Accelerating progress in interventions that harness Earth’s natural systems—from soils, to oceans, to glaciers—to help stabilize our climate.

Cascade Climate
WHY NATURAL-SYSTEM CLIMATE INTERVENTIONS?

We already depend on Earth’s natural systems to mitigate human-caused emissions and maintain planetary balance. Interventions that enhance natural systems can bring advantages of scale and cost that will often make them among our best—and sometimes only—options to avoid deep harms that decarbonization alone cannot address. We need to accelerate our learning about these options if we seek to curb near-term warming, restore a preindustrial atmosphere, or stave off catastrophic sea-level rise and planetary tipping points.

Realizing these opportunities involves overcoming complex systemic bottlenecks. Quantifying the full impact of natural system interventions can be particularly difficult, and uncertainty around potential ecosystem impacts can cause paralysis without adequate tools and governance frameworks. Natural system interventions can offer powerful climate benefits as well as co-benefits for local economies and ecosystems; yet these benefits are often public and intangible ones, requiring creative and bold new modes of financing and public support. These interlaced challenges can leave natural system interventions at an impasse, struggling to start the learn-by-doing flywheel.


ABOUT US ↗

Cascade is a philanthropically-backed nonprofit organization working across industry, government and science to accelerate progress in natural system climate interventions. We help remove the biggest bottlenecks inhibiting progress by coordinating ambitious cross-sector initiatives, building tools and infrastructure that unlock cycles of learning-by-doing, and resourcing high-leverage R&D and policy work.


SPOTLIGHT ON OUR WORK ↗

Foundations for CDR Quantification in Enhanced Rock Weathering

Foundations for CDR Quantification in ERW Deployments

After a year-long process involving over 100 stakeholders, we produced a comprehensive technical reference on the “hows” of rigorous carbon removal quantification in an ERW deployment.

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ERW Field Grants

ERW Field Data Partnership Grants

We launched an RFP process to fund the collection of ERW field datasets on existing deployment sites, aimed at answering priority R&D questions. Deadline: December 20th, 2024.

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Cost Estimator

ERW MRV cost estimator and database

We built a tool to help inform practitioners of the stacked costs of different analytical measurement choices in an ERW deployment, as well as a database of cost quotes to help practitioners compare costs for leverage.

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