Climate Change
Climate change threatens the security and prosperity of billions of people, but dangerous levels of warming are already locked in, posing catastrophic levels of risk to societies worldwide. We support efforts to understand, navigate, and prevent the catastrophic climate risks facing a world of climate overshoot.
Overview
The ten years from 2015 to 2024 were the ten warmest years on record. In 2024, global average temperatures were 1.55°C above the historical average, making it the first year where 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 crossing tipping points like the collapse of Atlantic currents, dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and the collapse 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
Increasing public understanding of emergency climate interventions
We are also exploring opportunities to radically improve the climate monitoring, observation, and data infrastructure needed to understand and respond to climate threats. Read more about our approach to funding research and open science.
Our program is global in scope. We are especially open to supporting emerging and early-stage projects with potential for major long-term impact.
Focus Areas
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 keep reducing emissions
Cuts to innovation funding for new clean technologies that will 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 expect to fund a number of distinct projects at different levels of development.
Increasing Public Understanding of Emergency Climate Interventions
Aggressively reducing emissions needs to remain the top priority of climate action. But with climate damages accelerating and temperatures already rising past 1.5°C, 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, might be able to 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 collapsing Antarctic glaciers that threaten to raise sea levels by several meters or to protect Arctic sea ice. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the World Climate Research Programme, and the United Nations Environmental Programme, among others, have recently called for greater research into Sunlight Reflection Methods.
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 they might be able to reduce the harms caused by climate change while decarbonization progresses, if found to be safe, effective, and democratically legitimate.
We believe that societies deserve reliable information so they can make informed and transparent decisions about the use of these interventions. The Navigation Fund supports scientific research and public engagement, including in the global south, to answer key questions people may have. We do not support deployment or advocacy for deployment in any form.