In several Alaskan villages—including Shishmaref, Kivalina, and Newtok—residents made the decision to relocate over 20 years ago due to the threats posed by coastal erosion, flooding, and permafrost thaw. Yet decades later, relocation efforts remain incomplete. Some communities are caught in limbo—partially moved, physically split between two sites, and forced to navigate life in the shadow of a relocation that has technically begun, but is far from finished. These prolonged timelines contribute to significant losses and damages: the fragmentation of social ties, chronic stress and deteriorating housing.

We are excited to share our new grant partners in East Africa focusing on addressing non-economic loss and damage!

Among the questions explored in the report is: How can displacement drive losses and damages? The experience of communities in Cogea, Fiji, helps illustrate this.

In 2017, Tropical Cyclone Yasa caused severe flooding that destroyed homes and infrastructure. Afterwards, government authorities declared the village site unsafe due to unstable ground conditions, forcing residents to abandon their land and begin a prolonged period of displacement.

We are very pleased to announce our new grants in the Bay of Bengal!

Our past and current partners in Kenya alongside our board members and staff recommended individuals and groups in Kenya and Tanzania to be a part of this pilot’s journey. We held an introductory meeting about the proposed approach with prospective Tanzanian collaborators in Arusha on the margins of the Community Based Adaptation Conference in May 2024. It was crucial for us to create grantmaking processes that fostered genuine collaboration and centred our partners’ expertise and experience to map systems, identify and prioritise points of leverage, and bring in other collaborators.

In a year-long collaborative effort, the Climate Justice Resilience Fund brought together diverse communities of climate and development practitioners whose work spanned research, policy, and practice, to define the complex relationship between loss and damage (L&D) and climate adaptation.

Participatory grantmaking is a growing ethos in philanthropy, where funders cede power over funding decisions to the people affected by those decisions. It may include a wide range of practices, such as co-creation of strategy and priorities, diversification of grant committees and review panels, or even crowd-sourced decisions and voting by large groups.