How Philanthropy Can Help Tackle the Worst-Case Climate Change Scenarios

About five years ago, stuck at home during the pandemic, I began researching what I could personally do to help address climate change. There were and are many ways to help reduce emissions, which we need to do faster and better. But after a career in Silicon Valley focusing on how to scale technology, I wondered: were there high-potential tools hiding in plain sight—overlooked and underfunded—that could make a big difference to people’s lives?

Over time, I came across a number of early stage ideas that have the potential for outsized impact, but also have basic uncertainties. Are they safe? Could they make a difference on a scale that matters? And I realized that governments, businesses, and philanthropies were doing very little to evaluate the full range of tools that humanity might need to avert the worst effects of climate change.

Here are the basic facts that concern me today: The best scientists say that reducing or eliminating carbon emissions is critical and insufficient. We’ve emitted so much carbon dioxide that existing emissions will leave us with a dangerously warmer planet, even if they went to zero tomorrow. We’re on track to overshoot the Paris Agreement’s warming goals—and that could trigger devastating consequences, from collapsing glaciers to mass displacement from extreme weather events. 

In that seemingly dire situation, what aren’t we doing? First, we need far better forecasting—tools and science that can tell us if and when these catastrophic risks might unfold. It matters not just whether glaciers are collapsing, but how fast. Second, we need effective, safe, and scalable strategies for managing those risks if they arise. 

To manage the “overshoot” scenario, we need to understand risks more clearly. In parallel, we need to build and test tools that could help us prevent or reduce the worst impacts. That mission now shapes my approach to climate philanthropy.

Helping to Build Carbon to Sea

The first cutting edge area of climate science that I dove into was removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, in part because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said several years ago that it must be part of any comprehensive response to climate change. Carbon removal at the scale experts call for is a challenge – there are basic science questions, technology questions, economic questions, and many different potential pathways.

I began supporting research into ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE)—a highly promising, scalable, but underexplored form of carbon removal. The concept is simple: the ocean already absorbs about a third of our carbon emissions every year. If we could safely accelerate the ocean’s natural process to draw down more carbon dioxide, it could be a valuable tool, and help remove harmful emissions in the long run.

Around that time, the National Academies of Science published a landmark study calling for more research—and funding—to advance tools like ocean alkalinity enhancement. 

But it became clear that making progress in this space required more than funding isolated research projects. There needed to be a focused team of people who would wake up every day thinking about how to move the entire field forward, given how nascent it was.

So we helped build Carbon to Sea to be that team—an independent organization that starts from the problem and figures out what’s needed to solve it. If the next step is developing controlled test sites, they can help create them. If it’s answering policy and governance questions, they can build a team to answer them. If we need to grow the number of scientists working on the problem, they could identify and fund them.

This flexible, focused model is working; they are doing all of the above. So far, they have awarded more than $24 million in grant funding, built a global network of partners and grantees, and won initial support from policymakers in both parties—no easy feat. 

Carbon to Sea has now raised more than $50 million from a range of top climate funders who see the value of an organization that can swiftly allocate resources, adjust strategies in real time, and focus intensely on outcomes. 

Tackling Hard, High Potential Challenges with Focused Teams

We’re now applying this flexible, focused team-building model to a broader set of underfunded, high-potential efforts aimed at managing the risks of climate overshoot.

For example, we’re supporting the Arete Glacier Initiative, a new team focused on understanding and potentially stabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—a massive driver of future sea-level rise that could cause devastating consequences if it collapses. Arete is bringing together glaciologists, oceanographers, and climate modelers to better predict how fast the ice sheet is changing and explore what, if anything, might be done to slow or prevent catastrophic collapse.

We’ve also helped launch Reflective, a team working to advance the science and governance of sunlight reflection. Sunlight reflection is exactly what it sounds like — trying to cool the earth by reflecting a tiny percentage of sunlight. It’s a controversial topic in climate science, but doing research shouldn’t be controversial if we truly believe that we need to evaluate every potential idea to prevent crises on a global scale. Reflective is working to build a responsible research agenda and evaluate whether sunlight reflection could ever play a role in reducing risk in an overshoot scenario.

Meanwhile, Spark is tackling methane, through both innovative abatement technologies and atmospheric methane removal. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas with an outsized role in near-term warming. Cutting methane quickly is one of the few ways we can buy time against fast-approaching climate thresholds, and Spark is focused on accelerating ideas that could work at scale, but haven’t yet gotten the attention they deserve.

These organizations—Carbon to Sea, Arete, Reflective, and Spark—are nimble, focused teams of high caliber people, who start from a problem statement and work backwards to solutions. Each combines scientific expertise with practical execution, and all of them are structured to adapt quickly as the science evolves and opportunities emerge. They aren’t wedded to any outcome; they are designed to create knowledge.  

My philanthropy, Outlier Projects, is one of a growing number of climate funders supporting these fit for purpose teams. But all of the tools these teams are researching need more resources and support in order to be evaluated and potentially developed at the scale that can make a difference. For philanthropists who are concerned about the gravest risks of climate change — and understand the work we need to do to address climate overshoot — these are some of the highest-leverage, urgent investments you can make.