Climate Funders Just Put $36 Million Into Cooling. There Is No Application Form, and That Is the Point.

On October 16, 2026, on the tenth anniversary of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, a group of climate philanthropies announced more than $36 million in new funding to cut emissions from cooling. The announcement is the first tranche of a $100 million, four-year commitment aimed at high-global-warming-potential refrigerants and at expanding access to efficient, climate-safe cooling.

The named funders are the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust, the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, and Sequoia Climate Foundation. The money aligns with a four-year sustainable cooling strategy developed jointly by the Super Pollutant Action Alliance and the Clean Cooling Collaborative, and it will flow to global organizations and initiatives working in Asia, Europe and other regions facing extreme heat.

What the announcement does not contain is an application link, a deadline, or an eligibility statement. That absence is not an oversight. It is the structure, and understanding the structure is the difference between waiting for a portal that will never open and actually reaching this pool.

What was announced

Amount: More than $36 million, announced October 16, 2026.

Context: Part of a $100 million philanthropic effort over four years.

Funders named: Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust; Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust; Sequoia Climate Foundation.

Coordinating bodies: The Super Pollutant Action Alliance (SPAA) and the Clean Cooling Collaborative (CCC), an initiative of the ClimateWorks Foundation formerly known as the Kigali Cooling Efficiency Program.

Three stated priorities:

1. Stronger policies to phase down super pollutants.
2. Rapid scaling of climate-safe alternatives in new cooling equipment.
3. Incentives to avoid emissions from refrigerants already in use.

Geography: Funds go to global organizations and initiatives, with emphasis on Asia, Europe and regions experiencing extreme heat. CCC's broader grantmaking has concentrated on the four regions projected to account for roughly 75 percent of cooling-related emissions through 2050: China, India, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

SPAA Executive Director Claire Henly described the commitment as "a vote of confidence in the treaty that has done more than any other to protect both the ozone layer and the climate."

Why cooling, and why now

The Kigali Amendment, adopted in 2016 and in force since 2019, extended the Montreal Protocol beyond ozone-depleting substances to hydrofluorocarbons — refrigerants that do nothing to the ozone layer but trap heat at hundreds to thousands of times the potency of carbon dioxide per unit mass. It is the most consequential climate treaty almost nobody discusses, and its ten-year anniversary is the occasion for this announcement.

Cooling occupies an unusual position in climate strategy. It is simultaneously a growing emissions source and a life-safety necessity in a warming world, which means the goal is not less cooling but different cooling. That dual character has kept it institutionally homeless: it is not quite an energy portfolio, not quite an adaptation portfolio, and not quite a pollution portfolio. Super pollutants in general — HFCs, methane, black carbon, nitrous oxide — have historically drawn a small fraction of climate philanthropy relative to their warming contribution, because the dominant funding frame has been carbon dioxide and the dominant intervention has been electricity.

For a grant seeker, a neglected category with a newly capitalized, explicitly strategic funder coalition is the most favorable configuration that exists. The competitor set is small, the funders have publicly committed to a four-year horizon, and the strategy document that governs allocation is a known artifact rather than an opaque board preference.

Read the third priority

Of the three stated priorities, two are familiar and one is where the open room is.

Policy phase-down work and scaling climate-safe equipment are both mature lanes with established incumbents — national Kigali implementation plans, standards and labeling programs, manufacturer engagement, procurement policy. If you are entering now, you are entering against organizations that have been doing this for the better part of a decade.

The third priority is different: "incentives to avoid emissions from refrigerants already in use." This is the refrigerant bank problem. Every air conditioner, chiller, cold-storage unit and supermarket rack already installed contains refrigerant that will eventually leak or be vented at end of life, and the installed base represents an enormous quantity of warming already purchased and not yet delivered. Addressing it is called lifecycle refrigerant management, and it is unglamorous work: leak detection, recovery and reclamation infrastructure, technician certification, end-of-life destruction, and the financial instruments that pay for any of it.

It is also the least-built of the three lanes. Policy advocacy has a constituency. New-equipment standards have manufacturers. The installed base has nobody, because nobody owns it collectively and the emissions are diffuse. A funder coalition that names it as one of three priorities is signaling that it knows the gap exists and expects proposals to fill it.

If you are deciding where to position, this is the lane with the worst-covered problem and the thinnest bench.

The access problem: this is intermediary money

Here is the structural fact that governs everything practical about this announcement. The money is not being granted directly by the Spitzer Trust, the Grantham Environmental Trust, or Sequoia Climate Foundation to implementing organizations. It is being pooled and routed through regranting intermediaries — SPAA and the Clean Cooling Collaborative, with CCC itself housed inside ClimateWorks Foundation.

Intermediary and pooled funds operate differently from both federal agencies and traditional foundations:

• There is usually no open RFP. CCC has made on the order of 128 grants with roughly 36 implementing partners. Those relationships were not formed through a public portal. They were formed through program officers who identified a gap in a regional strategy and went looking for someone to fill it.
• The strategy document is the real solicitation. When a pooled fund publishes a four-year strategy, that document functions the way a notice of funding opportunity does at a federal agency: it defines what is in scope, in what geography, with what theory of change. Proposals that map cleanly onto a named strategic objective get sourced; proposals that arrive from outside the frame do not.
• Sourcing runs through the partner network. The fastest route into a regrant pool is almost never a cold inquiry. It is a subaward or consortium role with an existing implementing partner, which converts you from an unknown applicant into a documented performer the program officer has already seen deliver.
• Decision timelines are opaque and non-cyclical. There is no close date and no panel calendar. A conversation started in November can produce a grant in March or in the following fiscal year, depending on where the strategy's gaps are.

None of this makes the money inaccessible. It makes it accessible through a different mechanism than the one most grant-seeking organizations are built to use.

A practical sequence

Read the strategy before writing anything. Find CCC's published regional priorities and SPAA's sustainable cooling strategy. Identify the specific objective your work advances and the specific geography. "We work on cooling" is not a position; "we can stand up refrigerant recovery and technician certification in a secondary Indian metro where the strategy identifies a gap" is.

Check the geographic fit honestly. CCC's concentration in China, India, Southeast Asia and the United States reflects a deliberate emissions-weighted allocation. The new tranche names Asia, Europe and extreme-heat regions. An organization working somewhere outside those priorities should expect to make a much stronger case for why its geography matters to the global number.

Get into a consortium. Identify the implementing partners already funded in your region and approach them as a subrecipient or technical partner rather than approaching the fund as a competitor. This is the single highest-yield move available to a new entrant, and it is available this quarter.

Build the measurement story first. Super-pollutant work has an advantage most climate grantmaking lacks: the outcomes are quantifiable in tonnes of CO2-equivalent with defensible global warming potential factors. A proposal that can state avoided warming per dollar, with transparent assumptions, is competing on the metric these funders chose their portfolio around. A proposal that cannot is asking for trust it has not earned.

Do not wait for a portal. There is no evidence one is coming. The organizations that receive this money in 2027 will mostly be organizations that were in conversation with a program officer in late 2026.

The wider signal

For U.S.-based organizations in particular, this lands against a federal backdrop where climate and environment grantmaking has contracted sharply and where the rewrite of federal grant regulations effective October 1, 2026 added termination-for-convenience authority and political pre-issuance review to every discretionary federal award. Organizations that built their models on federal climate funding have spent 2026 looking for pools that are not subject to that risk.

A four-year, $100 million private commitment with a published strategy and a treaty anniversary behind it is about as stable as climate funding gets right now. It is smaller than any federal program it might replace. It is also not going to be cancelled by a policy memo.

The tradeoff is the one named above: stability and strategic clarity, purchased at the cost of an open competition. You cannot apply. You can get sourced. Those require entirely different work, and the second kind starts with a conversation, not a document.