Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are among the few dozen people on earth who are not only wealthy enough that they could up their giving by a billion dollars a year without breaking a sweat, but also would likely keep getting richer even if they did so.
With the Trump administration drastically cutting government funding for nonprofits, some in philanthropy are hoping megadonors like the Facebook cofounder and his physician spouse will ramp up their grantmaking to stop unvaccinated children from dying of disease, famine-plagued peoples from starving and greenhouse emissions from spiking — and leading to more infections, famine, fires, etc.
Whatever the couple chooses to do to help “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the 21st century” — their Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s main funding focus — they appear all but certain not to make any major near-term commitments on climate.
The centibillionaires recently hired a new director of climate at CZI, Alicia Seiger, who is launching a formal climate program at the grantmaker, which started making exploratory grants on the issue in 2021. Asked about the program’s likely future budget in a January interview, she repeatedly said total funding is not a meaningful metric and brought up a roughly billion-dollar budget she was involved with while at Stanford University as a point of comparison. There is no effective way to distribute that amount of money via climate philanthropy right now, she said, because the climate sector is in a moment of transition.
“I don’t think the absolute number tells you anything,” she said. “If you gave me, again, a billion dollars to give in climate philanthropy today, I don’t know that there’s capacity to have impact on a return expectation that would be satisfying.”
Seiger was chosen by a couple worth north of $200 billion who have pledged to give away 99% of their wealth during their lifetimes. Zuckerberg has also called climate change “one of the most important challenges of our generation.” After she referenced funding totals and billion-dollar budgets several times, I asked if I had understood her perspective on climate funding correctly.
“If I had a billion dollars to put in c3s only, that I had to get out the door in six months, I don’t, I just don’t — it’s hard to imagine that you could employ the kind of discipline, both in the allocation and in the reception, that would get the kind of return on that on a cost-per-ton basis” to make it an effective use of money, she said.
Seiger’s investment language hints at her previous work as founding managing director of the Sustainable Finance Initiative at Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy. She also served for many years as the managing director of a campus outpost named for a prominent climate philanthropy couple, the Stanford Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, and she remains a visiting scholar at another climate-donor-funded entity, the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Until January, she was also an advisor to Alphabet’s X, or what it calls “the moonshot factory.”
This is also not Seiger’s first stint in climate philanthropy. In 2010, after the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, she founded a consulting firm, Climate Strategy Partners, whose clients included philanthropic donors, including institutions like Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s 11th Hour Project and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. She told me she felt the same way then as she does now.
“Again, if you had handed me a billion dollars then, I don’t know where you would put it,” she said. “There is a regrouping and a retooling that happens on cycles in the climate action story. We are at that moment again, right now, for a whole variety of reasons. And I think shooting high volumes out the door just to get the volumetric counts … is not an optimal strategy.”
The suggestion that the sector does not need vastly more money would seem to put Seiger in a minority in climate philanthropy. ClimateWorks Foundation, the sector’s biggest intermediary, made that point in a recent funding report: “Progress will require much more immediate funding” from philanthropy and others. Larry Kramer, former head of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, told me late last year that helping to launch Climate Lead, which recruits uber-rich types to fund climate action, was “maybe the most successful thing” he did — even though he also had a hand in launching some of the field’s largest collaboratives. Climate philanthropy still totals less than 2% of global philanthropy — a fraction of what is spent on areas like education, health or the arts.
But Seiger is convinced that type of thinking is a sickness, or at least less than optimal. “In climate, we have this kind of disease of volumetric gold stars that don’t necessarily correlate with impact,” she said. “The thing that I track is, what are you doing? What’s the strategy? How’s it developed? How are you working with other funders to bring in more philanthropic capital?”
What impact will Seiger seek at a changing CZI?
Roughly a decade after CZI’s ambitious debut with a remit to “build a more inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone,” the outfit has pared back and narrowed its approach on education and spun off its criminal justice work into a separate vehicle with a now near-depleted warchest. Most recently, it stepped away from DEI and “social advocacy” despite major commitments in that area post-2020. Mark Zuckerberg, in particular, has visibly veered to the right, such as in his comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast — and the couple joined Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos at Trump’s January inauguration.
Where does CZI’s work to date on climate fit in? Seiger calls the four-year span during which it spent just over $100 million, committing a third of that sum in its first round of grants, an “exploratory period.” (Separate from CZI, the couple also made a $50 million, climate-related pledge to a Hawaiian university.) During those years, such funding took place across different teams, with then-lead Caitlyn Fox telling me in 2023 there were “no immediate plans” for a standalone program. Now, climate grantmaking will be centralized under a program led by Seiger, beginning with a planning process.
“There’s a transition period here of digesting what’s been done, bringing my expertise to the table and getting buy-in, and visioning for what this program, now that it’s a formal program, is going to look like going forward. So that is the period you are catching us in,” she said. “It’s not just a cut-and-paste.”
Where CZI’s climate giving is concerned, the operation does not have a budget for 2025 or the years ahead, according to Seiger, though there are definite limits. “I don’t have a billion-dollar budget,” she said. But one reason she was drawn to the organization was a conviction that Zuckerberg and Chan have a serious commitment to climate.
Another was the slow pace of academia. “One of the reasons I came to CZI is because we can move fast,” she said.
Prior to Seiger’s arrival, CZI had funded carbon dioxide removal and decarbonization, with a focus on the technology development, environmental justice and policy components of that work, and more recently funded climate journalism.
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As for what’s ahead, Seiger says she is at CZI to “solve the problems that nobody’s solving.” As you might guess based on her background, she sees those problems as lying in what philanthropy often calls “climate finance.” Specifically, she believes carbon accounting — i.e., methods used to quantify an organization’s greenhouse gas emissions — can be used to expand demand for carbon removal, the focus of most of the foundation’s investments to date. She sees such work as a needed next step in the movement, based on her three decades of climate work.
“As we’ve moved from billions to trillions in our aspiration of investments, and from voluntary to mandatory regimes, there’s increasing recognition that the toolkit that we have that has carried us this far needs some retooling, and that’s this work of carbon accounting, where we can get the kind of information capital allocators need to make decisions,” she said. “The great news is that’s not a new technology, that’s technology that’s been around for centuries. It’s just that we haven’t applied it effectively in the greenhouse gas emissions space.”
She says such work can help drive both investment and accountability. To her, this is the best pathway forward for grantmakers as corporations retreat en masse from decarbonization commitments.
“If you look at all the work that went into the net zero pledges, a lot of philanthropy went into that,” she said. “What kind of carbon reduction do we have to show for that?”
Seiger also said environmental justice will continue to be a piece of CZI’s work. “Yes, it has to be,” she said. “It’s got to be a throughline and a thread into all the work.”
Our conversation took place before The Guardian reported last month that CZI was ending most of its internal and external diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, despite January assurances to staff that it would continue.
Zuckerberg and Chan were potential climate megadonors. Now what are they?
Three and a half years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan had just announced themselves as climate funders with a round of checks for carbon removal, including to several environmental justice groups.
It seemed the centibillionaire couple who set out circa 2015 with a goal of “curing all diseases” would, like Bill Gates and other top living donors, add another challenge to their philanthropic to-do list: solving climate change.
Yet their grantmaking to climate groups actually shrank every year since that first round of donations. In fact, CZI spent about as much on climate action over the last four years ($103 million) as the couple is reportedly spending to build a bunker and 5,000-square-foot mansion on their Hawai’ian estate ($100 million).
Today, the couple, for the first time, have a formal climate program. They are also twice as wealthy as they were when they cut those first checks, with a fortune topping $200 billion, thanks to stock market gains. And the planet is about 25% warmer than it was when they started their climate grantmaking, with Earth’s mean temperature hitting an all-time high last year of 1.28 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial age.
Zuckerberg once said that “we have to act together before it’s too late.” We’ll see in the years ahead what exactly he meant by that — or if he meant it at all.
Note (3/13/25): This article has been updated to clarify that CZI’s main funding focus is to cure, prevent and manage disease, and to add more detail around how Seiger raised the idea of spending a hypothetical billion dollars on climate work.
