This is a critical climate moment—and the stakes are rising fast. Global warming broke 1.5°C last year and has remained there despite the end of the warming El Niño cycle, which is surprising and alarming scientists. Greenhouse gas emissions remain at record highs despite the global community knowing they must precipitously drop. And now natural systems like tropical forests and wetlands show signs of absorbing fewer greenhouse gases and emitting more, raising the threat of climate warming feedback loops, while ice sheets disintegrate and other climate tipping points loom. The impacts of climate change are prominent today, from worsened wildfires to historic floods. And of course political realignment in the US and elsewhere not only slows climate action but is limiting capacity for much-needed innovation.

Even before the recent jump in temperatures, consideration of warming-induced feedbacks, and political changes, we were already on course for a future with roughly 2.5 to 3.0°C of warming in 2100, and probably even more after then. That is a grim scenario—in which impacts like extreme heat, violent storms, food and water scarcity would cause large-scale disruption, suffering, and economic losses. This is not the planet we want to leave for our descendants. The good news is that this future isn’t locked in–yet.

So how do we turn from the path we are on toward a safer, stable climate future? We need both ambition and innovation. Ambition to more aggressively deploy solutions we have in hand today, and innovation to develop solutions we need tomorrow but don’t have yet. As some governments retreat from climate action, philanthropy must step in and play a larger catalytic role on both fronts. 

Here’s what we know: we have to rapidly transition each emitting sector—including power, transportation, agriculture, industry, buildings, and waste—to their cleaner, greener versions. We need to move the needle on all of these sectors, all at once, and fast. Gone are the days where we can pick and choose sectors or specific greenhouse gases to act on. Skip a sector, and there is no feasible way to stop the ongoing upwards march of warming. Skip a major greenhouse gas, and to achieve the same overall warming avoidance, suddenly already-near-impossible targets for other greenhouse gases become yet more implausible. Some of these areas are more neglected than others, but all need philanthropic investment to scale what’s working, and to develop new approaches—be those technical, financial, social, or political—where efforts aren’t working yet.

In some sectors, like power and transportation, we already have many of the technical tools needed to significantly reduce emissions, though even there, innovation is still required to be able to address the entirety of the challenge cost-efficiently. Furthermore, the better and more economically advantageous available solutions are, the easier the politics of adoption become. Ideally, solutions are attractive enough that market forces alone drive adoption. Philanthropy can play a key role in pushing the policy, economic, and social levers to deploy those solutions faster and at the scale we need. 

In other cases, we don’t yet have scalable solutions. Take the super pollutant methane. Not addressing methane is no longer an option. It is responsible for almost 30% of current warming and is increasing rapidly in the atmosphere due to high ongoing emissions. There are available solutions for slashing emissions of methane from most sources, such as oil and gas, but not from the largest single source of human-driven methane emissions: livestock. Methane emissions from livestock digestion—or “enteric methane”—is a very large and growing climate challenge that demands innovation. Developing anti-methane solutions that support livestock productivity is one example avenue of a likely rapidly-deployable, scalable approach to reducing these emissions. Livestock emissions today represent about 10% of current warming,¹ and without addressing this, business-as-usual trajectories would have livestock methane adding 0.25°C to warming in 2100. 

Research, and in some cases, the start of deployment, is now beginning to happen on potentially promising innovations that could significantly reduce enteric methane emissions, including feed additives, vaccines, and selective breeding. Not all of these solutions will pan out, and like in every climate sector, we need to be looking for silver buckshots instead of a sole silver bullet. But there is a good chance that with the right mix of innovations and policies, we can make a big dent in the biggest single source of methane emissions. It’s vital that philanthropic funders continue to invest in high-potential, early-stage climate fields to prepare solutions for tomorrow in parallel with continuing to support the strategies that are working to deploy available solutions today.    

Here’s another hard truth: reducing emissions won’t be enough. We must continue to drive innovations for carbon dioxide removal and scale up the most effective solutions. Even though carbon dioxide removal is in its early days today, given our historical and ongoing emissions, there is no pathway to a stable climate without it. We also need to explore the feasibility of approaches to removing other greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, including researching options for methane removal as recently called for by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Some removal approaches will fail. But without bold philanthropic investors willing to jump in early, scientists won’t find the approaches that can and do ultimately work. Philanthropic funders taking a portfolio approach, much like a venture capitalist, betting on a range of different approaches, rather than trying to pick an individual winner early in the game, can help achieve these necessarily ambitious goals.

We also need to accept that climate change is already here and the impacts are already being felt, particularly for the most vulnerable communities. Ambition and innovation in the adaptation space are needed. For example, the Gates Foundation has been highly catalytic in driving advances in adaptation, like supporting the development of drought-resistant maize. But adaptation solutions are generally significantly underfunded, and philanthropy has a key role to play in bridging that gap. 

Additional fields deserve careful research as well, best supported outside of for-profit activity—from understanding if there are ways to stabilize glaciers already showing concerning melting patterns, to understanding the full system impacts of potential climate intervention strategies.

We’re too late in the game to have the luxury of only focusing on one problem, choosing only a subset of sectors to tackle, or only supporting currently available solutions. The challenge to climate philanthropy in this moment is to scale and strategize to be able to direct resources to scale every working strategy, turn every stone for new solutions, and constantly evolve and learn from what is working and what’s not. Whether that’s scaling solutions today, or preparing the solutions of tomorrow, we need all of it, and more.

Footnotes

‍¹ First-order approximation given anthropogenic methane emissions’ contribution to current warming (28% of gross warming from 1850-1900 to 2010-2019; IPCC AR6 WGI SPM Fig 2 2021) and livestock’s share of recent anthropogenic methane emissions (32%; Jackson et al. 2024).