How it works

How a small part becomes real work.

ClimateCurrent turns monthly gifts into climate projects that get built, shows the people who contribute as lights on a live map, and lets each light start others. This page explains the reasoning behind each step.

The wall

The smallness was never in you.

Most people who care about the climate have already changed something: what they buy, how they travel, what they eat. Those changes are worth making. But they reach only part of your footprint, because much of it is built into things no single person decides: how electricity is made, how goods are moved, how buildings are heated.

The usual next step is to buy certificates. That turns money into a receipt: a claim on a reduction made somewhere else, often one that would have happened anyway. It feels like an answer, and it leaves the feeling of smallness where it was.

It isn't apathy, it's arithmetic.

The change

Build the work. Not the receipt.

Here a gift goes to building climate projects directly. The money pays for the work itself: equipment, people and time at places where emissions can be stopped. Nothing is claimed twice.

What you see is a prudent estimate of what your gifts are expected to achieve, in tonnes a year. It is an estimate, not a guarantee, and it is corrected when the facts change, downwards as well as upwards. How the estimate works →

Why methane

Three quick tests. Methane is what's left.

Every possible project is put through three tests.

1. Did your money cause it? This is additionality: the work counts only if it would not have happened without the gift. Paying for something that was going ahead anyway changes nothing.
2. Is it in time? Warming builds up year by year. A cut that acts in the next few years does more than a promise that pays off decades from now.
3. Is it the most warming stopped per euro? Money goes where the evidence per euro is strongest, and somewhere else when the evidence changes.

Today, stopping methane where it escapes passes all three. Methane warms strongly and fades within decades, so cutting it now slows warming within our own lifetimes, and many of those cuts only happen when someone pays for the work.

Methane is today's answer, not our identity.

Why companies belong

Companies don't just fund this. They join it.

A company can pay a contribution for its people. Each of them then takes part personally, with their own place and their own light, and what their company funds stays part of their own impact, also when they leave. The company sees what it made possible, and what it funds carries the work forward for everyone.

For companies →

You can see all of it

Every light is someone contributing right now.

A person appears on the map only after switching it on, and placed in your area, not at your address, unless you move it there yourself. No name travels with a light.

Together

The whole point is that you don't do it alone.

Everyone who takes part can introduce others with a personal link. The people who join through you, and the people who join through them, become part of what you see: what you set in motion, never counted as your own giving. Introductions currently earn no commissions or rewards.

I found something. It might help.

In short

Three words, plainly.

Footprint

The emissions that follow from how a person lives, including the ones built into the goods, energy and services they use.

Certificate

A document that records a reduction made somewhere else and can be bought and sold. It is a receipt for a claim, not the work itself.

Additionality

The test of whether a reduction happens because of the money. If it would have happened anyway, it is not additional.