Bill Gates’ Climate-Oriented Venture Fund Will Now Also Invest in Climate Adaptation

Bill Gates’s climate-oriented venture fund “is plowing more money into climate adaptation,” reports MIT Technology Review:

To date, the fund has focused on “climate mitigation,” which largely concentrates on driving down climate pollution. Climate adaptation refers to developing ways of bolstering protections against the dangers of climate change, rather than just preventing it.

The firm’s new focus will include ways to help farmers and communities grapple with increasingly common or severe droughts [possibly through advanced desalination technology or systems that pull moisture out of the air], and helping crops remain productive as the world becomes hotter, wetter, or drier; potentially through indoor farming and genetic alteration. Strengthening the infrastructure of global ports, which face growing threats from sea-level rise and increasingly powerful storms, will also be investigated.

“Investment opportunities there could include dynamic mooring systems that automatically respond to storm surges, cranes that can operate safely in hotter and harsher conditions, and ships that are more rugged,” said Eric Toone, technical lead for Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ investment committee, in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

“Mitigation’s just not going to get us there fast enough, and suffering is unacceptable….” Toone says. “So while our focus will continue to be on mitigation, we will expand our scope to include adaptation.”