We Need A Portfolio of Audacity

December 19, 2025

Dear friends,

I’m Savanna Ferguson, Executive Director of Climate Breakthrough.

As we close the year, I’ve been thinking about the stories emerging from COP30 in Belém, Brazil. There’s something about watching more than 50,000 people gather at the edge of the world’s largest rainforest that puts things in perspective. Holding the summit in the Amazon was unmistakably symbolic: the forest stands as both a reminder of what’s at stake and a testament to what we’re fighting to preserve. And for us at Climate Breakthrough, there was an added layer of meaning: Alessandra Orofino, one of our 2025 Climate Breakthrough Awardees, is a proud Brazilian and now working on cultural transformation to make the forest so central to Brazilian identity that its protection becomes inevitable.

COP30 was, predictably, a study in contrasts. More than 80 countries pushed for formal roadmaps to phase out fossil fuels and halt deforestation, but opposition from oil-producing nations meant these didn’t make it into the final agreement. The United States sent no official delegation for the first time in the conference’s history. And yet: countries agreed to triple adaptation finance by 2035, reaching $120 billion annually. They adopted a new mechanism to support workers and communities through the clean energy transition. Indigenous delegates secured a historic pledge to recognize Indigenous land tenure rights over 160 million hectares across tropical forest countries, including Brazil, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

What stayed with me most was the sense of collective effort: imperfect, slow at times, but persistent. A reminder that change rarely happens in a straight line.

The contours of breakthrough

When we launched the Climate Breakthrough Award program in 2016, we were responding to a specific observation: the funding norms in climate philanthropy were systematically excluding the potential for many of the most transformative ideas. They were deemed too risky, too ambitious, too difficult to measure. Many were emerging far from the centers of philanthropic influence, where proximity and familiarity, rather than potential, too often determined who received support. And so they went unfunded, or underfunded, or funded in ways that constrained rather than enabled their ambition.

We set out to build something different. A framework designed to find, vet, and trust exceptional people first. A platform that gave them the space to think at the scale that the problem demands. A mindset that recognized setbacks as a necessary feature, not a bug, of breakthrough efforts.

We give each Awardee $4 million—the largest climate award for individuals—in multiyear, flexible, non-directive funding. We select Awardees first based on their track record and vision, and then we support them through an extensive strategy development phase. A hallmark of our program is the flexible and highly tailored wraparound and impact and learning support we offer in order to meet the needs of breakthrough-style pursuits. We expect some initiatives may not work out. That’s the price of trying things that might.

This year, as we look across the progress made by our full cohort of Awardees, we see what breakthrough thinking looks like in practice. Ideas once seen as improbable are now in the realm of possibility: an end to oil and gas development in the UK, the prospect of a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, climate litigation, reimagining the role of insurance in decarbonization, the polluter pays principle, among others. Our Awardees are shaping consequential climate conversations, challenging outdated assumptions, and pushing for transformative change where it’s long overdue.

If successful, their work could significantly reduce global annual greenhouse gas emissions, affect entire industries or regions of the world, and materially change the lives of tens of millions within ten years of launch. They are innovations in policy, economics, and social change; shifts in the systems that shape climate outcomes. Combined, they could cut global annual emissions by over 6.4 gigatons by 2030.

We also track the philanthropic funds that Awardees raise for the work launched through our program. This is an important indicator of uptake in the field. Since our program began in 2016, Awardees have reached over $639 million in catalyzed philanthropic funds from more than 137 funders and over $1 billion through ventures, trusts, and funds outside of philanthropy.

This year, we selected five new Awardees. Former US Vice President Al Gore said something when we announced our 2025 Awardee cohort that stuck with me: “This is a moment of full potential.” I keep returning to that phrase. Full potential. Not guaranteed success, but possibility. It’s the space where breakthroughs can happen if we create the conditions for them.

That’s what Climate Breakthrough exists to do: create those conditions. To find people with the vision and capability to pursue solutions as innovative and incisive as the problem demands, and then trust them with the resources and freedom to do it. I don’t know exactly which of their initiatives will break through. That’s simply the contours of breakthrough work. But I know we need to support ambitious leaders and greater visions of what’s possible. We need a portfolio of audacity.

What this moment requires

2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the Climate Breakthrough Award program, a moment that already feels significant. So it means a great deal to share that we were recently selected to receive a $20 million unrestricted gift from MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving. We were one of several lucky, hardworking, and high-impact organizations operating around the world to have received her support. I hope her visionary gifts will catalyze and inspire other philanthropists, and that her giving will light the way for more funding to the global community of people working every day to solve the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.

The Yield Giving gift allows us to support five additional Climate Breakthrough Awardees with multimillion dollar, multiyear, flexible, and non-directive funding. It is a tremendous gift and has freed our team to think more creatively about Climate Breakthrough’s future. We will nonetheless need far more to maintain and grow our work in the years ahead. We are committed to building a broad and diverse community of supporters who, like Scott, believe that bold climate action deserves bold philanthropy.

More than anything, her gift reminds me that unrestricted funding isn’t just about money. It’s a principle of freedom. Freedom to imagine, to test, to fail, and to pursue ideas that rigid systems might not allow.

Just as we give our Awardees the freedom to develop their strategies without prescriptive requirements, Yield Giving has given us the freedom to strengthen and expand our work as we see fit. This parallel is not coincidental. It reflects a shared understanding that the most transformative work happens when we give not just money, but trust.

As we mark a decade of this work, I’m thinking a lot about responsibility. Not just to our Awardees, but to the wider ecosystem that makes their work possible. Philanthropy cannot replace public leadership, but it can open doors. It can create conditions where underexplored ideas can take root and grow. It can give people the confidence and freedom to achieve things that once seemed impossible.

That is our role. And it’s one we step into with humility and determination. In the year ahead and beyond, we’ll expand our public engagement and invite more people into conversations about what breakthrough thinking makes possible—and what it takes to support it. This is our opportunity to help shape a broader narrative around ambition, risk, and the kind of nimble philanthropy this moment requires.

Thank you for being part of this community. For believing in the work. For choosing, in your own ways, to hold on to possibility.

To a better future,

Savanna Ferguson