Our Commitment

CARE is passionate about Climate Justice, and we are committed to preventing, reducing and mitigating the impact of our own activities on the planet and its people.

We are a proud signatory of the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian organizations and currently serve as a non-permanent member of the Charter’s Board, established to govern, advise, provide oversight, and facilitate the work of the Charter Secretariat.

With 209 signatories, the Charter sends a clear signal that humanitarian organizations have a key role to play in addressing the climate crisis. We must be a part of the solution and help people adapt to a changing climate and environment, while working on our own environmental sustainability.

In CARE’s Vision 2030, we committed to becoming a more environmentally-just and climate-responsible organization. To achieve this, CARE strives to prevent, reduce, and mitigate its own emissions and environmental impact. In order to track our carbon footprint, the CARE Climate Justice Center (CJC) uses carbon footprint and climate-smart indicators. We ask that our offices worldwide provide us with regular data on emissions from flights, vehicle use, and office energy consumption, and what measures they are taking to reduce emissions from these three sources. The CJC also provides training sessions with offices in different languages to enable staff to share accurate data. This helps us build a picture of the Confederation’s carbon footprint and allows us to determine what reduction targets need to be set and where improvements can be made.

Some measures we have already taken include introducing a climate-smart flight policy, setting up an internal network of Green Teams to drive sustainable practices in CARE offices, and advancing rigorous environmental screening for our programmatic work. CARE also developed an organization-wide Climate and Environment Policy (CEP), which outlines its commitments for reducing greenhouse gases, minimizing its environmental impact, integrating climate and environmental considerations into all levels of its work, and providing the guiding principles and minimum targets for how CARE will fulfill its set commitments.

Through the CARE Climate & Resilience Academy, an initiative under the CARE Climate Justice Center, we also offer a free online course on becoming a more climate-smart organization. This online training is available internally and also to external partners and other Civil Society Organizations, free of charge.

Only significant and quick emissions reduction will keep the possibility open of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, as envisaged in the Paris Agreement. However, because of the humanitarian and development work CARE does, there will always be unavoidable emissions that need offsetting, for example, from vehicles and flights to insecure or hard-to-reach areas.

In order to do this ethically, we have set up our own offsetting program in partnership with the Fair Climate Fund. Carbon credits from the BACHAT II clean cookstove program reflect CARE’s values and approaches and are certified at the highest standard. The program reduces emissions, but also empowers women in rural India, improves health and safety conditions for families, and contributes to the community’s long-term climate resilience.

CARE’s Climate Resilience Marker

The Climate Resilience Marker is CARE’s innovative tool designed to ensure that our projects around the world effectively address the growing impacts of climate change. It’s a framework that helps our teams build strong, climate-smart projects from the ground up, preparing communities to better withstand climate-induced shocks and stresses like droughts, floods, and extreme weather events.

This tool is a strategic evolution of our previous resilience framework, with a specific focus on climate and environmental risks. By targeting these core hazards, the marker helps us address the root causes of vulnerability, strengthening a community’s capacity to cope with risks and ultimately building their overall resilience.

How does the Climate Resilience Marker work?

The Climate Resilience Marker is integrated at every stage of a project, from its initial design to its final review, serving several key purposes:

• Project Design: The marker is used during the proposal phase to ensure that all new projects are designed with climate risks in mind. This helps build robust solutions that are more likely to succeed and have a lasting impact.
• Learning and Adaptation: The marker is a vital tool for reflection. By using it during project reviews and evaluations, our teams can identify areas for improvement and make necessary adjustments to enhance a project’s climate resilience.
• Accountability and Impact: The marker also helps track our progress by enabling CARE to collect and analyze data on the level of climate resilience integration across our entire portfolio, allowing us to measure and demonstrate our collective impact.