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October 22, 2021
This week, Dan and guest host Susan, sat down with Lukas Haynes of the David Rockefeller Fund to discuss how grant-awarding foundations can help power climate solutions. The David Rockefeller Fund recently joined the Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, one of the first U.S. foundations to do so, in an effort to drive decarbonization and inspire other asset owners to do the same.
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Episode Transcript:
Dan: Welcome everyone to the climate conversation, I'm Dan Bresette, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. In a normal introduction, this is where I would introduce my intrepid co-host Sidney O'Shaughnessy, but she’s since not with us today, have a guest co-host for the day. And so, it's my pleasure to introduce for the first time of the podcast EESI Director of Development Susan Williams. Hi, Susan, welcome to The Climate Conversation.
Susan: Hi, Dan, I'm thrilled to be guest hosting today on The Climate Conversation.
Dan: Today we are going to be talking about the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance, and the alliance was created by the United Nations Environmental Programme's Finance Initiative. And it's been described as the gold standard for net zero commitments. The alliance aims to harness the world's biggest investors to work towards decarbonizing the global economy.
Susan: To discuss the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance and what it means for decarbonization, we've invited the CEO of the David Rockefeller Fund, Lucas Heinz, to the show. The Fund is a member of the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance and has provided grant support to ESG because of our mutual interest in equitable climate solutions. The David Rockefeller Fund joined the Alliance in early 2021 and Lucas is excited to share his insights on how investors can transition their investment portfolios to achieve net zero carbon emissions. Lucas, welcome to the show.
Lukas: Hi, Susan. Thanks for having me on the show. It's great to be here and to share more about the David Rockefeller Fund's commitment to a net zero investment portfolio.
Susan: Could you please tell us a little bit about your work leading the David Rockefeller Fund, what are the fund's main goals?
Lukas: The David Rockefeller Fund is a family foundation inspired by the vision and generosity of our founders, David and Peggy Rockefeller, to foster and embody a more just creative and flourishing world. I've been there six and a half years now and we have three core programs for justice, the arts and climate, and the main goal with our investments and grants and the climate area is to support and sustain bold, science based leadership on equitable climate solutions. This includes organizing efforts to address the intersection of climate, gender and racial justice inequities, and to accelerate and expand movements to keep coal, oil and gas in the ground in the kind of grant support we provide. We're especially interested in supporting nonprofits run by serving and building power for communities of color who have been the most impacted in fighting the climate crisis so far.
Susan: That's so interesting, Lucas. As a follow-up question, what's one of the recent grants that supports communities of color in their fight for climate justice that you're particularly excited about?
Lukas: One is called The Hive Fund, which is a pooled fund, and it's particularly focused on the role of women and women of color in the southeast part of the United States and building climate justice projects and campaigns. And it sort of educates communities on what they're experiencing and how they’re tied to climate change and then empowers them with the information they need to organize their neighbors and to become active.
Susan: That sounds so important. Thanks for sharing that. Dan, over to you.
Dan: Lucas, thanks for joining us today on the podcast. What motivated the David Rockefeller Fund to join the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance?
Lukas: Really, it was the urgency of what scientists have been telling us and a desire to model with our endowment portfolio what we believe all private family foundations who care about climate change should be thinking about the world needs, quite simply, a dramatic and rapid transformation in the way energy is produced and consumed and land is used, the industries and companies we all pay and who many of us invest in play.
A huge role in these decisions and need to pay attention to what consumers and investors want to do about global warming and the extreme weather it creates. Our first step, about 2016, was to divest from all of our coal, oil and gas holdings, and that was a significant decision for the board of this board of many Rockefeller family members. And now we are making progress to drive decarbonization across the rest of our investment portfolio. It's not easy, but the way we think about it is if smaller family-led investors like the David Rockefeller Fund don't try, how can we expect the larger asset owners and managers to succeed and decarbonization over time?
Dan: Well, congratulations on leading by example. I think it's good that what you're doing is obviously good, and I think it's really great when foundations and organizations like yours are setting the raising the bar and setting a good example for others to follow. So thanks for that.
Lukas: Well, thanks. But we're not quite there yet. It's a goal and we're working hard towards the goal and learning down this pathway is really a large part of our theory of change because we're trying to share what we learn in real time with fellow travelers and others who are just sort of ‘net zero curious’.
Susan: Thanks so much, Lucas. Shifting to your role in the United States domestically, you are a leader in the in the alliance. The alliance is an international one. But how can we get more groups in asset owners to join the alliance, especially in the United States?
Lukas: We were the first foundation to sign up to the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance and many of our fellow members are large European asset owners. So we really are trying to get the word out within the United States, and we think education and momentum building are the most important to get more groups to pledge. Net zero with their investment portfolios.
Leaders of organizations with endowments want to make sure they understand what they're signing up for, and they appreciate that some net zero pledges and targets are better than others, so they want to get it right and we want our pathway to net zero to help. Many leaders are actually starting to feel peer pressure and making a pledge. So we think momentum is building, and it's all the more important that we share what we learn about. For example, indexing and measuring the carbon in our portfolios and thinking about setting realistic targets and what it takes to move forward quickly on progress.
Susan: Thank you, Lucas. How are you sharing your learning and spreading the word? Is it on your website? In meetings with other philanthropies? On your social media? All of the above?
Lukas: It's technical enough that it's really not conducive to social media. A couple of ways we're doing it is to form a sort of learning community. We've got a brown bag series of Zooms with other endowment managers and investment committee leaders who are serious about what's involved and learning from our example in partnership with our investment advisers.
We actually have an even tighter sort of formation of aligned family institution endowments where there's some overlapping trustees between our organization and theirs. And that's really a very sort of deep active learning community. And then through podcasts like this and our fearless investment committee chair, Nili Gilbert, we're speaking out. She was very outspoken and present in the media around the Biden Climate Summit in April, doing Zooms with Janet Yellen and John Kerry and Mark Carney. With the U.N. all playing some role in spreading the word about the need to drive more investment into low carbon and decarbonization strategies.
Dan: That's really interesting, Lucas. We’ve known you and the David Rockefeller Fund for some time. But I think it's possible that some of our listeners may not understand how important philanthropy is when it comes to advancing climate solutions in the United States. What is the role of philanthropy in climate solutions and how has it changed over time?
Lukas: How much time do we have before I rattle off all the many roles?
Dan: (Joking) Well, this is a four-hour podcast, so that's probably an unfair question. It's a big question, but I'd be very interested in sort of just sort of a basic explainer about how philanthropy sort of is advancing or helping organizations like ours advance climate goals.
Lukas: I can think of at least four roles, but I won't spend an hour on each of them. First, to align one hundred percent of our endowment investments with the Paris targets for decarbonization. As we've discussed, this will position trillions of dollars in new capital to invest in the climate solutions the world needs, and in many cases, are ready to scale.
Another way is another role is in supporting advocacy for the necessary government and multilateral organization policies. We need to support and mandate equitable emissions reductions across all sectors, but most urgently from the countries most responsible for historic emissions global warming emissions.
A third role is to support the civil society activists and movement leaders globally that create political and social pressure on government leaders, policy makers and industries.
The U.S. is finally leading again with a vision of climate leadership, but that energy did not come from Washington, D.C. As you probably know, it came from outside pressure, including young people and communities of color who voted in leaders the last three years committed to climate leadership. And finally, I'd say, and this is closely related.
Philanthropy needs to support the organizations that are informing voters, the ones that will support sustained leadership toward science-based solutions over the next. Not just in one to five years, but in 10 and 30 years. This is a real marathon in addressing the historic emissions that are that are already leading to such extreme weather impacts.
And it's not an issue where we can move forward a couple spaces and then go back. We need to urgently reduce emissions and continue to draw them down sharply over the next 10 years. So there's just a few roles that the philanthropy sector can play.
Dan: And in your sort of six plus years at the David Rockefeller Fund, what have you seen in terms of trends? How is the role of philanthropy changed or how is how is your organization's sort of role in climate philanthropy evolved over that time?
Lukas: Those are two quite different questions. First, as far as the [philanthropy] sector, I think there is much more urgency. I think the advancement in scientific attribution of climate change to extreme weather impacts, especially for four regions and localities, has really dialed up the urgency. And there's much more attention being paid to what scientists and nonpartisan research institutes have been saying for a very long time.
I think there's also been a recognition that technical solutions are just one part of the puzzle. And, supporting the public education and the movement building that that has been really evident in recent years and has led us to this sort of political policy moment in the United States had been neglected for too long. And we can learn a lot from the activists and those demanding the just and equitable solutions as urgently as we need them for the David Rockefeller Fund.
We have always believed in bipartisan approaches to this problem and the need for adequately bold, ambitious federal policy to demonstrate the U.S. leadership required at the international level to help drive ambitious global agreements. And the last four years was a very challenging time. But even over the last four years, we've seen a growing awareness within the Congress and members of Congress on both sides to address the real clear and present dangers of climate change.
We supported some of the analysis on how climate change impacts our national security. And that has made its way into members of Congress thinking and committee hearings. But just as important, I think, is a recognition on our board and staff that the leadership is sustained by grassroots energy and mobilization of the public to demand of leaders at all levels, state and federal the transformative climate and energy policies we need at every level in every sector.
So, I think that's some of our learning is it takes both inside the Beltway approaches to educating policymakers and outside the Beltway support, especially to the to these movements who have really put climate on the front page in the last couple of years.
Susan: Thank you so much for sharing all that Lucas is really interesting, especially as someone who is known you even before you were at the David Rockefeller Fund. The urgency is certainly much higher now than when we first met.
Shifting a little bit to looking towards the future and specifically the 26th Conference of the Parties [COP26] under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, scheduled to take place in Glasgow this fall. Can you share: will the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance be releasing any new plans or commitments? Or for that matter, will the David Rockefeller Fund be releasing any new commitments that you're able to share or preview at this time?
Lukas: I can't speak for the Net Zero Asset Owners Alliance. I know they're going to play an important role in Glasgow at COP26. I can't say that that we set an interim decarbonization target goal about the same time as the Biden Climate Summit in April, and that goal is was 25% reduction by 2025 with a view to 50 percent by 2030, which is aligned with the Paris Climate Accords, in route to net zero by 2050.
And recently, we completed our baseline carbon footprint, which is then used to translate our target goals into units of CO2 emissions across all the asset classes in our investment portfolio. This footprinting will now be submitted in a report at COP26 and shared there alongside other members.
We hope our board member and fabulous Investment Committee Chair, Nili Gilbert, whom I mentioned, will also be representing the David Rockefeller Fund in the leadership of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. This is a somewhat separate and broader alliance helping to organize the efforts of over $90 trillion in capital from across the finance sector, the global finance sector on the road to COP26 and beyond.
So for COP26, one of the main focuses, will be mobilizing the needed capital investments in developing economies to ensure a just transition. And between Nili’s personal leadership across our institution and others, like the alliance I just mentioned, I'm confident we're going to be very well represented there and, just doing our part, we're just one relatively tiny player. But it takes as many institutions as we can help mobilize to continue to drive the necessary investment that the world needs.
Dan: That was great. Lucas, thank you so much for joining us today and looking forward to keeping up with how things are going with you and everyone else. And thanks again for your leadership at the at the Fund, but also the Fund's leadership itself, setting a good example for others in climate philanthropy to follow. And of course, when climate philanthropy is doing the right thing, it's also easier for the grantees to do the right thing as well. So thanks for setting a good example there too.
Lukas: Well, thank you for those kind words, we're just trying to do our small part to be part of the solution. There is so much focus on the problems and just the terrible, devastating impacts we see around the world. And I think it's wonderful for this podcast and other media channels to focus on solutions because we have much of what we need to solve this problem globally, and it takes institutional will and political leadership, most importantly, to get where we all need to go.
Susan: Thank you so much, Lucas, for being on the show and for focusing on climate change solutions. I would be remiss if I didn't plug our Climate Change Solutions newsletter. Our Climate Change Solutions newsletter comes out every other Tuesday. It's free and you can sign up at eesi.org. And I also couldn't agree with you more about the breadth and number of different kinds of actors that we need to further these equitable climate solutions.
You mentioned everything from movement organizations to policymakers at the U.S. level, to the international negotiations to international financial institutions. With this kind of emergency and the urgency of the work that we're doing, we need all kinds of solutions at so many levels. So it's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast today, Lucas.
Lukas: It's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Dan: Well, Susan, that was a great conversation, I really enjoyed a chance to talk with Lucas about the David Rockefeller Fund and all of their great work. I think something that really stuck out to me is his points around the issue of alignment, right? You also talked about all of the different solutions that have to be brought to bear. And I really enjoyed sort of listening to him talk about the importance of making sure that everyone's aligned and pulling in the same direction.
Because when we have this urgency ahead of us, we can't afford to be wasting any time, wasting any resources, by having by having organizations or stakeholders or anybody else doing anything that doesn't contribute to those climate solutions. So I thought that was a really good point on his part.
Susan: I totally agree, Dan, I loved how Lucas focused on solutions and the multitude of actors that need to pull together from the financial community to people that facing the impacts of climate change to movements, to policymakers at the national level and at the international level. It's a lot of different groups that need to work together on fostering these equitable climate solutions. I also thought it was really poignant that he mentioned it's not just technical solutions; it's not a matter of engineering. We need to have the will and the cohesion to work together in these ways.
Dan: It was a great conversation. Thank you for being a great guest co-host. It was great to have you on the podcast today. And since Sid is not with us, I guess it's my turn to do the official signoff, which I don't often do. This might actually be the first time I'm getting to do it. So here we go. If you want to learn more about EESI’s work, head to our website at eesi.org. Also follow us on social media at “eesionline” for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation published as a supplement to our biweekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Go to eesi.org and hit the ‘Subscribe’ button. Thank you for joining us and see you next time.
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