Minding the Gaps for Climate Finance: An interview with Vibrant Data Labs

At The Russell Family Foundation (TRFF), we believe good work deserves a wider audience — and that’s true whether that work comes from our own grantees or from the partners, collaborators, and fellow investors also advancing planet-positive solutions for people, places, and nature. This is one of those stories.

This story comes from Vibrant Data Labs (VDL), who frequently collaborates with One Earth,  itself a TRFF partner, and it’s a story about what happens when you finally ask this question: where is the money that is being directed towards climate solutions actually going?

We sat down with Maggie Cutts, Vice-President, Partnerships, and Eric Berlow, CEO of Vibrant Data Labs, the data science team behind Minding the Gaps: One Earth’s Climate Finance Report, to hear how the project came together and what it reveals about the gap between the climate solutions we know we need and the dollars actually reaching them.

VDL builds open-source tools that map money directly to solutions, revealing who is funding what and exposing critical funding gaps. One Earth is a global climate organization that helps people understand what solutions the planet needs most – and how to mobilize the culture, capital, and collective action to scale them.

Two Different Lenses, One Shared Question

Eric’s background is in ecology and complex systems. He thinks about climate as a problem with many interdependent, multicausal moving parts. Maggie’s background is in catalytic capital, spent inside what she calls the “jargon-enriched” world of climate tech and impact investing.

When they first met, Maggie says, it was Eric’s outsider view that struck her. “He was combining philanthropy with investment, because to someone outside the field, you just see it as capital — you don’t make these distinctions,” she said. That naivety, as she describes it, wasn’t a limitation. It was an advantage. Because VDL wasn’t boxed in by the field’s existing silos, its dataset could be built from “a more informative place,” open to actual climate-relevant solutions, rather than how different sectors within climate had already decided counted.

Vibrant Data Labs itself grew out of a fairly simple ask. A corporate foundation and family office, new to climate but experienced in other social-impact work, wanted to know who was already funding what so they wouldn’t duplicate efforts or overlook the areas that mattered most. That question became a methodology, and the methodology became a small, mission-driven company: seven people, no outside investment, equal ownership, and equal pay across the team. One Earth serves as VDL’s fiscal sponsor — a partnership Eric credits with bringing the climate-science rigor that VDL’s data tools needed.

Following the Money to Find the Gaps

The core insight behind Minding the Gaps, released in September 2025, is simple: you can’t have impact unless you know what needs to be done, and you can’t close a gap unless you know how much money is already going toward it.

One Earth had already built a rigorous, science-based framework: three pillars (energy transition, nature conservation, and regenerative agriculture) built on a systems model, charting a path to net zero by 2055. What hadn’t existed was a way to map real capital flows directly onto that framework. That’s what VDL built: a data pipeline that reads how thousands of companies and nonprofits on the ground describe their work — via their own websites, tax filings, and public descriptions — and sorting that activity into the framework’s categories.

“It was a real synergistic advance,” Eric said. Suddenly it was possible to see not just that nature-based solutions were underfunded, but by how much, and to click through and see exactly which organizations were working in a given space, and who was funding them. The result is both the report and its companion tool, the One Earth Solutions Finance Tracker, an interactive dashboard that lets funders explore who’s doing what, and who’s already backing it.

What the Data Shows

The headline numbers are stark. Energy transition solutions pull in roughly 89% of tracked climate finance, while nature conservation receives just 4%. This is despite nature-based solutions being central to nearly every credible climate model, including One Earth’s own, which finds that restoring degraded lands alone could contribute close to half the carbon sequestration needed to hit net zero by 2055.

But the more interesting story, Maggie and Eric both stressed, is in the detail beneath those headlines. Even within the well-funded energy pillar, money clusters around “a few shiny objects”. Solar photovoltaic alone attracts roughly half of tracked clean-energy funding, despite projections that it will make up only around a fifth of the future energy mix based on the most recent One Earth “Razor’s Edge” Climate Model. Meanwhile, less flashy but critical solutions like renewable heat (geothermal, electric, solar, etc.) receive less than 2% of Energy Transition funding even though, for example, industrial heat accounts for two thirds of industrial emissions.

The pattern repeats in agriculture, where nearly a fifth of regenerative agriculture funding flows to meat-free proteins alone, while a cluster of soil-building solutions like agroforestry and cropland restoration — arguably just as vital to a resilient food system — receive less than 2% of that. And within nature conservation, Indigenous-led land stewardship receives less than 6% of nature philanthropy, despite Indigenous peoples managing an estimated 39% of Earth’s remaining intact ecosystems.

Not One Gap — Many Gaps, for Many Kinds of Capital

If there’s one message Maggie wants funders to take from this work, it’s that there’s no single right answer to “where should I invest?” As Eric put it, “there are more gaps than non-gaps”.The challenge is finding the right gap for your specific capital and strategy.

Maggie offered a concrete illustration: VDL’s work with the Grantham Foundation focuses on early-stage innovation gaps, while its work with Elemental Impact focuses on the very different problem of scaling companies that have already proven a technology but are “too risky to be bankable.” Both are legitimate philanthropic roles serving the same broader transition — but they require entirely different lenses on the same underlying data. “There’s not one blanket statement here,” Maggie said. “It’s nuanced, and context is everything.”

An Honest Accounting of the Data’s Limits

With “transparency” as one of their core values, both Maggie and Eric were candid about what the tracker can and can’t see. One challenge for them, and the wider field, is data consistency across geographies. VDL’s work currently focuses on entities with US headquarters (including those that work internationally) building their data pipeline from what organizations disclose about themselves — tax filings, websites, self-descriptions. Philanthropic data is the hardest to track globally: in the US, a single dataset of tax filings covers most nonprofit activity, while in Europe, reporting is fragmented country by country.

That means smaller organizations without a website, or those that don’t describe their work in the specific language the model looks for — including many Indigenous-led, gender-led, or smallholder-farmer initiatives — can be underrepresented. As Eric put it plainly: “This is a sample, not a census.” But he and Maggie are confident the sample is strong enough to trust its broad strokes. The gap between funding for agroforestry and funding for electric vehicles, for instance, is not a rounding error. 

Why It Matters to Us

This is exactly the kind of work we love to spotlight: rigorous, honest, and built by people willing to say clearly what they know and what they don’t. Minding the Gaps gives funders a map, and an invitation to look more closely at where their particular capital could matter most.

You can explore the full report and the interactive One Earth Solutions Finance Tracker. If you’re a funder wondering where your own dollars might fill a real gap, Maggie and Eric’s answer is simple: with solution roadmaps like One Earth’s – we know what needs to be done, and whatever your interests and your impact strategy, there is a gap for you. The data is there to help you find out how you can best leverage your unique role.