Emergency situations such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico call for emergency responses – fast and decisive in the short-term, and ideally seeking to salvage something positive from the wreckage over time.    

Given that environmental philanthropists are sometimes accused of being too slow to process applications and too unpredictable in their decision-making, it is heartening to see grantmakers pulling together to deal with the immediate after effects of the BP disaster.

The silver lining of this awful situation could be to accelerate movement towards a greener energy system. Here too, environmental groups and other pundits are organising through work on the economic, environmental and social risks associated with reliance on fossils fuels, manifest in concerns that conventional oil supplies will soon peak and decline, and that the world cannot afford to replace them with much dirtier oils such as tar sands.  

The Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Ecological Health is spearheading the philanthropic response to the BP oil spill in the US. The Fund was founded after Hurricane Katrina by funders active in the Health and Environmental Funders Network and the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA).

Since the explosion onboard the BP Deepwater Horizon rig on 20 April, the Fund has distributed $155,000 (£105,000) to 27 grass-roots groups in the region. Projects include advocacy, monitoring of the disaster response, and mapping where oil is coming ashore. The fund also led a tour of the region for donors last month, which heard from community leaders, scientists and environmental networks.

The Fund was created during an emergency conference call on the philanthropic response to Katrina. Overseen by a professional philanthropy advisory, operating via a pooled fund advised by activists and focused strongly on grassroots organising, it is an interesting model in many respects. All the more as it has pledged to help communities recover “in a holistic manner”, taking donors into the territory of systemic change that challenges current paradigms.

Compared to the priorities and practice of the average environmental grantmaker, this remit is pretty bold. Of the Fund’s thirty or so donors, it would be interesting to know if the pooled fund represents an extension of internal strategy, or the chance to experiment with grantmaking strategies outside their normal comfort zone.

The EGA, whose members represent 220 foundations, has also sprung into action with a series of webinars upon the evolving physical and political fall-out of the BP spill, plus an online spreadsheet whereby members recommend projects and groups for funding. In this way, grantmakers with little direct experience of the Gulf or the issues raised by offshore drilling are presented with peer-recommended opportunities for engagement on a one-off or ongoing basis.

For now, the EGA list focuses on community responses up and down the Gulf coast. At the same time, grantmakers are starting to think how the disaster plays into the broader politics of oil. The spill has a bearing on several major aspects of energy policy and investment, including the US climate bill and the development of carbon-intensive tar sands in Alberta, Canada.

The international campaign against the development of Albertan tar sands has gathered pace in recent months and is now a diverse movement comprised of grass roots activists, mainstream environmental groups and sustainable investment specialists such as the UK-based Fair Pensions and the US CERES network.

The latter group has forced the issue onto the agendas of major oil companies including BP, Shell and ExxonMobil via shareholder resolutions that couch tar sands projects in terms of investor risk. “The risks for companies involved in developing Canada's oil sands are arguably greater than those in the Gulf of Mexico," says Ceres president Mindy Lubber, citing uncertainties within the permitting system and carbon regulation as a “recipe for diminishing revenues and returns”.

A group of UK funders contributed to the costs of bringing indigenous leaders from Alberta to London before this year’s annual general meetings of BP and Shell. Funders are mulling how else to use the spill to their longer-term advantage. President Obama has announced a moratorium on deepwater drilling including exploratory wells off Alaska, while one former investment banker likens the Deepwater disaster to the “off-shore industry’s Three Mile Island”. However, the cancellation of off-shore drilling would make proposed US climate legislation even less palatable to its Republican supporters.

Green groups and grantmakers alike will have to pick their way carefully through the local, national and global response to the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. More active collaboration and information-sharing between philanthropists can only help this process.

Harriet Williams helps coordinate the Environmental Funders Network. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the of the network.