for our trustees, staff and stakeholders to learn more about the key causes and solutions of climate change.
• Commit Resources: We will commit resources to accelerate work that addresses the causes and impacts of climate change.
• Integrate: Within all our existing programmes, priorities and processes, we will seek opportunities to contribute to a fair and lasting transition to a post carbon society, and to support adaptation to climate change impacts.
• Steward our investments for a post-carbon future: We recognise climate change as a high-level risk to our investments, and therefore to our mission. We will proactively address the risks and opportunities of a transition to a post carbon economy in our investment strategy and its implementation, recognising that our decisions can contribute to this transition being achieved.
• Decarbonise our operations: We will take ambitious action to minimise the carbon footprint of our own operations.
• Report on progress: We commit to reporting annually on our progress against the five goals listed above. We will continue to develop our practice, to learn from others, and to share our learning.

Educate and Learn

• As a staff team, we reflected on our organisational commitment on climate, recognising that we are all responsible for driving progress through our individual roles; and spent time thinking through what actions we could each take. We also continue to provide opportunities for staff training and learning including:
  • Climate change training with Climate Fresk to upskill and deepen knowledge around the causes and impact of climate change.
  • Sessions for staff and our Involving Young People Collective to hear from experts and key partners on issues we care about including the nature and climate crises. Last year, we heard from Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland, Our Migration Story and Fishtek Marine, as well as Systemic Justice who delivered a workshop exploring the intersections between climate justice and racial justice.
• We met with other funders across the sector to share and explore intersectional issues around climate justice and migration. Convened by Unbound Philanthropy and the Pickwell Foundation, this learning series supported funders to become active at the intersection of climate change and migration.
• We regularly highlight the work of organisations we support, including those focused on climate, on our social media channels and newsletter.

Commit Resources

• Improving and restoring Our Natural World is one of our three strategic aims, and our total funding towards our nature and climate-related work during 2025 totalled £29.4m. This includes grant funding, social and impact investments, as well as spending using our Tools budget.
  • In addition to funding in our priorities for Our Natural World (£24.4m), we also funded climate-related work in our priorities in Creative, Confident Communities (£2.7m) and A Fairer Future (£2.2m). For example, we awarded a grant to Greener and Cleaner towards their work on locally-led models of citizen climate action; a social investment to Abundance Investment as match funding of local investment into Local Climate Bonds; and through our Tools budget, we funded research by Public First exploring flood-resilient communities, economy and growth. We publish our grants, social and impact investments on 360Giving.
  • In Our Natural World, we carried out a mapping exercise to identify organisations with a specific outcome on climate to help us understand more about progress. Organisations include those working in climate resilience and adaptation such as The Welsh Dee Trust, who work with communities to restore rivers in Wrexham to reduce harm from floods and improve access to high-quality green and blue spaces; and SOS-UK’s Farming for Carbon and Nature, a project to support university owned farms to transition to regenerative practices to enhance biodiversity and sequester carbon.

A short film from Greener and Cleaner about their Community Hub in Bromley.

• We continued delivery of our Blue Spaces programme: since launching it in 2022, we have made 26 grants, totaling £4.1m, supporting 19 projects to develop creative ways to take action on local rivers, lakes, ponds and wetlands. As well as funding, organisations took part in a learning programme, which concluded in December 2025. The learning programme was co-created with the funded organisations and Involving Young People Collective, whose experience of community co-creation and youth-led change helped participants explore how to engage with under-represented voices. We shared the outcomes, impact and learning from the programme in a report and webinar.
• We surveyed everyone in our portfolio (grants and social investment) to find out how organisations are responding to the causes and impacts of climate change, and to evaluate how Esmée can support and influence organisations to prioritise climate as part of their core work. 105 responses were evaluated by nfpResearch. [GC1] Informed by this learning, we are prioritising support for organisations around education and learning, peer support and Funding Plus grants for climate justice and adaptation work.
• We commissioned and shared a mid-strategy review of our work towards freshwater which evaluated progress and made recommendations for Esmée and the wider sector
• We hosted webinars to share findings from two reports we commissioned:
  • Restoring Seascapes by Pelagos Consulting on how to scale and sustain marine recovery across the UK.
  • Business action on nature in the UK and a guide to nature finance by Will McDonald.
• Preserving and restoring peatland continues to be a key focus of our influencing, and together with a wide range of organisations, gardeners and industry, we are calling for a ban on the sale of peat to be included in the King’s Speech in 2026. We are also supporting organisations including Sizzle and Royal Horticultural Society to accelerate the UK’s transition to being peat-free.

Integrate

• A key focus of our work in Our Natural World is to address the lack of diversity in the environment sector.
  • We continue to support and participate in The RACE Report, and ask all environment and conservation organisations awarded funding from Esmée to engage with the initiative. We shared a blog with our reflections on the 2025 report.
  • We have been working with Common Purpose and Makani Cambridge to co-design a new senior leadership programme ‘Reimagining Leadership' for Global Majority people in the sector. We published a report giving an overview of the work and learning from the co-design process and hosted a webinar where we also shared next steps.
  • We supported Ocean and Coastal Futures and Black Ocean Citizens to develop a survey to understand how racism manifests in the sector and to help to inform development of interventions.
• We continue to proactively find and support environment organisations led by, and for, communities experiencing racial inequity, as well as organisations whose work links both environmental and sustainability issues with those from economically and culturally marginalised communities. For example, in 2025, we supported:
  • Black Girls Hike – challenges the status quo and provides a safe space for Black women to explore the outdoors.
  • Radical Ecology – advances environmental justice through intersectional work across culture, research and policy.
  • Voice4Change England (V4CE) – advocates for the Black and Minoritised voluntary and community sector. We supported work to explore the barriers and opportunities for participation/authorship/leadership in the environmental sector experienced by global majority communities.
  • The Climate Coalition – the UK’s largest group of people and organisations dedicated to tackling climate change and restoring nature through community organising and collective action.
  • Positive Money – an organisation working to redesign our economic system for social justice and a liveable planet.
  • Land In Our Names (LION) – a collective working to address inequality in access to food and land for growing.

Cultivating Justice podcast series by Farmerama Radio in collaboration with Land In Our Names and Out on the Land (part of The Landworkers' Alliance)

A short film sharing highlights from the Great Big Green Week in 2025, organised by The Climate Coalition

Steward our investments for a post-carbon future

• In line with our commitment that our investment portfolio will be net zero in terms of carbon emissions by 2040, we assess fund managers who are aligned with our goals. During 2025 several manager changes were made to improve our alignment, with more planned for 2026. The most recent analysis of our main investment portfolio (carried out in 2025) showed our exposure to fossil fuels was 0.7%, versus the market comparison (ACWI) of 6.3%.
• Together with Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Church of England Social Impact Investment Programme, we commissioned a report on Investing for UK Climate Justice by NPC, which explored solutions and sectors delivering clear social benefits alongside climate outcomes, as well as the opportunities and barriers to investing.
• We sought an external consultant or organisation to carry out independent due diligence on the Big Nature Impact Fund (BNIF), a new £90m fund being launched by Finance Earth to support nature recovery projects in England. We appointed Triodos.

Decarbonise our operations

• We carry out an independent analysis of our internal carbon usage every three years – the next one will be in 2027.
• We are collaborating with others in the sector to explore actions we can take to minimise the impact on the environment as the use of AI grows.
• As part of how we work,
  • We use electronic papers and file notes for internal meetings, and all catering is vegetarian and vegan by default.
  • Flights for business purposes are only used by absolute exception and must be pre-approved by the Chief Operations Officer for consistency.

Report on progress

• We share our learning with others including with peers and industry groups such as the Association of Charitable Foundations and the Environment Funders Network. This includes publishing an annual progress report on our website.