Climate Change
Pursuing climate stabilization in an era of climate overshoot
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Liam St Louis
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I decided to work on climate change because of a talk by marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She explained how climate change wasn’t just warming the planet; through ocean acidification, caused by the ocean absorbing excess atmospheric carbon dioxide, it was already triggering chemical changes, causing crabs and other sea creatures to start to dissolve their shells and deform their bodies just to survive.
That hit me in a way that abstract talk of declining crop yields and rising seas never had. I quit my job a few months later to figure out how I could help. My path led first to helping launch a policy group on carbon dioxide removal, one of the tools needed to bring CO2 levels back to normal, and then to philanthropy, where I’ve worked with foundations grappling with a new climate reality: a world where, despite massive progress on clean energy, emissions reductions alone can no longer prevent potentially catastrophic levels of climate change.
We launched The Navigation Fund’s Climate Change program in January 2025 under two shadows: the announcement that 2024 was the first year on record in which global warming surpassed the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C maximum target and the imminent return to office of Donald Trump, who had promised to eviscerate the U.S. climate policy apparatus.
It’s clear we’re operating with destabilized politics on a destabilized planet. We have pushed our planet beyond safe limits, and our decarbonization agenda will remain vulnerable as long as it depends on sacrifices made by regular people with more pressing problems.
That doesn’t mean we can give up. Now more than ever, future generations depend on us. But getting back to stability will require new ideas, new solutions, and a new generation of talent, leaving no stone unturned in the fight for a thriving planet. I hope that our work at The Navigation Fund can help others to find the way forward and even give the crabs a chance to rebuild their shells.
A Destabilized Planet
The ten years from 2015 to 2024 were the ten warmest on record. Global average temperatures were 1.55°C above the historical average in 2024, the first year warming breached the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement. Around half a degree of additional warming is currently ‘masked’ by air pollution; the closer we get to zero emissions, the more that warming will be felt.
All that heat will contribute to a destabilizing feedback loop through emissions from permafrost, forests, soils, and wetlands. And global emissions continue to rise, year on year. Despite historic levels of clean energy deployment, even the best case scenario will see hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted over the next few decades.
“Climate overshoot” is now inevitable. Over the course of this century, we will risk destabilizing earth systems and crossing tipping points like the collapse of Atlantic currents, dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and the melt of major Antarctic glaciers. The world needs to prepare, and our strategy focuses on supporting organizations responding to this new reality.
Our Approach
We have two complimentary focus areas:
Reducing derailment risk for decarbonization
Climate stabilization
Funding Priorities
Reducing Derailment Risk for Decarbonization
We fund work that helps ensure emissions continue to fall, even in a more turbulent world. That includes support for efforts to reduce systemic risks that could derail climate progress and for neglected levers of decarbonization, such as superpollutant emissions and durable carbon removal, where solutions are not on track to reach scale.
Examples of systemic risks to climate action include:
Impacts of climate change itself (disasters, refugee crises) that directly reduce our physical capacity or political will to continue reducing emissions
Cuts to innovation funding for new clean technologies that would make deep decarbonization easier
Deepening political polarization of climate action
Many other potential risks fit under this category. Given the wide range of topics, we fund a number of distinct projects at different levels of development.
Increasing Public Understanding of Emergency Climate Interventions
Aggressively reducing emissions must remain the top priority of climate action. But with damages accelerating, societies will face hard choices about how to respond. We support work that helps societies understand whether certain interventions could reduce harm.
These interventions, often called emergency climate interventions, could rapidly limit many climate impacts and lessen the risk of collapse for key Earth systems. Approaches include a variety of Sunlight Reflection Methods (SRM), as well as targeted efforts to stabilize Antarctic glaciers or sea ice. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the World Climate Research Programme, and the United Nations Environmental Programme, among others, have called for greater research into SRM.
These interventions are not a cure-all; they carry their own risks, and they would not reduce the need to rapidly reduce global emissions. But if found to be safe, effective, and democratically legitimate, they might reduce the harms caused by climate change while decarbonization progresses.
We believe that societies deserve reliable information so they can make informed and transparent decisions about these interventions. The Navigation Fund supports scientific research and public engagement, including in the Global South. We do not support deployment or advocacy for deployment.
Read more about our approach to funding research and open science.
Interested in Supporting This Work?
We collaborate with institutional funders and individual donors on pooled funding, co-funding opportunities, and strategic advising.
Grantee Highlights
Arête Glacier Initiative is combining advanced engineering and sophisticated modelling to better understand the speed and scale of glacier melt in the West Antarctic and to explore approaches to preventing total collapse.
Operaatio Arktis, founded by a group of Finnish climate activists, is working to make Finland and other Nordic countries leaders in understanding climate tipping points in the Arctic while researching approaches to preserve a stable Arctic climate.
The Degrees Initiative funds researchers in the Global South to study the potential impacts of sunlight reflection method technologies. Fourteen Degrees Initiative-funded researchers were selected as authors and editors of the IPCC’s 7th Assessment Report on climate change, ensuring that a diverse base of expertise will shape the world’s most influential climate body.
Select Grant Recipients
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Our Process
We operate on a rolling, year-long grantmaking structure and prioritize efficiency so organizations can access funding when they need it most. We use an invitation-only model, proactively identifying organizations whose work aligns with our priorities.