Cascade ClimateWe launched Cascade to help accelerate progress with high-potential climate solutions—those that hold transformative potential but need a concerted push to ‘get over the hump’ and become a part of the world’s mainstream climate response. Cascade has initially focused on Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW), a promising approach to removing atmospheric CO₂ while simultaneously improving soil health. We believe ERW can play a major role in the climate future, but doing so requires ambitious coordination across science, policy, and markets.
While our work in carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will continue to grow, we’ve recently made the decision to expand our work into another pressing climate frontier: mitigating near-term warming. Over the past year, climate funding hit significant headwinds, further hampering our ability to manage severe warming risks. While CDR is essential for meeting net zero targets over the course of this century, we also need to advance solutions that offer a fast path to reducing the risk of temperature overshoot in the next few decades. One critical component of this solution set revolves around mitigating emissions of so-called “super pollutants”—pollutants that are more powerful than carbon dioxide ton for ton and that are fueling near-term warming.
In what follows, we unpack some of the reasons why we are expanding our scope to include drastic cuts to super pollutants, and how this complements our work on CDR as a path to long-horizon climate repair.
Evolving reflections on our CDR work
Durable carbon removal is the only way to reverse the buildup of legacy emissions in the atmosphere and ultimately move back towards pre-industrial CO₂ levels. The scale-up of ERW or any durable CDR pathway is daunting. It requires advances in science, engineering, policy, infrastructure, community engagement, workforce development, and much more. But the urgency is real: the decades it will take for CDR to reach climate-relevant scale is precisely what makes immediate investment so critical. We must get moving today on the iterative work of deployment-driven learning and scaling in the most promising regions.
However, while durable carbon removal plays a vital role for long-term restoration of global temperatures, it cannot meaningfully alter the world’s warming trajectory in the near term. Even if all CO₂ emissions ceased tomorrow, the carbon already in the atmosphere would persist for centuries, continuing to warm the planet. The benefits of durable CDR unfold only with decades of sustained deployment at tremendous scale in a highly decarbonized global economy. We are nowhere close to entering that phase.
As a team, we are feeling the same fire in our belly to accelerate CDR as we did at our founding. Yet we’ve also always known that this isn’t enough. We feel intensifying responsibility to engage with dire near-term warming threats—and growing conviction that we can actually help. The organizational capabilities we’ve developed through our CDR work lend themselves well to building momentum behind solutions that reduce warming more immediately.
Why drastic cuts to super pollutants matter
Different tools are needed to address near-term warming risks and long-term climate repair. For the latter, the focus is on deep decarbonization and gigaton-scale carbon removal. But the potentially devastating consequences of near-term warming will not afford us the luxury of taking an exclusively long-term lens. Warming in the next few decades could destabilize ecosystems, economies, and societies in far-reaching ways, while also initiating a vicious cycle of climate feedback loops and non-linear tipping points.
The most powerful lever we have to limit warming in the near term is to cut short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) such as black carbon, methane, tropospheric ozone and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). These pollutants don’t persist in the atmosphere as long as CO₂, but they are far more potent while they last. For example, methane warms the planet more than 80 times as much as CO₂ over a 20-year period. And certain HFCs have a warming impact thousands of times greater than CO₂.
There’s also a hidden challenge worth understanding: as we phase out fossil fuels, we also reduce emissions of surface aerosols, which are cooling particles that reflect sunlight back into space. This “aerosol unmasking effect” means that reducing CO₂ emissions can lead to a short-term increase in warming. To counteract that, we need solutions that exert a cooling effect as quickly as aerosol unmasking exerts its warming effect. And our first resort must be cutting emissions for SLCPs like methane and HFCs—their short atmospheric lifespan means that cutting such emissions reduces the greenhouse effect much more quickly than cutting CO₂.
We are hardly the first to call attention to this. A whole range of civil society organizations—such as Carbon Containment Lab, Clean Air Task Force, Climate and Clean Air Coalition, Environmental Defense Fund, Global Methane Hub, Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, Natural Resources Defense Council, Spark Climate Solutions, and numerous others—have been doing great work on super pollutants for many years. In recent years these pioneers have mobilized a growing chorus of public and private actors calling for a rethink of climate finance priorities, culminating in major milestones like the Global Methane Pledge. Still, action on super pollutants does not get the attention and resources it deserves.
Historically, the lion’s share of climate finance has gone towards reducing CO₂. Up to a point, that’s appropriate given CO₂’s central role in long-term climate change. But we need to accelerate the ongoing rebalancing of priorities bearing the time equation in mind. If we’re serious about reducing risk over the next 10-20 years, we need to make much deeper cuts to super pollutants—and fast.
Applying lessons from ERW and CDR
Over the past two years, Cascade has had a front-row seat to the early momentum in durable CDR. That experience has taught us valuable lessons about how to build new climate solution categories from the ground up.
The core challenge often revolves around starting with catalytic approaches to get things snowballing then building a bridge to a different long-term set of arrangements that solve for scale and sustainability. And perhaps the hardest aspect of this is how we avoid “transition traps1,” getting too dependent on the very mechanisms that were essential for early progress.
We’ve seen firsthand how catalytic voluntary climate finance triggered a virtuous cycle in the first years of the durable CDR industry. Strong demand signals from Frontier, Microsoft, Google, Milkywire, and NextGen helped mobilize project development, crowd in private investment, prompt policy attention, seed fresh academic research, and expand civil society engagement. Yet we cannot allow ourselves to fall into relying on the voluntary market as an ongoing crutch. Success means these solutions eventually become embedded in standard industry operations, in government programs, or in compliance markets.
Much of Cascade’s work on ERW revolves around building a bridge from the voluntary market toward policy-enabled demand and financing. To do this we need to orchestrate parallel and inter-connected efforts that span the policy, market, and scientific spheres. For example, developing government standards and regulation for ERW—such as the European Carbon Removal and Carbon Farming Regulations—requires convening and synthesizing consensus across geochemistry, environmental science, GHG accounting, and climate policy perspectives. Meanwhile, as ERW commercial deployment expands, we must foster a new set of collaborative arrangements to learn by doing. We need creative research partnerships between academic scientists and project developers; we need data access platforms and meta-analyses that synthesize existing evidence and help inform policy program design; and we need to find common ground across carbon market participants, farmers, and other agricultural stakeholders. If the ERW community can chart a path across this bridge through collaborations like these, the field will have a shot at realizing its full long-term potential.
We see the need for an analogous journey with super pollutant mitigation, and now is the moment to kick it into higher gear. What we must work backward from—the “far shore” on the other side of the bridge—is a policy-driven end state that embeds accountability for super pollutant reductions within industry value chains while systematically addressing residual sources (such as legacy HFC stockpiles and emissions from abandoned infrastructure assets and unmanaged lands) as part of national GHG inventories. The good news is that, thanks to the many aforementioned NGO pioneers and policy leaders in the space, some important beginnings of this future state have already materialized. Prominent examples include the Montreal Protocol and Kigali Amendments, the EU F-Gas Regulation, and the US AIM Act. But we are still a long way from what will ultimately be needed.
To accelerate progress we need to do a better job building the near side of the bridge. More concretely, we need to spark a more prominent and sustained wave of high-quality super pollutant mitigation projects: those with rigorous measurement, technological readiness, and clear additionality. High-quality projects can serve as compelling proof points that prompt new private and public investments, while accelerating a cycle of deployment, learning, engagement and growing policy ambitions.
As in durable CDR, voluntary carbon finance offers one promising avenue to kickstart this cycle for super pollutants. As with Google’s recent purchases, corporate buyers can help spin up the flywheel by funding high-quality projects in priority pathways and regions. But to avoid stalling in a “transition trap”, this early phase must be carefully stewarded. The key is proactive engagement with policymakers and industry—bringing proof points to their attention and wherever possible engaging them directly in joint efforts to pilot new arrangements. By exposing them to early projects that serve as powerful proof points—and involving them directly wherever possible—we spur the development of lasting policies and integration of mitigation methods into standard industrial operations.
How Cascade can help
This is exactly the kind of concerted bridge-building Cascade specializes in: bringing an emerging climate solution along this stepwise journey in a way that spans the commercial, policy, and scientific spheres.
We’ve begun to form a few loosely-held hypotheses about where we might contribute most effectively. These include:
- Building alignment around a theory of change that fast-track super pollutant mitigation (and other climate action) by simultaneously building both sides of the bridge outlined above. Voluntary carbon financing can play a catalytic role in launching high-impact super pollutant mitigation projects, especially in overlooked sectors or regions where momentum is lagging. By designing these market programs with policy endgame in mind, and involving the key long-term stakeholders right away, we can accelerate structural change and avoid getting stuck in transitional arrangements.
- Bringing that theory of change alive in HFC mitigation as a particularly high-impact demonstration case. Lifecycle refrigerant management represents an estimated 90 gigaton climate opportunity, yet progress has been slow in many regions. Voluntary carbon finance can unlock an initial wave of recollection, destruction and reclamation projects in priority geographies, generating both immediate emission reductions and valuable learning. These proof-of-concept projects can then serve as stepping stones towards regulatory frameworks, compliance market uptake, and scaled public investments.
- Building bridges between the GHG reduction and removal communities to advance a comprehensive “all of the above” climate strategy. This includes wrestling with complex system-level questions: How do we appropriately balance short-lived and long-lived climate pollutants within net-zero frameworks? How can reduction and removal efforts reinforce rather than compete with each other? By fostering dialogue and developing practical tools for integrated climate action, we can help move beyond false choices toward truly comprehensive solutions.
We are in the midst of an extensive listening and learning tour to understand how we might help advance super pollutant mitigation. We start from a place of curiosity, humility, and a deep respect for the platforms and momentum that super pollutant pioneers have already established. Similar to our work in ERW, we hope to play a complementary role helping to catalyze the next chapter of progress and stitch together a comprehensive approach.
We’ll be back soon with more detail on what we’re hearing and where we think there’s momentum to build upon. Stay tuned.
Footnotes
- By "transition trap," we mean the risk that mechanisms essential for catalyzing early adoption turn into crutches or barriers to scaled deployment—a concept building on path dependence literature showing how early choices can lock in suboptimal outcomes. For example, corn ethanol production was initially valuable as a bridge technology to displace petroleum fuels; but the industry and supporting policies became entrenched even as more effective alternatives like electric vehicles emerged, illustrating how early catalytic mechanisms can resist the transition to scaled solutions. ↩