Orchestras need good conductors. Climate action needs people working on 'meta'.

In climate work, there’s a strong pull towards visible, tangible action. I call it the “less talking, more doing” instinct: when people think about climate action they’ll probably think about planting trees, working with vulnerable communities, installing solar panels, or working on some cool new invention.

I know this pull well myself. Five years ago I took a train to Sweden to work as a wetland conservation volunteer. We’d spend one or two days in a ditch to add ‘plugs’ to stop peatlands from draining. It was back-breaking work, but you could see the results of your work every day.1 Clearly we must be doing more important work than the monitoring and evaluation team who once showed up, said hi, measured a few things, drank coffee, and drove away?

Since then, I’ve grown to think that this instinct, however satisfying, quietly undersells a different kind of work. The kind of work that never plugs a wetland, advocates for policy change, or even tries to create an impact itself. I’m talking about what the nonprofit and philanthropy sector calls “meta” work.

Meta work is work that’s one step removed from impact. A meta organisation isn’t lobbying a government to fund climate science, won’t run a field experiment, or launch a petition. Rather, they build the infrastructure that lets the organizations doing these impactful things actually work: helping climate professionals find highly impactful work that fits their background, doing research which climate nonprofits are making the most progress on climate per dollar, and starting new nonprofits working on neglected gaps. Meta organisations aren’t at the frontlines of advocacy or innovation, but they help climate progress by making sure that people are working on the right problems and that money flows to where it can be used best.

The promise of meta organisations comes down to two main arguments:

1. It is very highly leveraged. A small but successful meta organisation can create and support entire fields of climate action by setting priorities, providing funding, incubating new organisations, and providing talent.

2. It is extremely neglected. The vast majority of people and dollars in climate are pointed at interventions, not meta. A small increase in resources for small fields usually goes a long way, because of the law of diminishing returns.

Of course, you can’t solve climate change by doing meta work alone. Meta work is only valuable if there are promising organisations working on the actual interventions. My argument is about the margin: I think a few additional resources or people in climate meta can go a long way.

Compared to other global challenges—climate is quite well resourced: there are millions of people working on climate, and climate finance is in the trillions of dollars per year. A straight-forward way to speed up climate action is to steer the allocation of resources to the most important, tractable, and neglected solutions—which is exactly what meta organisations do.

I like to compare ‘meta’ work in the non-profit/philanthropy space to the conductor of an orchestra. A conductor doesn’t make any music, but without a conductor the orchestra would sound a lot worse. Clearly, you can add a lot of value to an orchestra without playing yourself. By working in the ‘climate meta’ space, you can help other climate organisations and professionals perform their very best, the same way a conductor helps her orchestra put on a great performance.

This post was inspired by Devon Fritz, who recently published a post about the value of meta work in the social impact space in general (beyond climate). My goal for this post is to show the importance of meta-work to climate and highlight a few climate-specific meta orgs, but the typology of meta orgs below is his.

• Charity evaluators figure out which climate charities are the most promising to donate to. Some evaluators, like Giving Green, are looking for the charities where one extra dollar will make the biggest difference on reducing emissions.2

• Grantmakers fund nonprofits (and sometimes other organisations) with their own endowment or by re-granting people’s donations. Some effectiveness-oriented climate grantmakers are Founders Pledge’s Climate Fund, the Giving Green Fund, and the Navigation Fund.

• Effective giving organisations fundraise for nonprofits that have been vetted by charity evaluators or by themselves. Many effective giving organisations focus on a country or community, such as Doneer Effectief (Netherlands), Impactful Giving (India), and Effektiv Spenden (Germany). (Full list here.)

• Charity incubators, such as Ambitious Impact, launch new nonprofits where there should be one, but isn’t one.

• Philanthropic advisors help wealthy people make better donation decisions.

• Career advisors help talented professionals work on tackling the most promising climate challenges. That’s us (Effective Environmentalism Initiative), but also orgs like Probably Good and High Impact Professionals.

• Community builders make sure that people interested in the same topics talk, exchange ideas, and help each other thrive. (We run a Slack community for impact-focused climate professionals, by the way.)

Probably yes.

The meta space is tiny, most of the organisations I mentioned above have only a few full-time staff. My own organisation, the Effective Environmentalism Initiative, is a part-time project. Just one extra person can take the climate meta-space quite a bit further.

If you’re considering starting a new organisation in this field, or want to help effective environmentalism with career advising or community building, I’d love to hear from you to see where we can help each other.

If you’re interested in grantmaking or research two help improve the allocation of funding, these two articles by Probably Good might interest you:

• Prioritization Research as a High-Impact Career Path

• Grantmaking as a High-Impact Career Path

• Effective Environmentalism Durham just completed its first fellowship program, piloting a co-developed introduction course.

• Giving Green announced $5.4 million in grants for decarbonizing the power sector in the U.S. and India.

• Probably Good published an article about making a successful career change.

• Tackling the Existential Threat of Climate Change: Collective action to manage, mitigate, and reduce climate risk. An FP Analytics brief about strategies to address climate change by stabilizing feedback mechanisms and managing sunlight reflection.

• A post about climate stabilization on the EA Forum by Craig Segall making the case for dealing with extreme climate change as an important yet neglected cause.

• Experts: Why carbon removal needs a ‘major scale up’ to return warming to 1.5C. Cecilia Keating for CarbonBrief.

• The Case for a Comprehensive Meat Tax by Michael Goff on the EA Forum.

• The Absorption Problem by Nick Allardice. A historic amount of money may be about to flow toward the world's problems, but right now that money can’t be absorbed at the effectiveness and scale this moment demands.

• Funding available ($10 million) for alternative protein policy advocacy and market shaping by the Nova Vista Foundation.

• The Loss and Damage Policy Institute (LDPI) is hiring for a Policy Advisor. LDPI ensures loss and damage finance delivers real benefits to people affected by climate change.

Find more opportunities on the Probably Good, 80,000 Hours, and EA Opportunities job boards.

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