Every Nonprofit Is a Climate Organization Now, Whether It Recognizes It or Not

Climate change is widely recognized as the defining crisis of our time. Driven by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, it threatens massive biodiversity loss and more frequent and extreme weather events. And in the United States, the impacts of climate change show in tangible ways.

Recent years have rattled the West with abnormally numerous intense wildfires, with places like Colorado and Arizona facing prolonged droughts. On the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, hurricanes have brought unprecedented rainfall and destruction to unlikely places such as Texas and the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The Pacific Northwest has been hit by extreme heat waves; the Florida Keys are experiencing ecosystem disruption and biodiversity loss. In turn, agricultural production and supply chains are increasingly strained nationwide.

“Marginalized communities face the most harm from climate change due to deep-rooted systemic inequalities.”

“Extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and extreme temperatures driven by climate change are impacting every corner of our country,” Jim Walsh, policy director at Food and Water Watch, told NPQ.

Although climate change affects all of us, its harms are not distributed equally. As Suriya Khan, advisor for the Fair Start Movement, told NPQ, “The issue is straightforward: Those who contributed least to the crisis are bearing the most severe and often irreversible consequences, especially in a system that has already moved beyond safe ecological and social thresholds.”

Research shows that vulnerable communities around the world, including within the United States, are currently disproportionately bearing the harms caused and intensified by climate change. Low-income communities, sexual and gender minorities, women and girls, racially marginalized communities, and younger and future generations face the most severe consequences of climate change.

“Marginalized communities face the most harm from climate change due to deep-rooted systemic inequalities,” Olivia Nater, communications manager at Population Connection, told NPQ.

These communities also shoulder disproportionate burdens from the industries driving the climate crisis, including air, water, and soil pollution.

“Whether an organization focuses on LGBTQIA rights, poverty, public health, or animal protection, climate change is already shaping the outcomes of the people they serve.”

Moreover, because climate change and natural disasters can destabilize political systems, they also pose a threat to human rights writ large. Research shows that climate instability strains democratic and social systems, deepens existing inequalities, and ultimately results in additional and intensified harm to marginalized communities. It has also been linked to democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarian regimes.

Climate change is inherently intersectional, and this demands that nonprofit organizations consider how their missions might require them to address and mitigate climate harms affecting the communities they serve.

Why Climate Change Matters for Every Nonprofit

Because of the wide-ranging, disproportionate impacts of climate change, nonprofit leaders interviewed by NPQ were adamant that nonprofits must integrate climate justice into their work.

“Climate change affects all of us, but not equally, and that inequality is precisely why every organization has a responsibility to engage,” Khan explained. “Whether an organization focuses on LGBTQIA rights, poverty, public health, or animal protection, climate change is already shaping the outcomes of the people they serve.”

For example, housing instability and homelessness expose LGBTQ+ communities to overlapping environmental and public health harms. LGBTQ+ people without stable housing are more likely to live in heavily polluted areas, contributing to long-term health consequences and increased susceptibility to climate-related hazards.

“LGBTQ people are disproportionately affected by climate change in part because of the discrimination and systematic exclusion that make them more likely to experience economic and housing insecurity,” Ari Shaw, senior fellow and director of International programs at UCLA’s Williams Institute, told NPQ. “These are the same conditions that make communities most vulnerable to climate events like floods, extreme heat, and disasters.”

Even same-sex couples who have secure housing are more likely than different-sex couples to live in densely populated urban areas and coastal regions, both of which face heightened exposure to climate risks. These couples are also more likely to reside in communities with underresourced infrastructure and limited access to emergency planning or recovery support, reducing their capacity to prepare for and adapt to climate disruptions.

“Research also shows that LGBTQ people face specific barriers during disaster response,” Shaw explained. “Many avoid emergency shelters out of fear of discrimination, and transgender people can be denied aid when their legal documents don’t match their gender identity.”

Beyond these entrenched systemic inequities, the intersection of ideology and climate is often explicit. A review of 45 right-wing organizations working against trans rights revealed that four out of five have received funding from fossil fuel companies or wealthy donors. One of the climate policy experts involved in the study noted that the fossil fuel industry benefits from stoking fear around transgender issues because it diverts attention from “the very real and ongoing risks that climate change creates.”

Nonprofits whose mission is related to LGBTQ+ rights should also advocate for climate mitigation and environmental resilience to achieve their goals. According to Shaw, the disparate impact of climate change on LGBTQ+ people “makes work on climate change and extension of the work that many LGBTQ organizations are already doing.”

This example also maps onto nonprofits working on poverty, women’s rights, racial justice, public health, and housing security, among others. As Khan explains, “Climate is not a separate issue; it is a force that amplifies existing harm, deepens inequality, and destabilizes communities. Ignoring it means accepting worsening conditions.”

How All Nonprofits Can Help Mitigate Climate Harms

Nonprofit leaders recommended three ways that nonprofits whose missions do not explicitly focus on combating climate change can join the movement to support climate-vulnerable communities and advance environmental justice.

1. Challenge inaccurate narratives propagated by corporations driving the climate crisis and enabling governments.

Corporations driving the climate crisis have contributed to the weakening of democratic systems and are enabled by the government. In the United States, Khan told NPQ, this dynamic is reflected in “policy paralysis, regulatory capture, and widening inequality.”

Regulatory capture refers to the cooptation of policymaking by extractive industries to serve their interests. According to Khan, this phenomenon also appears in how the government and other institutions measure policy success and who they exclude when selecting metrics. “When institutions define success using incomplete baselines, they don’t just mismeasure progress—they legitimize ongoing harm,” Khan explained.

In this way, these corporations sustain the extractive practices driving climate change, promoting false narratives to justify them, evading accountability, and maintaining destructive economic systems. One example of this, according to Walsh, is greenwashing, a tactic used by extractive industries to mislead consumers on the environmental impact of their products.

“Corporations are gaming the systems through campaign donations and slick PR campaigns to convince the public and policymakers that schemes like biofuels and carbon capture are going to address the climate crisis,” Walsh explained. “In reality these greenwashing efforts enrich corporate interests, maintain the status quo, and perpetuate harms to communities and our planet.”

Zahara Nabakooza, a leader at Truth Alliance, believes that this issue goes far beyond greenwashing and shapes how we see the world: whose lives are valued, who deserves resources, and the power imbalances at the root of the climate crisis.

“Education, media, and political systems shape how people understand the world. When these systems carry bias, they can normalize inequality and hide injustice,” Nabakooza told NPQ. “Over time, repeated narratives can feel like truth, even when they are not.”

Because these narratives are embedded in the worldviews people are born into, it is essential to make them visible and actively challenge them. Khan and Nabakooza told NPQ that nonprofits can play a key role in contesting these narratives and pushing for greater corporate and governmental accountability for climate harms.

“Fair Start addresses climate change by focusing on accountability, truth, and proper baselines,” Khan explained. “We work to identify where harm is being misrepresented or minimized and challenge claims of ‘impact’ that fail to account for real-world consequences. A central focus of our work is exposing what we call ‘illegal baselining,’ when institutions use misleading starting points to make harmful systems appear acceptable.”

Other nonprofits, Khan noted, should similarly challenge misrepresentations and minimizations made by corporate and government actors when it comes to climate-vulnerable groups.

2. Raise awareness of the intersections between climate change and other issues.

Since climate change has such broad impacts, nonprofit leaders interviewed by NPQ said that nonprofits new to environmental justice should explain how climate change intersects with and affects their missions.

Nater told NPQ that Population Connection, for example, raises awareness of the links between population, climate change, and sustainable development through its outreach and education work.

“We advocate for the empowerment of women and girls as an overlooked yet critical climate solution,” Nater explained. “We also financially support more than 20 grassroots organizations around the world that are working to protect the environment and remove barriers to family planning and girls’ education.”

Food and Water Watch, as Walsh explained, also works at the intersections of these issues, “bring[ing] together community organizing, legal resources, communications plans and a vision for a livable planet that builds political power to oppose corporate domination and protect the public and our natural resources.”

According to Walsh, nonprofits new to environmental justice can similarly advocate for the communities they serve by connecting their missions to climate solutions and raising awareness that climate justice is integral to, rather than separate from, their work.

“Everyone has a stake in fighting the climate crisis because it shapes the world around us. The climate crisis and the industries driving it forward are impacting public health, housing, civil rights, and affordability,” Walsh explained. “That means that all sorts of nonprofits can benefit themselves and their members by working to stop environmental injustice and fight for a livable planet.”

3. Break down silos between movements to build collective power.

Challenging false narratives and raising awareness of climate justice for vulnerable communities requires nonprofits to work together across intersections.

“Breaking down silos requires recognizing that these issues are structurally connected,” Khan told NPQ. “That means aligning around shared harm rather than isolated missions, using common standards of accountability, and focusing on real outcomes instead of institutional identity.”

Walsh noted that once the nonprofit sector recognizes that “climate change is something that affects all of us [and] it is not a standalone issue, but one that requires coordinated action across civil society,” organizations can build broad coalitions to challenge extractive industries and the governments enabling them.

“We can build coalitions by aligning around shared goals of improving public health, fighting corporate domination, building affordable and sustainable housing, and holding lawmakers accountable for the decisions they make,” Walsh explained.

But these coalitions, he pointed out, will require organizations to “take time to build relationships across movement spaces, ensure impacted communities are at the table, and build on the varied expertise that everyone brings to the table.”

While building such alliances will require significant work, Khan believes it is imperative to begin immediately: “Once it is acknowledged that we are operating beyond multiple thresholds, the urgency becomes unavoidable, and collaboration becomes necessary rather than optional.”

Note: The author currently provides consulting services to the Fair Start Movement, staff and affiliates of which are quoted in this article.