As part of its environmental overhaul last year, Goldman Sachs founded the Goldman Sachs’ Center for Environmental Markets to examine market-based solutions to environmental challenges. The foundation has awarded its first research grants. The three grants, totaling more than $2.3 million, will fund programs focused on finding market-based solutions to climate change, including examining policy options for lawmakers, market opportunities for environmental technologies, and valuation of fragile ecosystems.
The grants have been awarded to:
- Resources for the Future, for support over one year of its Climate and Technology Policy Program, which seeks to advance economically sensible approaches to dealing with climate change. Anticipating the adoption and implementation of federal controls on greenhouse gas emissions, the program’s main project brings together companies from to provide information for a report to be written by RFF researchers on policy options.
- World Resources Institute, for a two-year project to analyze the viability of the various technology options that could be deployed both in the U.S. and elsewhere to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and diversify the world’s energy sources, including coal gasification, biofuels, renewable power, and carbon capture and storage, among others.
- Woods Hole Research Center, for a three-year project to examine how to value forest ecosystems and analyze economic alternatives to cutting valuable rainforests.
