Climate Solutions Round Description
The Climate Coordination Network believes that Climate Action is the ultimate public good. Why? Because climate change increasingly impacts everyone worldwide. Our mission is to accelerate community-supported climate solutions on a global scale, catalyzing diverse forms of climate action to create a sustainable and equitable future for all.
The goal of the GG21 Climate Solutions Round is to provide strategic grant distribution to support impactful climate solutions projects around the world.
GG21 Snapshot: Outcomes and Statistics
- Matching Cap: 10%
- QF Mechanism: Qf + COCM (50-50)
- Participants: 71 Climate Solutions Grantees based on impact ranking
- Number of applications: 102 grantee applications
- Total funding: $22,050
- Number of contributions: 794 unique donors
- Average contribution: $12.66
- Matching funds: Paid out in USDGLO
Climate Solution Round Implementation
New for GG21: More Specific Eligibility Criteria + Round Limited to 70 Projects
In order to provide more funds to impactful climate projects, the CCN team decided to try something new for GG21. Here is a summary of the key changes:
Revised Eligibility Criteria: We rewrote the GG21 Eligibility Criteria to specifically outline what grantees needed to include in their applications as well as what would disqualify them from participating (even if they had previously participated in the round). See revised Eligibility Criteria here.
Karma GAP Requirement: Applicants who participated in GG20 were required to post at least 2 milestones and updates in their GG20 KarmaGap profile. After GG20 we encouraged projects to set milestones based on the funding they received.
Round Limit: The Climate Solutions round was limited to 70 grantees as determined by a ranking of project review scores. Note we ended up with 71, but more on that in the challenges section.
Project Review Process: The new review process was more detailed and specific compared to previous rounds. Reviewers scored projects in 8 categories on a scale from 1 to 5 based on their application, Karma GAP milestones and updates and impact metrics. Each project was reviewed by 2 reviewers. Read the detailed CCN Grant Review Process document here.
Application Period: Applications closed before the round so that the impact ranking could be finalized. This is the first time we have closed the application period before the round started.
The Climate Solutions Round: Global, Collaborative & Unique
What makes the CCN Climate Solutions Round unique? The Climate Solutions Round’s unique feature/approach is that we cultivate a supportive community that results in ongoing productive relationships and collaborations. During our review of grant proposals from projects that have been in multiple rounds, we found clear examples of grantees supporting each other and collaborating to accomplish goals and address challenges.
Round Matching Results
As planned and communicated from the beginning of GG21, the CCN team utilized a combination of QF + COCM (Connection Oriented Cluster Matching) to calculate the matching pool results for the Climate Solutions Round. In the past two rounds (GG19/GG20), we tested and compared COCM and QF allocation mechanisms. As noted in previous posts, the Climate Solutions round is a closely connected community. Because of this COCM tends to flatten the results and disincentivizes projects that have worked hard to market their projects during the donation period. We have also heard much criticism that the standard QF distribution is just a popularity contest that disincentivizes projects with smaller communities and less marketing capacity.
For these reasons, we tested a hybrid model that allocates 50% of the funds using COCM and 50% using QF in GG21. We are proud of the coordination we see within the community, and for our round and our community, using QF + COCM (50-50 each) to calculate the matching funds provides the best outcome and incentives for our participants. In the future, we may explore different percentages for QF/COCM and we are also exploring tunable QF.
Impact Assessment
In sum, the GG21 CCN Climate Solutions round impacted 71 Climate Solutions projects worldwide, reducing GHGe, building core infrastructure and—perhaps most importantly—facilitating cooperation and coordination to accelerate climate action. This round, we continued to encourage grantees to provide specific metrics utilizing ideas from the Climate Solution Metrics Garden and we required all returning grantees to include their KarmaGAP milestones and updates. We are working with Karma on ways we can generate a more comprehensive round impact report. It is currently difficult to summarize the 71 KarmaGAP pages.
To amplify our climate impact, the CCN team also decided to pay out matching funds in USDGLO. By using Glo Dollars for payouts, we increase our impact by joining the Glo Consortium and selecting to combat climate change with the revenue generated from our Glo Dollar holdings. Over $10,000 of additional funding was generated by swapping our matching funds to USDGLO. These additional funds are distributed by GLO Dollar to climate initiatives. We also encouraged our Climate grantees on this opportunity to allocate their yield from matching funds to climate action. We would encourage Gitcoin and other rounds to consider using USDGLO for matching payouts.
Participant Feedback
For GG21, we created a more specific and comprehensive feedback form here is some of the Initial results:
“Massive THANKS to #GG21, @Gitcoin, @climate_program and @letsGROWdao! It’s been an intense time with loads of effort, filled with great conversations (and a few tangents and rabbit holes) all powered by next-level community vibes.”
— Impact Evaluation Foundation (IEF) post on X
“The @climate_program team. Thank you for maximizing your philanthropic impact by paying out matching funds in Glo Dollars. You’re leading the way in embedded philanthropy.
— Glo Dollar post on X
“Just did a round of donations. So many great projects to choose from​:green_heart:Huge thank you to the CCN team for all of their work. 
We at CARBON Copy are blown away by the support from the community so far. Thank you, thank you, thank you! 
”
— @Kentbabin, Carbon Copy (CCN Telegram)
“It rocks, it needs to exist, it is why I hang out in the space, it is why I can tell people web3 can be used for good. You stay very close to the community, you listen deeply and you navigate making informed, rooted decisions + iterations on the process. I have soooo much respect for you guys!!!”
– Anon feedback post round
Challenges for GG21
Communication to Grantees: Communicating our new Eligibility Criteria and implementing our new review process was challenging. A few grantees missed communications and/or were confused by the new process.
Review Process: While we found the new review process to be an improvement, we were building the plane as we were flying and had to make some adjustments along the way. We were not specific enough about one of the eligibility criteria, which was “if they are primarily a token launch or NFT project to raise money for a liquidity pool.” We made exceptions for projects with tokens that planned to use the funds for operations or other costs outside of directly providing token liquidity. We mistakenly identified one project, $Earth, as primarily a token launch for a liquidity pool. Because of this error, we re-evaluated all the other projects that had not met the eligibility requirements and found no further errors in our reviews. Due to our mistake, we decided the fairest course of action was to add $Earth to the round as the 71st project.
Checker: All community rounds were required to use Checker, but Checker has not received any updates or improvements since before GG20. The AI is still not useful for our round and our new review process could not be accommodated in the product. We had hoped to see Karma GAP milestones/updates pulled into Checker, but this feature has not yet been added. We took the time to provide feedback on the product after GG20 and were disappointed to see none of the feedback was utilized to improve the product.
Grants Stack Product Support: We had several issues during this round and the last round, which we reported to support at Gitcoin. Responses from the support team were slow, and many of these issues were not resolved. In most cases, we found our own workarounds for these issues. These issues include downtime with the indexer, inability to download CSV from the Manager and issues checking out and making donations. The last issue particularly concerns me as I could not donate to the round and did not receive support before the round ended. If this is the support a round manager receives, I worry that our grantees and donors may also suffer from a lack of product support.
Donor turnout: We saw a significant decline in the number of unique contributors and the total amount crowdfunded. We suspect this was a combination of no OSS round, summertime and general market conditions.
| Round | Total Amount Crowdfunded | Number of Unique Contributors |
|---|---|---|
| GG20 | $58,000 | 2,262 |
| GG21 | $22,050 | 794 |
Incentives for Round Managers: While we appreciate Gitcoin supporting our community the past 3 rounds by adding to our matching pool, we, along with all other round managers, have not received any compensation for our work. Gitcoin appears to be receiving many different benefits from the community rounds, and I think they should compensate round managers for bringing value to Gitcoin through our work.
Lessons Learned and Areas for Improvements
- We need a better way to review our grantees. While the new process we implemented lowered the workload of our review team we still lack tools to make it even more efficient.
- We need to create a code of conduct or more specific guidelines for what qualifies as Sybil attacks. We want to make sure our community is clear on what are acceptable donor behaviors.
- We will continue to work on updating the Eligibility Criteria of the Climate Round to be even more specific based on learning from this round, i.e. clearly defining the difference between tokens for liquidity and tokens for supporting climate action, etc.
Closing Thoughts
A big thank you goes out to Momus Collective and Gitcoin for your support funding our matching pool!
The CCN team truly appreciates all of the Climate Solutions grantees, the contributors who supported the round and the opportunity for The Climate Solutions Round to participate as a Gitcoin Community Round for GG21. We look forward to mutually beneficial partnerships and collaborations in the future.
