Small Dollar, Big Impact

The Earth doesn’t care where cuts to heat-trapping pollution happen. So if we’re interested in getting the biggest bang for our climate buck, maybe we should put more money into building solar energy where it’s cheapest – in developing nations. 

“Building solar in the U.S. is fine, but you have five times more impact if you build it in these [developing] markets,” says Premal Shah, cofounder of Kiva.org and Renewables.org.

Both of his social investing enterprises use crowdfunding to invest in, rather than donate to, entrepreneurs or small businesses who don’t have access to the usual capital from traditional lenders like banks. That can build a track record of successful loan repayment for these businesses to unlock more traditional capital. 

“What Kiva tries to do is reframe stories of poverty as stories of entrepreneurship. So you're not giving money and someone's begging for it, but it's really someone in a community, we're listening to them. They have ideas, very practical ideas of, ‘if I could buy more seed, more fertilizer, this productive cow, this type of productive sowing machine, if I could do this, I could basically earn more money from my family, keep that money from my family, pay back that loan, and then grow from there,’” Shah says. “It allows us to see people on a plane of mutual dignity, not from a place of ‘we feel sorry for them,’ but we want to be their business partner.”

He’s applied this same model to renewable energy, allowing anyone to loan as little as $25 toward building solar projects on a school or car dealership in places like India or Botswana. 

Kinari Webb, MD., also found that directly investing in the people with the most at stake in climate disruption – like indigenous rainforest communities – can also have outsized impacts. She founded her nonprofit, Health and Harmony, after witnessing communities in Borneo log precious rainforest simply to pay for essential healthcare. So she created a local health clinic. And she took on what she calls “radical listening” – asking the communities directly what kind of resources and training they needed. 

“10 years later, we had a 70% reduction in the loss of primary forest. We had 52,000 acres of rainforest grow back. We had a 12 times return on investment of the amount of money that we'd spent.”

“Our experience is that people want to protect the forest,” Webb says. “All of us want a healthy planet and we want a healthy place where we live ... And if people have the choice to be able to protect it, they choose to protect it.”

And here in the U.S., a new survey of more than 3,000 Americans shows that we may be underestimating the power of one major lever of climate action: politics. The latest survey from the Environmental Voter Project reveals that Americans think about climate change more than abortion, immigration, or gun violence, yet less than one fifth of people see political solutions to reining in climate pollution. 

Nathaniel Stinnett of the Environmental Voter Project says making it clear climate disruption is a systemic problem rather than a matter of personal behavior could help activate it as a political issue. 

“We can't change our consumer habits or recycle our way out of the climate crisis. It needs political solutions, and we need to overcome this fossil fuel propaganda that's convinced us otherwise,” he says.

“We in the climate movement need to do everything we can to get climate concerned Americans to understand that nobody, not Democrats or Republicans, are going to lead on climate in a consistent way until they are forced to do so out of political necessity.”