Which sectors have funding?
The climate problem is a coordination problem. Are all climate solutions being worked on? What are the neglected areas? Which areas make the most profitable investments?
This visualization attempts to answer those questions using the Project Drawdown taxonomy of climate solutions which provides estimates for carbon impact per solution. Companies in each solution are ordered by number of employees which provides a rough estimate to their traction and success.
Trends
It is my hope that this visualization can be used by startup founders and investors who want to support neglected sectors. If you are interested in making sure climate companies are funded, or if you have companies to add, message CLAI VC, a new climate fund.
- Funded sectors are clumpy - with the most investor interest around recycling, the grid, and EVs.
- There are important unloved sectors, including Family Planning and Education and Refrigerant Management - the number 3 and 4 ranked solutions.
- Nature-based solutions seem particularly underfunded, perhaps because they are harder to monetize.
Caveats
It is important to note that Project Drawdown doesn’t assign an impact estimate to all of its own categories, e.g. no estimate is provided for Utility-Scale Energy Storage in order to avoid double counting.
Also, not every climate solution is accounted for in the Drawdown taxonomy. Missing sectors that are included in Bill Gates’ excellent How to Avoid a Climate Disaster taxonomy include decarbonizing heavy industries like steel, concrete, and chemicals. Most notably, carbon removal, utilization, and storage (CCUS) solutions are also missing from Drawdown. Historical amounts of carbon released into the atmosphere need to be removed through CCUS techniques, and this is the focus of groups like AirMiners.
Other solutions are hard to capture in any rigid taxonomy - for instance, in the USA renewables deployment is blocked on grid interconnection and delays mean that projects take over 3 years(!) to connect. Solutions at the bottom of the visualization do not have Drawdown’s numerical estimates, but are likely highly impactful as well.
Data
The data is from Climate Draft, a resource for VC-backed climate companies. This visualization was generated with the help of Claude Haiku in matching companies to solutions.
