To see the accelerating and compounding effects of climate change, look no further than California.
In the U.S. Southwest, ecosystems are strained by a ballooning residential population and coasts erode at an alarming rate. Extreme heat, severe wildfire, flooding, intense droughts are frequent realities.
Yet something else is happening in California. Universities are rallying around the issue of climate change, conducting billions of dollars in research each year to uncover the scale of the problem and develop solutions for a more sustainable planet. The work is often supported by competitive government funding, but increasingly another contingent is looking to universities to confront the issue and provide a blueprint for the future: donors.
Around the world in 2022 alone, universities received billions in philanthropic funding to support sustainability related research. California’s Stanford University received $1.69 billion to establish a sustainability school, including one of higher education’s largest-ever gifts: $1.1 billion from zero-emissions advocate John Doerr. Priscilla Chan and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave $50 million to the University of Hawaii (U.S.) to support ocean restoration research. A £25 million gift at Imperial College London will support sustainable aviation. Significant gifts will fund programs in sustainability and financial management at Canada’s University of Waterloo, conservation research at Canada’s University of Victoria, sustainable transportation at the University of Sydney in Australia, and more.
“People see this as one of the grand challenges of our time,” says Michelle Rosenthal Clark, Associate Vice President for Development at Caltech, which received a $750 million gift from the Resnick family in 2019 to establish a sustainability school. “Some donors like big, hairy, audacious problems. This is definitely one of those; it touches all of humanity.”
As some universities look toward attracting and supporting more environmentally conscious gifts, their advancement teams are considering the best ways to communicate about sustainability initiatives and steward donors interested in giving toward climate change research.
And fundraising is just the beginning when it comes to reevaluating advancement strategies through the lens of sustainability. Globally, many universities are setting sustainability goals and looking to reduce their carbon footprint. University investment outfits are facing heightened pressure to divest endowments from fossil fuels, and more schools are pursuing environmental, social, and governance investing strategies that emphasize climate sustainability.
For the most part, universities courting and stewarding sustainability gifts follow their existing playbook for any large gift: learning what motivates a donor, discovering what work the institution does that touches that area, and figuring out how the donor and faculty can work together toward a mutually beneficial goal.
Yet there are a few areas where advancement outfits have to tread sensitively.
Development officers have to be careful not to overpromise in research areas (like climate issues) in which scientific solutions are still unknown, or where action is more likely to mitigate rather than solve issues. Another complicating factor is timing: Unlike establishing a student scholarship or new program that could get off the ground quickly, it can take decades to see the results of gifts toward sustainability research—and donors may not see outcomes in their lifetime.
But perhaps the trickiest issue is figuring out how to handle messaging, which requires striking a careful balance between highlighting the urgency and gravity of the problem, while remaining optimistic about solutions on the horizon.
“There is that real tension between trying to get the message across but also trying to say, ‘We can do something.’ … You do have to engage people positively on this,” says Paul Brooks, Communication Officer, who works with the advancement team at the University of Surrey in the U.K. Brooks helped develop messaging for the university’s “Future Says Surrey” fundraising campaign, which includes a pillar focused on sustainability.
“If you browbeat people with the scare stories, then you risk terrifying people too much and you also risk losing engagement,” he continues. “There is a problem but here's what we can do. Here’s the difference we can make. That's always the message. … You’ve got to be optimistic about it, because otherwise we might as well all go home.”
More and more, philanthropists are being influenced by a younger generation that is increasingly worried about the state of the environment. In a recent student survey at Surrey, Brooks said, respondents named sustainability as their number one topic of concern. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found younger generations were more concerned about and engaged with climate change issues than older individuals.
Caltech’s Resnick gift met much of the traditional profile for record-breaking university largesse: The family had a long-standing relationship with Caltech, having already given $21 million toward establishing a sustainability institute, and the patriarch served on the board of trustees.
The difference? Perhaps the influence of the family’s younger generation.
“Publicly they’ve stated that their family, and younger members of the family who are inheriting the future of the planet, were also instrumental,” explains Clark.
Before UC Davis received its largest ever gift from a couple, $50 million from the Resnick family to support a sustainable agricultural innovation center and research fund, the university tried to drum up donor interest in a different kind of sustainability initiative.
UC Davis first established its net zero West Village—a community home to 2,000 Aggies that produces as much energy as it uses—in the mid-2010s. The community opened in 2015 with lots of fanfare. With an eye toward reaching net zero emissions for the entire campus, the UC Davis development team was hoping donor interest could help fund a campuswide push.
“We got zero traction with donors,” recalls Shaun Keister, UC Davis’s Vice Chancellor for Development.
“The donors say, ‘That’s your problem, that’s your deal,’” he continues. “We even promoted it as ‘Let's be a test bed; let’s create a campus that is a model that then sets the shining example for the world,’ ... and even that was a tough, tough sell.”
When it comes to sustainability initiatives, donors seem to gravitate toward big ideas that top scientists tackle through academic programs—the kind of research enterprise found primarily at large, prestigious universities.
“Sophisticated donors understand the solutions to these problems aren’t going to come from politicians; they aren’t going to happen with certain nonprofits in this space. The research is going to be done at universities,” Keister says, adding that donors interested in combating issues like climate change and environmental degradation do their homework to see which institutions have existing expertise and groundwork to tackle an issue most effectively. “That’s why you see transformational gifts in higher ed in this space.”
Johns Hopkins University is a top U.S. research university, spending nearly $3.2 billion on research in fiscal year 2021. It also has one of the best fundraising records of any higher education institution, netting higher education’s largest gift when businessman and politician Michael Bloomberg gave $1.8 billion to support financial aid in 2018. (Bloomberg’s total giving to the university tops $3 billion.)
Yet when Fritz Schroeder, Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations at Hopkins, tried to court gifts toward water sustainability and water resources during the university’s latest fundraising campaign, he fell short of his multi-$100 million goal. The reason? Even though the university is home to a superstar water resources researcher, it didn’t have a deep enough nexus of research in that area to support major growth.
“We had all the right taglines: ‘The next world war is not going to be fought over oil, it’s going to be fought over water rights and water access,’” Schroeder recalls.
“When we would talk to donors, a lot of them would say, ‘Look, I get it. Water is really important. But what are you actually going to do to try to address what is a global crisis?’” he continues. “It was a scalable question, given the magnitude of the problem that we will face as a globe over the next decade or century. How could we actually contribute to that larger discussion? And I don't think we ever really fully answered that question.”
That doesn’t mean a sustainability campaign is off the table, but Schroeder recognizes he has to leverage the university's scalable strengths.
The University of Surrey’s current fundraising campaign has a £60 million goal. The university is finding success in working with nonprofits and foundations, especially those with an existing environmental focus. The university’s effort to study biodiversity in the Surrey Hills has been a conservation choice in the People’s Postcode Lottery, a monthly subscription lottery in the U.K. that puts a portion of revenue toward philanthropic causes. And the university has had success in securing corporate funding for students studying sustainability.
Corporate engagement in the area of climate change is a way for companies to signal to the soon-to-be workforce that they are a climate friendly and sustainable place to work, explains Jana Rowe, Advancement Manager for Surrey’s Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences.
“There is more potential with corporates as well, especially those that have ESG [environmental social governance] budgets,” she says, adding that Surrey is considering growing its corporate engagement team given recent successes in that arena.
Today, climate change and environmental issues have become increasingly political. Institutions that receive these major climate gifts and establish sustainability centers are often lobbied by students and faculty not to accept donations from fossil fuel companies—as was the case with Stanford in 2022—or receive criticism about sources of the philanthropy. The Resnicks, for example, amassed their wealth through the Wonderful Company, which includes the bottled water brand FIJI Water and a large agricultural empire that includes citrus and nut franchises. The company has come under heat for bottling and shipping water long distances, and disproportionate water usage in its agricultural practices has been the subject of criticism.
Additionally, universities are facing increasing pressure to divest in fossil fuels from students and environmental activists. According to the Global Fossil Fuel Divestment Commitments Database, 1,557 institutions have divested. Of those, 15.7% are educational institutions. In the U.K. alone, 100 universities have pledged to divest.
For donors, divestment is a more complicated story. Some support divestment as a way to signal the university’s environmental values and pivot from fossil fuels. Others are concerned about the effect divestment has on investment returns—an impact that was underscored when gas prices surged during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and portfolios that had invested in energy stocks largely outperformed those that divested.
Divestment is an especially polarizing issue, particularly in the U.S. In California, the nine-campus University of California system divested from fossil fuels in 2020—making it one of the largest university systems to divest. At the time, the university noted that fossil fuel holdings posed a long-term risk to its investment portfolio. Yet the state of Texas (home to the University of Texas and Texas A&M Universities, which have sizable endowments) is against divestment efforts, with the state boycotting financial firms that participate in the practice.
Arizona State University (U.S.) made a big publicity splash when it launched “the world’s first School of Sustainability” in the mid-aughts with the help of philanthropic funds. The university is working toward becoming carbon neutral by 2035, but instead of divestment, it’s pursuing a sustainable investment strategy. Part of the reluctance to divest comes from the concern that the university’s investment portfolio would suffer “suboptimal outcomes,” says Jeff Mindlin, Chief Investment Officer at ASU Enterprise Partners, the university’s investment arm. The research in this area so far is inconclusive; one 2021 study found little discernible difference in the performance of divested and non-divested university endowments over time.
“When you start to arbitrarily exclude things from the investment universe, you're not going to have as good of an outcome,” he says. “Secondly, in our mind, by divesting we're not really solving the problem. We're not changing how much carbon is in the atmosphere.”
Instead, Mindlin says his team has been focused on engagement—both with the oil companies ASU invests in and with the students who are interested in learning more about ASU’s approach. ASU Enterprise Partners recently filed a resolution with Chevron, seeking greater transparency in how the company plans to reduce emissions.
“As a shareholder, we had a voice,” Mindlin says. “We’ve been talking to companies that we own and trying to think through some of their practices around our priorities, net zero being one of them.”
Pitzer College, a small, private and sustainability-minded institution in California, was one of the first colleges in the U.S. to divest from fossil fuels back in 2014. Since then, dozens of colleges have followed suit, spurred on by students, faculty, alumni, and community activists concerned with the rapidly unraveling climate crisis.
In recent years “the world's changed dramatically in terms of the awareness of the climate crisis,” says Donald Gould, chair of the governing board for Pitzer College.
Pitzer now invests some $80 million of its endowment into an ESG fund, which Gould says is in keeping with the school’s values of social justice and environmental sensitivity, tenets Pitzer has embraced since opening its doors in the 1960s. Gould says the college’s investment decisions heighten its “reputation as a sustainable school” and signals Pitzer’s values to potential students, donors, and alumni.
For Gould, endowment performance is not the only fiduciary duty his governing board must consider when making decisions.
“The board's fiduciary duty is to make trade-offs all day long. To make trade-offs that they feel are optimal in advancing the long-term interest of the institution as a whole,” he explains, adding that the decision to divest allows the school to maintain a portfolio that better reflects its core values.
“The world understands it needs to stop putting CO2 (carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere,” Gould says. “The business plans of the leading fossil fuel companies were inconsistent with the world that we hoped to see. So you could bet on the fossil fuel stocks and you might very well win. But you were going to win in a world that was losing.”
Ultimately, he says, this is a “scientific issue and an ethical issue.”
These issues (divestment, climate research, sustainability goals) and all their complexities will continue to shape higher education’s—and the planet’s—future.
DIGITAL ONLY ISSUE - Measures of Success: Five teams share stories of data in action. Plus a spotlight on sustainability: fundraising for climate initiatives, digital sustainability, and storytelling about climate change.
