Industrious Labs seeks to address climate change by decarbonising heavy industry through advocacy, capacity building, and research.

Addressing climate change
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What problem is Industrious Labs working on?

Industrious Labs exists to deliver unstoppable policies, people power, and analysis to drastically reduce dangerous emissions, hold industry accountable to communities and workers, and develop a circular economy.

Today, heavy industry contributes 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions, making it the largest source of climate pollution. Industrious Labs’ mission is to decarbonise heavy industry by 2045. Its campaigns target the industrial sector and work to align strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with policies that expand good jobs. Industrious Labs also works with partners to advance environmental justice.

What does Industrious Labs do?

Industrious Labs works with movement partners to develop campaign strategies, support the execution of campaigns, and develop diverse coalitions to tackle industrial sectors.

It does this through four main activities:

  1. Focused campaigns: Industrious Labs runs and supports advocacy campaigns that bring together stakeholders from climate, labour, environmental justice, business, and more to run focused, strategic campaigns that adopt administrative policy, win corporate commitments, and lock in decisions that will drive the phase-out of fossil fuels in the industrial sector.
  2. Research and analysis: Advocates and policymakers lack the data and analysis to run strategic campaigns and make informed policy decisions that drive decarbonisation. Industrious Labs’ Analysis Department synthesises a wide array of unorganised data on emissions, economic output, demographics, and more — providing analysis that serves strategy development, campaign execution, and policy making.
  3. Capacity building: There are too few organisations working on industrial decarbonisation, especially organisations led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour. Industrious Labs works to recruit and support capacity building with stakeholders in key frontline communities to build the movement for industrial decarbonisation.
  4. Sharp communications: Industrial decarbonisation is a tremendous opportunity — not only to eliminate one third of US emissions but also to restore American jobs and address harmful pollution that sickens environmental justice communities. Industrious Labs’ communications staff works with allied organisations to drive stories and build political will for change.

Industrious Labs launched in October 2022 after 16 months of incubation.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Industrious Labs?1.

We don't currently have further information about the cost-effectiveness of Industrious Labs beyond it doing work in a high-impact cause area and taking a reasonably promising approach.

Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).

At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.