Climate Change
Pursuing 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 1.5°C 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 gone far beyond safe limits, and our decarbonization agenda will remain vulnerable for decades to come.
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 climate
The eleven years from 2015 to 2025 were the warmest on record. In 2024, global average temperatures were 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels, making it the first year where warming breached the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement. Roughly half a degree of additional warming is currently ‘masked’ by air pollution; as air pollution and fossil fuel use decline, warming will accelerate.
“Climate overshoot” – warming far beyond the limits that scientists and governments agreed to – is now inevitable. Over the course of this century, we will subject billions of people to extreme heat and flooding, see large-scale displacement, set off feedback loops accelerating emissions from natural systems like permafrost and wetlands, and potentially cause the disruption of ocean currents in the Atlantic, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and the melt of major Antarctic glaciers. The world needs to prepare, and our strategy focuses on supporting organizations working to navigate this new reality.
Funding Priorities
The Navigation Fund is focused on what we think of as stabilization: identifying what is newly at risk in a world of climate overshoot and expanding our social, political, and technological toolkits to protect it.
This is a broad category, touching on decarbonization, climate science, engineering, adaptation and resilience, governance, and carbon removal, among other things. We have made grants in all these areas but focus our funding on two:
Earth systems stabilization
Reducing derailment risks for decarbonization
Earth systems stabilization
Global warming is triggering new instabilities in critical Earth systems whose shift or collapse this century would imperil billions of people in communities around the world. These instabilities include:
Loss of critical ecosystems: Warming is already threatening coral reefs around the world; researchers expect the Arctic Ocean to see an ice-free summer before 2050; the Amazon rainforest could slowly transform into a grassland.
Ice-sheet collapse: Sea levels could rise rapidly this century, largely due to the potential collapse of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. This would displace hundreds of millions of people.
Weakening ocean currents: Important currents that transport heat around the world could significantly weaken. This would bring much colder temperatures to Europe while disrupting rainfall in West Africa and Asia, threatening food supply for millions of people.
Increasing ecosystem emissions: Hotter temperatures cause ecosystems like wetlands (through offgassing), permafrost (through thaw), and forests (through fire) to release more emissions, creating a feedback loop. This process alone could increase temperatures by 0.2-0.4°C.
Declining planetary reflectivity: Reductions in cloud cover, sea-ice cover, and air pollution are causing the Earth to absorb and trap even more solar energy, accelerating warming.
We support efforts to understand these systems, evaluate whether they can be safely and effectively stabilized, and address the underlying drivers of the risk. This includes building monitoring and observation platforms, researching stabilization pathways like glacier stabilization and sunlight reflection, and reducing superpollutants like methane that drive near-term warming.
Our grants support both scientists conducting research and civil society groups working on governance, regulation, and public engagement. Read more about our approach to funding research and open science here.
Reducing derailment risk for decarbonization
To protect societies, nature, and Earth systems in the long run, we need to ensure that emissions continue to fall even in a more turbulent world. This will be particularly challenging as the impacts of climate change itself (disasters, displacement) begin to directly reduce our physical capacity and political will to reduce emissions at the speed required. Our program funds work that makes societies more resilient to these risks.
Some of our grants in this category have supported:
Advocacy for innovation funding for new clean technologies that would make deep decarbonization easier
Adaptation efforts to manage heat stress in cities
Building more politically diverse constituencies for climate action
Scaling up carbon dioxide removal
Given the wide range of topics, we fund a number of distinct projects at different levels of development.
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.