In two years’ time the United Nations will host the COP 30 climate conference in the Brazilian Amazon. This is a unique opportunity, and philanthropy should be planning right now to heed the call for collaboration that empowers historically excluded voices, typically those most affected by extreme weather events.

We will need to bring together diverse strategies and combine resources to have the impact the world needs on climate change. The complexity of the problem we’re trying to solve demands it.

The Global South Should Lead

It is morally—and strategically—right for philanthropic voices from the Global South to take leadership roles as we prepare for COP 30 to come to the Amazon. The runup to COP 30 over these next two years is the moment to right a serious injustice in climate philanthropy, with the majority of Global North funding going to Global North organizations for projects whose impact should be greatest on the Global South, where communities are most affected.

In particular, 75 percent of the world’s children live in the Global South, yet their rights and concerns are rarely prioritized by climate decision-makers. It is a glaring omission and also a profound opportunity. Organisations from Brazil and other Global South countries, with distinct perspectives and solutions, are well placed to shape and shepherd investments to address these kinds of inequities.

An Integrated Approach To Combating Climate Change

Years of advocacy around climate at the U.N. have taught us that a single strategy is not enough, and philanthropy won’t solve everything alone. For effective change, we need to knit multiple approaches together: We need robust policy advocacy. We need solid research. We need to reach people’s hearts as well as their minds. And we need to partner with other stakeholders, including public authorities and policymakers, to leverage and scale up our efforts. It’s these four things together that create a solid rope that can pull for real and systemic change.

Policy Advocacy Works

The Global South has, in many cases, led the way on policy efforts relating to children, climate, and biodiversity loss. There have already been significant policy milestones along this journey, and there are more to come. Brazil’s 1988 constitution explicitly named children’s well-being as an ‘absolute priority’ and the right of all people to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment. It took four years after that landmark achievement before Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court first cited child and adolescent rights in a decision, but three decades later, more than 4,000 decisions had explicitly referenced these rights, through the work of organizations that took strategic litigation, including on climate, to the Court.

The U.N’s Convention on the Rights of the Child—the most widely ratified international treaty in history—declares every child’s right not only to safety and health but to play. In August, after soliciting input from more than 16,000 children and youth, the U.N. released legal recommendations for governments and corporations to address children’s rights as they relate to climate and other environmental issues. And the U.N. affirmed children’s rights to sue their governments. Every time children’s concerns are established as a policy objective, it provides a framework for advocates to push for change that reflects those concerns.

On climate, these legal and policy frameworks are having major implications. Children offer very specific leverage for climate change advocacy. This is why a coalition of advocates from around the globe is calling on COP’s negotiators and state parties to commit to a Children Action Plan. When we center children’s concerns in climate deliberations, we deliver smarter interventions. Children’s vulnerabilities link to interconnected systems and sectors, leading to better mitigation and adaptation in a host of areas. From health to education, shelter, and safety, children’s voices lift us all to better work.

Research Matters

The environmental threats children in the Global South face go well beyond disruptive heatwaves, droughts, storms, and wildfires. Biodiversity loss is depleting the natural diversity essential for children’s holistic development and jeopardizing the ecological balance critical for sustaining the environment they will inherit. It affects everything from food security to exposure to new diseases, from learning opportunities to spaces where play and imagination can flourish. We must urgently discover, understand, and thus protect these ecosystems.

The scale and systemic nature of this issue demand strategies shaped through thoughtful research and rapid technology development. In 2020, The Alana Foundation, which I lead, partnered with the XPrize Foundation to create a prize to accelerate development of new technologies for mapping tropical forest biodiversity. Testing new technologies on the ground will take place in mid-2024, in Manaus, the heart of the Amazon. However, this effort will not only be carried out by philanthropic organizations. In partnership with the Brazilian State, the tests will promote cooperation between researchers and universities around the world with Brazilian scientists.

Reaching Hearts and Minds

It’s one thing to do the research and policy advocacy, but we need to tell effective stories. They are what build the public and political will for change. This year at COP 28 in Dubai, a coalition of advocates including Alana, UNICEF, and the UAE Ministry of Education brought the voices of children from around the world into COP’s official meeting spaces for the first time through short films. ‘I could say that climate change has ruined my life,’ said Anja, a youth from Serbia, in one film. ‘Try harder,’ urges another child, Lamar, from Egypt.

But we need different formats to reach different audiences, such as fiction series that ‘hide the broccoli in the popcorn’ and mobilize people for the causes we care about through entertainment. This was the impetus for the limited series ‘Aruanas,’ an environmental thriller we produced in Brazil which reached around 35 million people. We move hearts and minds towards action on complex issues like climate change when we tell relatable stories.

The Urgent Need For More Collaboration

The Amazon, right now, is going through a historic drought. Half a million people in Brazil’s Amazonas state are in the current crisis. Forty million more across the country are living under climate risks. Despite meaningful recent shifts in policy and enforcement, we still see deforestation in the Amazon. There is mounting evidence we are on the precipice of a vicious cycle that pushes global warming and biodiversity loss beyond human control. We are at a climate tipping point.

Against that urgent backdrop, philanthropy has an opportunity. We can’t expect solutions to global problems unless there is true partnership between organizations in the Global North and the Global South. Funders in the Global North can’t expect to solve these problems on their own or by financing networks led by Global North stakeholders. Funders in the Global South bring on-the-ground knowledge, experience with advocacy and partnerships with public agents, and cultural understanding about how to build collective commitment to making systemic change. Now is the moment to plan and execute, in partnership, integrated strategies. Together we can set the stage for COP 30, in Brazil in 2025, to become a different kind of tipping point—one that transforms our ability to address the defining challenge of our time.

Pedro Hartung is Executive Director of the Alana Foundation, an international funder and policy advocate with roots in Brazil.