Natural Resources

Current patterns of unsustainable consumption and production are irreversibly harming the natural systems that sustain life, exacerbating economic inequalities and threatening human health and the survival of indigenous peoples.

The Fund seeks initiatives which minimize the risks that current levels of production and consumption pose to the health of people and ecosystems around the world; integrate environmental objectives into public and private economic and policy decisions; strengthen civil society participation in economic and environmental governance; and improve or enforce protection of key environmental resources and biodiversity.

Program areas include:

• Strengthening efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions;
• Promoting environmentally sound renewable energy sources versus fossil fuels and nuclear power;
• Reducing harmful institutional consumption and procurement;
• Harnessing consumer pressure for environmentally sound products;
• Shifting public and private financial flows out of environmentally harmful investments and into environmentally sustainable ones, by influencing multilateral lending and credit institutions and global trade mechanisms, and changing U.S. tax policies and corporate subsidies;
• Opposing global trade and investment policies that deprive vulnerable peoples of access to vital natural resources such as water and native seed varieties;
• Promoting environmental justice, for the low-income and dispossessed communities where environmentally destructive projects are disproportionately sited.

2005 Grants »