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The challenge

To avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to evaluate every potential solution. The oceans represent a vast, yet dramatically underfunded opportunity.

There is growing evidence that we will overshoot the 1.5° C threshold laid out in the Paris Agreement. This will require us to evaluate a broader set of tools in the decades ahead to repair and prevent damage to our communities and ecosystems.

Over millennia, oceans have played a critical role in stabilizing our planet’s climate. We are taking an ambitious path by investing in oceans as a tool to help combat climate change.

 

Oceans play a critical role in stabilizing climate

70%

of our planet is covered by oceans

25%

of carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by the ocean

90%

of excess heat from emissions is captured by the ocean

0.1%

of ocean-focused philanthropy is for climate solutions

Our hope

Living sustainably with our oceans and planet

We have seen firsthand the damage that climate change has done to our oceans, including coral reefs. While the oceans house some of our most vulnerable ecosystems, they also offer some of the most powerful potential climate solutions. 

We back innovative and overlooked technologies, including those that actively remove greenhouse gases and those that mitigate potential harm to our ecosystems. The challenge is that we don’t yet know which tools work the best, and what the potential tradeoffs are. We need to evaluate every tool, prioritizing scientific integrity.

We hope to help create a world in which future generations live more sustainably with our oceans, the planet, and each other.

Select Grantees

We are proud to support visionary leaders and organizations who are advancing their fields. Some of our grantees include:

Coral Gardeners

Founded on the island of Mo'orea, Coral Gardeners' mission is to revolutionize ocean conservation through actively planting resilient corals at numerous sites in French Polynesia and beyond.

Carbon to Sea

For billions of years, minerals on land have been washing into the ocean, creating slightly alkaline waters and drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Ocean Visions

Ocean Visions is a science-based conservation organization focused on the interlocking ocean and climate crises.

Arête Glacier Initiative

Arête Glacier Initiative is a nonprofit focused on forecasting and managing the risk of sea-level rise, particularly from vulnerable glaciers like Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica.

Revive & Restore

Revive & Restore’s Advanced Coral Toolkit develops and applies cutting-edge biotechnologies to advance coral reef conservation and management.

The Nature Conservancy

The Nature Conservancy is one of most effective and wide-reaching environmental organizations in the world.

Cascade

Cascade is a philanthropically-backed nonprofit accelerating progress in interventions that harness Earthʼs natural systems—from soils, to oceans, to glaciers—to help stabilize our climate.

Spark Climate Solutions

A science-driven nonprofit, Spark Climate Solutions accelerates progress in emerging, high-impact climate fields. Spark’s current programs focus on unsolved super climate pollutant emissions.

Great Barrier Reef Foundation

The Foundation is creating a better future for the world’s coral reefs by helping them adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Coral Gardeners

Coral reefs are the most biodiverse and valuable ecosystems on our planet, yet they are one of the most impacted by climate change and human pressures, in peril of going extinct by 2050. Founded on the island of Mo'orea, Coral Gardeners' mission is to revolutionize ocean conservation through actively planting resilient corals at numerous sites in French Polynesia and beyond, creating awareness campaigns and engaging activities to inspire local and global action, and scaling the work by applying innovative technology solutions in service of the reef.

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Carbon to Sea

For billions of years, minerals on land have been washing into the ocean, creating slightly alkaline waters and drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon to Sea is the leading initiative to explore whether the acceleration of this natural process, known as Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement, can safely remove and store carbon dioxide. This research could be pivotal in preventing the worst potential outcomes of climate change.

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Ocean Visions

Ocean Visions is a science-based conservation organization focused on the interlocking ocean and climate crises. Their work is based on the substantial body of science indicating that without confronting the planet's energy and carbon dioxide imbalances, no other conservation measures will be able to address the cascade of impacts to the ocean and planet. Focusing on neglected areas like prolonging Arctic Sea Ice and marine carbon dioxide removal, they catalyze action by providing detailed insights to institutions around the world to accelerate the development of potential solutions in the fight against climate change.

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Arête Glacier Initiative

Arête Glacier Initiative is a nonprofit focused on forecasting and managing the risk of sea-level rise, particularly from vulnerable glaciers like Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. By advancing research on sea-level rise modeling, monitoring, and observational technology, we aim to improve predictions to inform mitigation and adaptation strategies. We also assess the safety, feasibility, and effectiveness of potential interventions to stabilize ice sheets and actively manage rates of sea-level rise, enabling science-based societal decisions to address the impacts of climate change and protect at-risk communities.

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Revive & Restore

Coral reefs are among the most important—and most imperiled—ecosystems on the planet. Revive & Restore’s Advanced Coral Toolkit develops and applies cutting-edge biotechnologies to advance coral reef conservation and management. From cryopreserving coral fragments to transferring resilience through stem cell transplants, identifying stress-response genes, and developing probiotic treatments for coral disease, Advanced Coral Toolkit projects pioneer transformative methods to boost coral diversity and resilience. These tools create actionable coral conservation solutions for the present while laying the groundwork for future intervention options.

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The Nature Conservancy

The Nature Conservancy is one of most effective and wide-reaching environmental organizations in the world. As part of their efforts to protect the ocean and tackle climate change, they are developing and demonstrating innovative tools and technologies to reduce costs and dramatically scale coral production for restoration.

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Cascade

Cascade is a philanthropically-backed nonprofit accelerating progress in interventions that harness Earthʼs natural systems—from soils, to oceans, to glaciers—to help stabilize our climate. Since its founding, Cascade has established itself as the leading hub of field-acceleration work in enhanced rock weathering at a critical inflection-point moment for the ecosystem.

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Spark Climate Solutions

A science-driven nonprofit, Spark Climate Solutions accelerates progress in emerging, high-impact climate fields. Spark’s current programs focus on unsolved super climate pollutant emissions. Super pollutants, including methane and nitrous oxide, cause more than half of current warming. Spark’s current programs work to grow the fields working on livestock enteric methane mitigation, methane removal, transformational agricultural nitrogen management, and warming-induced emissions science and monitoring. Spark takes a deeply collaborative field-building approach, doing a mixture of direct work in the field, regranting, and launching new initiatives in order to support the growth of talent, institutional capacity, and collective knowledge to set up each field for long-term success.

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Great Barrier Reef Foundation

The Foundation is creating a better future for the world’s coral reefs by helping them adapt to the impacts of climate change. As the largest coral reef charity on the planet, it raises funds, invests in innovative ideas and designs real-world, scalable conservation programs that are delivering breakthroughs in marine and terrestrial restoration. Walking in step with First Nations Peoples and front-line communities in Australia and the Pacific, it’s fast-tracking and deploying solutions around the world.

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Advisory Board

David Koweek, PhD

Chief Scientist, Ocean Visions

David Koweek, Ph.D. is Chief Scientist at Ocean Visions, where he is responsible for ensuring scientific accuracy and integrity. David is trained as a marine and Earth system scientist. He has led and participated in field expeditions all across the world, including on the Great Barrier Reef, the Ross Sea, the California coast, the Sargasso Sea, and natural carbon dioxide vents off Italy. An expert in evaluating the potential of various ocean solutions, David is a frequent participant in research conferences and expert-level panels, including recent panels for the Energy Futures Initiative, the Foundation for Climate Restoration, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. His scholarly works have been published in top-tier journals, including Nature. Prior to his role with Ocean Visions, David was a postdoctoral research scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.S. from Brown University.

Julie Pullen, MS, PhD

Founding Partner & Chief Scientist, Propeller Ventures

Dr. Julie Pullen is an oceanographer and meteorologist working on climate resilience and climate solutions. Her expertise spans climate, weather and water with a particular focus on climate solutions/interventions, earth system prediction, AI and climate tech. A founding Partner and Chief Scientist with Propeller Ventures (an ocean climate solutions VC fund), she was earlier the Climate Strategist (and previously, Director of Product) with Jupiter Intelligence, a climate risk analytics startup. 

She was an ocean engineering professor at Stevens Institute of Technology where she held a joint appointment with the Department of Energy’s Environmental and Climate Sciences division and was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in the Philippines. A former oceanographer with the Navy, she was a Science Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and led the Department of Homeland Security’s National Maritime Security Center. She is a Fellow of the Explorers Club for her scientific exploration achievements.

Dr. Pullen serves on the U.S. Government’s National Climate Security Roundtable and the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) advisory committee for Sustainability and Climate Risk. She is on the board of Waterfront Alliance and Ocean Visions, and is an advisor to Carbon to Sea. 

Dr. Pullen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee peer-reviewing the two most recent National Climate Assessments, as well as panels on Earth System Prediction and Ocean Observations. She was a chapter co-author of the New York City Panel on Climate Change report. She was elected to the leadership councils of both the American Meteorological Society and The Oceanography Society and also co-chaired their largest meetings.

Marc von Keitz, MS, PhD

Director, Grantham Foundation

As Director of the Grantham Foundation, Marc is supporting the development of innovative climate solutions, with an emphasis on ocean-based carbon dioxide removal strategies, through direct investments and grantmaking.  He also serves on the board of directors of several climate tech startup companies.  Before joining the Grantham Foundation, he worked as a program director at the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E launching and managing a diverse portfolio of energy and climate focused funding programs, including the MARINER program, which was focused on scaling seaweed cultivation for energy and climate applications.  Other professional experiences include various leadership roles in biotechnology across academia and industry.  He studied biology and chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (KIT) and INSA Toulouse and obtained an M.S. and a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Stanford University and the University of Minnesota, respectively.