Climate and environmental solutions by problem area

The world needs to replace fossil fuels with clean energy sources fast — but we're not moving nearly quickly enough. Even as solar and wind costs have plummeted, we're still adding more fossil fuel capacity than clean energy in many regions. The challenge isn't just building more renewable power plants. It's also storing that energy when the sun isn't shining, upgrading ancient electrical grids, speeding up painfully slow permitting processes, and dealing with the reality that we've already built trillions of dollars worth of coal and gas infrastructure that someone paid for and expects to keep running.

Meanwhile, nearly a billion people still lack electricity entirely, and even in wealthy countries, our energy systems are rigid and wasteful. We need technology solutions that make clean energy cheaper, faster to deploy, and more reliable than fossil fuels — not just sometimes, but always.

Buildings consume about 40% of global energy and produce roughly the same share of carbon emissions. Most of this energy gets wasted through poor insulation, inefficient heating and cooling systems, and outdated design practices.

The building sector moves slowly — most structures last decades, and retrofitting existing buildings is complex and expensive. Meanwhile, billions of people worldwide still rely on polluting fuels for basic needs like cooking and heating water, creating both climate and health problems.

Solving building energy waste requires both cutting-edge technology and practical approaches that work at massive scale. The opportunity is enormous: dramatically reducing emissions while making buildings more comfortable and affordable to operate.

Transport accounts for about a quarter of global energy-related carbon emissions, and it's almost entirely dependent on oil. Cars, trucks, planes, and ships burn fossil fuels that pump CO2 directly into the atmosphere, while our cities and supply chains are designed around this dirty infrastructure.

The challenge isn't just switching to cleaner fuels — it's rebuilding how we move people and goods. Some transport modes like aviation and shipping have no obvious clean alternatives ready today. Others, like personal cars, have solutions that work but need to scale up fast and become affordable for everyone.

This is urgent because transport emissions keep growing as more people get cars and more goods move around the world. We need both better technology and smarter systems that help us travel less wastefully.

Industry is the backbone of modern civilization, but it's also one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Manufacturing steel, cement, chemicals, and plastics doesn't just burn fossil fuels for energy — these processes often require fossil fuels as raw ingredients or release CO2 as an unavoidable part of the chemistry itself.

This creates a massive challenge. We can't simply swap in renewable electricity and call it solved. Heavy industry needs fundamentally different approaches: new chemistries, new materials, new ways of thinking about how we make things. The scale is enormous — industry accounts for about a quarter of global emissions — but so is the opportunity to transform how we build our world.

Our food system is caught in a destructive cycle. Modern agriculture feeds billions of people, but it's systematically destroying the very resources it depends on — soil, water, forests, and climate stability.

Livestock farming alone uses nearly 80% of agricultural land while producing just 18% of our calories. Industrial crop production relies heavily on fossil fuel-derived fertilizers that pollute waterways and strip soil of its natural fertility. Meanwhile, we're clearing forests at an alarming rate to create more farmland, even as we waste a third of all food produced.

This isn't sustainable. We need technologies that can maintain food security while regenerating the land, reducing emissions, and working within planetary boundaries.

The natural world is collapsing at an unprecedented rate. We're losing species 1,000 times faster than normal, forests are shrinking, wetlands are disappearing, and ocean ecosystems are breaking down. This isn't just about saving cute animals — healthy ecosystems provide clean water, fertile soil, climate regulation, and countless other services that human civilization depends on.

The problem is massive in scale and accelerating. Traditional conservation approaches can't keep up with the speed and scope of destruction happening across the planet. We need technology to help us monitor what's happening, protect what's left, restore what's been damaged, and create economic incentives that make nature worth more alive than dead.

The world generates over 2 billion tons of municipal solid waste every year, and that number is growing fast. Most of it ends up in landfills or gets burned, releasing greenhouse gases and toxic chemicals into the environment.

This isn't just an environmental crisis — it's economic waste on a massive scale. We're throwing away valuable materials that could be reused, recycled, or converted into energy. Meanwhile, plastic pollution is choking our oceans, electronic waste is piling up with toxic heavy metals, and organic waste in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than CO2.

The current waste management system was designed for a linear economy: take, make, dispose. But we need to shift to a circular economy where materials stay in use as long as possible. That requires better technology, smarter systems, and new business models that make waste valuable instead of costly.

Water scarcity is becoming one of the most pressing challenges of our time. While the planet has the same amount of water it always had, we're using it faster than natural systems can replenish it, and climate change is making water cycles more unpredictable.

Nearly half the world's population already experiences severe water scarcity for at least one month each year. Meanwhile, aging infrastructure loses billions of gallons through leaks, and 2 billion people still lack access to safely managed drinking water at home. Agriculture consumes 70% of global freshwater, often inefficiently, while extreme weather events — both floods and droughts — are becoming more frequent and severe.

This isn't just about inconvenience. Water stress drives conflict, forces migration, threatens food security, and holds back economic development. The technologies in this category work to stretch our water supplies further, deliver clean water more efficiently, and help communities adapt to an increasingly unpredictable water future.

Climate change isn't a distant threat — it's already reshaping where people can safely live and work. Communities worldwide are facing floods, heat waves, wildfires, and storms that are more intense and frequent than anything in living memory. Yet most places lack the tools, knowledge, or financial resources to prepare for what's coming next.

The gap between climate science and local action is enormous. Global climate models can tell us the planet is warming, but a city mayor needs to know which neighborhoods will flood, which roads will buckle in extreme heat, and how to protect residents who can't afford air conditioning. Without this kind of practical, local information, communities are flying blind into an increasingly dangerous future.

This isn't just about building sea walls or planting trees. It's about creating entirely new systems — for predicting risks, designing solutions, and paying for protection — that can keep pace with a rapidly changing climate.

The global financial system is fundamentally misaligned with climate goals. Trillions of dollars continue flowing toward fossil fuel projects and unsustainable practices, while clean energy and climate solutions struggle to access the capital they desperately need.

This isn't just about having enough money — it's about redirecting existing capital flows. Pension funds, banks, and investors manage over $400 trillion globally, but most of this wealth still supports the old economy. Meanwhile, developing countries face impossible borrowing costs for solar farms, and promising carbon removal technologies can't scale without patient capital.

The consequences compound daily. Every coal plant that gets financed instead of a wind farm, every loan that ignores flood risk, every greenwashed investment that crowds out genuine climate action — these financial decisions shape our physical future.

Climate action is happening in the dark. We're making trillion-dollar decisions about energy systems, carbon markets, and climate adaptation based on incomplete, outdated, or simply wrong information.

Most of what we think we know about emissions comes from estimates and calculations, not actual measurements. We're guessing at how much carbon forests store, how fast cities are decarbonizing, and whether our climate projects are working. Meanwhile, climate impacts are accelerating faster than our models predicted, and we need precise, real-time data to respond effectively.

This isn't just an academic problem. Investors can't tell which climate projects deliver real results. Cities can't plan infrastructure without knowing their local climate risks. Companies can't manage what they can't measure. The gap between what we need to know and what we actually know is enormous — and it's slowing down everything else.

The climate transition requires millions of new jobs — from solar installers to battery engineers to climate-smart architects. But we're facing a massive skills gap. There aren't enough trained workers to build renewable energy systems, retrofit buildings, or maintain new infrastructure. Meanwhile, fossil fuel workers are losing jobs faster than clean alternatives appear, and most professionals making climate-relevant decisions lack the knowledge to make good ones.

This isn't just about having enough people — it's about having people with the right skills in the right places at the right time. Without solving this, the hardware and software solutions we're building will sit unused, and the transition will stall.

Across the world, people are becoming increasingly disconnected from the natural environment that sustains us. This separation isn't just about living in cities — it's about losing the deep, everyday relationship with nature that shaped human culture for millennia.

This disconnection has profound consequences. When we don't experience nature regularly, we struggle to understand our dependence on healthy ecosystems. We miss out on the mental and physical health benefits that contact with the natural world provides. Children grow up without developing the curiosity and care for nature that comes from direct experience.

The challenge is urgent because this disconnection makes it harder for people to support the environmental action we desperately need. It's difficult to protect what feels abstract or irrelevant to daily life.