Climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity
Climate change is the “crisis multiplier”. Climate impacts are escalating, exacerbating stresses on food, water, and land. The poorest and most vulnerable countries and communities who are least responsible for the causes of climate change are suffering most. The science tells us that we are on course to breach multiple critical tipping points that will cause irreversible damage to the human and natural world. We need a new approach.
Quadrature Climate Foundation was established in 2019 by the founders of Quadrature Capital, a market neutral investment fund that uses algorithms to predict and trade global financial markets. Initially, the founders were passionate about supporting causes that addressed poverty, inequality, and suffering. In 2018, they came to understand the way the climate crisis superimposed onto these challenges, eroding efforts to fight famine, support refugees, and manage natural disasters. This perspective led them to focus the foundation on the climate crisis, as the most urgent challenge of our time.
Our mission is to unlock the critical solutions needed to avert and manage the worst climate impacts especially for the most vulnerable people and ecosystems. We take a science-based approach to investing across the full suite of climate solutions – reducing greenhouse gas emissions, finding and scaling ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and managing current and inevitable climate change impacts. We focus on pragmatism without losing sight of ambition – a just climate transition requires a “big tent” approach that finds and champions leaders, and also brings others along.
Our funding priorities
Solutions that reduce emissions need to accelerate. We must act quickly to address technological, economic, political and social bottlenecks to deploying rapid decarbonisation solutions. But this on its own will not be enough.
Solutions that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere are also critical but remain unviable at the scale needed to avoid overshooting 1.5C. We need to rapidly innovate and scale up removals.
Solutions to manage climate impacts are increasingly urgent. We need to scale up climate adaptation. We also need to improve our understanding of new solutions that may be needed to manage future climate risks, in ways that prioritise the interests and inclusion of the most vulnerable countries and communities.
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Reduce
We work to unlock the most urgent decarbonization solutions this decade. This includes action to address the deployment bottlenecks for the most promising CO2 reduction solutions. It also includes action to drive rapid reductions in other greenhouse gases driving near-term climate risk, including methane.
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Remove
We advance the development and scaling of high-quality greenhouse gas removals, across nature based, engineered, and hybrid approaches. This includes CO2 and also other gases such as methane.
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Manage
We enable systems level approaches to climate adaptation in the most climate vulnerable countries. We also support equitable and effective research and governance efforts on solutions that could be needed to address more severe climate impacts in the future. This includes work to fully understand and evaluate options that increase the reflection of sunlight from clouds and particles in the atmosphere, or “solar radiation management".