Combating climate change has become an increasingly important global issue as the effects of rising temperatures impact everything from the rising cost of housing to higher grocery store bills.

While world leaders debate how to best tackle the problem, the question of “How are we going to pay for all this?” is always top of mind. The answer: climate finance, which the United Nations broadly defines as “local, national or transnational financing—drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing—that seeks to support mitigation and adaptation actions that will address climate change.”

These days, the private sector has become an increasingly important source of climate cash as some governments reverse course on climate commitments. However, as a new report by the nonprofit One Earth and Vibrant Data Labs found, the amount of money being invested into climate causes is both not enough and unevenly distributed between priority areas. Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour spoke with Justin Winters, Co-Founder and Executive Director of One Earth, to find out what’s driving this gap and what can be done about it.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation:

Sabri Ben-Achour: So when we talk about climate finance, what are we talking about?

Justin Winters: Well, we're talking about how resources flow. You know, both investment and philanthropic capital -- all capital really -- how it's flowing to address the climate crisis.

Ben-Achour: When we think about resources flowing -- investing money in things that might fight climate change -- you have three buckets kind of investment that can get us there. Could you explain those and maybe give us an example?

Winters: Climate finance over the past decade has nearly doubled, but it still only remains a sliver of global investment, and in fact, less than 2% of philanthropic giving is going to climate and environment. We did a really fascinating analysis with a company called Vibrant Data Labs, and assessed and evaluated nearly $400 billion in both private investment capital and philanthropic grants across more than 10,000 U.S.-based companies and nonprofits, and identified, where are those funds flowing to climate solutions, and where are they not flowing?

Ben-Achour: Where is the money going and where is it not going?

Winters: We found some incredible imbalances, and the way that we assessed this was really looking at climate solutions. So, what are the things that we need to invest in and support in order to solve this incredibly complex, challenging problem? What we found is that almost 89% of all private [climate-based] capital in the U.S. is flowing to the energy transition. Now this isn't a bad thing, but there are two other critical solution pathways that we need to invest in if we want to create a future that's livable. So that includes things like nature conservation and transitioning our food and our fiber systems to regenerative agriculture. So in the scope of our analysis, nature conservation only received 4% of total climate finance funding, and regenerative agriculture wasn't much better. It received only 7%.

Ben-Achour: So how do you get money to nature conservation or regenerative agriculture? Are we thinking like early stage venture capital funding, or is this something that governments have to take on?

Winters: Well, it's certainly something that governments have to take on. We need that form of capital, too, but there's opportunity across all these pillars. For nature conservation, that's the one that is particularly reliant both on government funding as well as philanthropic capital. But you know, things like regenerative agriculture, I mean, there are incredible opportunities for all types of capital, including venture capital, including investment capital, but we need to be more thoughtful about the types of capital to the solutions that need to support it, and what stage those solutions are at. We need to think holistically, and we need to be thinking in an innovative mindset about new markets that are going to emerge. I mean, I'm particularly excited about regenerative agriculture and all the ways in which we can support our farmers and our food systems to transition to something that is more conducive to biodiversity, more conducive to human health.