The Climate Environment: The Landscape of US Environmental Nonprofits in the Climate Change Era

While past research has examined how individuals, businesses, and governments respond to climate change, researchers have yet to map systematically how meso-level organizational actors – particularly environmental nonprofit organizations (ENPOs) – are confronting this pressing global challenge. This paper analyzes how US ENPOs incorporate climate change into their missions and programming, using computational text analysis of over 5,000 nonprofits’ reporting forms to better understand the organizational fields in which they are situated. We identify 21 distinct semantic topics that encapsulate ENPO activity and assess how climate change surfaces across them. Although climate change is central to several topics, it has not crowded out traditional ENPO priorities such as wildlife, conservation, and nature appreciation, which appear largely isolated from explicitly climate-focused topics. ENPOs’ use of the 21 topics varies by organizational characteristics, with younger, larger, and metropolitan nonprofits more likely to describe their mission and programming with climate change-related language. This study provides a comprehensive empirical mapping of the ENPO sector and the contours of its organizational fields, contributing to environmental sociology, organizational studies, and nonprofit research by illuminating civil society’s response to climate change.