From near-term Innovation Imperatives to bold Moonshots, the Climate Tech Atlas is designed to map the frontier of innovation and speed our way to net zero.  

THE CLIMATE TECH ATLAS IS HERE: Today, Speed & Scale is excited to announce the launch of the Climate Tech Atlas, a free digital platform that identifies the technologies needed to build a clean, affordable, and energy-abundant future.

At Speed & Scale, we believe that global decarbonization requires both “now” and “new” technologies.  The Climate Tech Atlas seeks to ignite bold, scalable breakthroughs and drive ambitious global investment in existing, emerging, and yet-to-be-discovered solutions.

With contributions from Breakthrough Energy, Elemental Impact, Energy Innovation, McKinsey Sustainability, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, the Atlas spotlights over 100 critical climate technologies that will unlock new markets and move the needle at scale in cutting global greenhouse gas emissions.  These technologies cover 24 opportunity areas in six primary economic sectors. They are grouped in two broad categories:

• Innovation Imperatives: Critical needs to speed the path to net zero, such as eliminating livestock emissions or creating emissions-free cement.  

• Moonshots: High-risk, high-reward innovations that could radically reshape our economy over the longer haul, such as space solar or autonomous drone firefighting.

In 2024, global investment in the energy transition soared to more than $2 trillion, for 6x growth from just ten years ago. The Climate Tech Atlas aims to build on that progress to accelerate decarbonization. It maps solutions ready to scale, innovations gaining momentum, and bold new ideas that could redefine the possible. The Atlas is a resource for innovators, investors, policymakers, philanthropists, students, and the inherently curious.

Check out Heatmap’s story on the Climate Tech Atlas, published today.

Let’s get to work! We invite you to dive in and to add your own ideas to reimagine our clean energy future.

OKRs in the News

🚗 1.0 – Electrify Transportation

• Flight Plan to Net Zero: Alaska, American, and other global airlines are backing a $150 million Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund to scale next-gen sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) beyond today’s limited biofuel supply. With SAF still under 1 percent of global jet fuel use, this initiative aims to leapfrog costly crop-based options and invest in scalable, low-carbon tech like algae and synthetic fuels (Wall Street Journal).

• Involution Revolution: While China’s EV market now makes up over half of the country’s car sales, a brutal price war among 50-plus automakers has led to overcapacity, plunging profits, and government intervention to curb excessive competition. Despite the chaos, relentless innovation and exports are cementing China’s global dominance in EVs (New York Times).

• Electrifying Everest’s Streets: Fueled by generous subsidies, abundant hydropower, and a flood of low-cost Chinese imports, Nepal’s EV share has skyrocketed from nearly zero to 76 percent of all passenger vehicle sales in just five years (New York Times).

🐄 3.0 – Fix Food

• Cooking With (No) Gas: Citing precision, safety, and kitchen comfort, top chefs are quietly switching from gas to induction. As induction tech improves, it’s gaining traction even in flame-loving cuisines, helping reduce methane emissions and indoor air pollution one Michelin star at a time (Bloomberg).

  Beef With the Climate: Methane emissions in Brazil rose 6 percent from 2020 to 2023, and cattle production now accounts for three-quarters of the country’s methane output–more than all of Italy’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023. The worsening problem underscores Brazil’s urgent need for agriculture-specific climate solutions ahead of COP30 in the northern Brazilian city of Belem (Reuters).

🌳 4.0 – Protect Nature

• Disaster Prep: As climate disasters intensify, knowing how to respond can save lives—yet most people aren’t fully prepared for hurricanes, floods, wildfires, or extreme heat. A new quiz from the New York Times puts disaster-readiness to the test with a reality check on how well someone could handle the next extreme event (New York Times).

• Brewing a New Standard: New EU rules will require all coffee sold in Europe to be traced back to deforestation-free farms, a shift that could reshape global coffee trade and pressure small producers to provide plot-level GPS coordinates as proof of sustainability. Targeting commodities linked to forest loss, the EU aims to reduce its role in the 10 percent of global emissions caused by deforestation (The Conversation).

🧱 5.0 – Clean Up Industry

• Billet Bonanza: China’s semi-finished steel exports have surged 320 percent this year, as traders shift to “semis”—intermediate steel products like billets, which require further processing—to bypass rising trade barriers and offset weak domestic demand. With record-high steel exports and calls from China’s own industry to rein in the trend, global tensions around cheap Chinese metals are heating up once again (Bloomberg).

• Ironing Out Emissions: Startups like Boston Metal and Electra are pioneering clean steel technologies in the U.S., using electricity instead of fossil fuels to produce iron and aiming to slash emissions from one of the world’s dirtiest industries. But without stronger investment and policy alignment, these innovations may struggle to scale fast enough to meet urgent climate goals (BBC).

🧹 6.0 – Remove Carbon

• Storage Wars: A landmark study places Earth’s safe carbon storage threshold at only 1,460 gigatons of carbon dioxide, slashing earlier estimates by around 90 percent. Without dramatic near-term reductions in CO2 emissions, there is a significant risk that the limit will be breached before the year 2200. Even if available storage was to be tapped exclusively for carbon removal, the payoff would be limited to just 0.7°C of cooling. The takeaway: Emissions cuts remain the non-negotiable priority, with storage treated as a scarce resource to be stewarded across generations (Nature).

• Carbon Clash: Investment in carbon dioxide removal is soaring, but consensus on what qualifies as “durable” removal is splintering. A joint analysis by Carbon Market Watch and NewClimate warns that leaning too heavily on nature-based options could mask inaction and stall progress. But an opposing letter from 30-plus scientists led by The Nature Conservancy’s Susan Cook-Patton insists that natural systems can scale affordably and with integrity. The fight over semantics now sits at the heart of the net zero debate (Business Green).

🏛️ 7.0 – Win Politics And Policy

• Crude Diplomacy: The Trump administration is aggressively pressuring global allies to prioritize fossil fuels over clean energy, linking trade deals to massive oil and gas purchases and threatening retaliation against countries that back international climate agreements. By turning U.S. economic might into a cudgel for climate denial, the administration risks undermining global progress just as the planet faces record-breaking heat (New York Times).

• Blown Off Course: The Trump administration has halted construction on multiple offshore wind farms, including the nearly completed $6.2 billion Revolution Wind project in Connecticut, citing vague national security concerns. Legal experts warn that this strategy could destabilize clean energy investment across the U.S., putting billions of dollars in capital, thousands of jobs, and grid reliability at risk (New York Times).

🏃 8.0 – Turn Movements Into Action

• Battery-Packed Living: In Michigan, Veridian at County Farm is testing a bold experiment: a fully electric, master-planned community. Equipped with solar rooftops, efficient heat pumps, and home batteries, the project is projected to cut 24,750 tons of CO₂ and save homeowners $188,000 apiece over three decades. It could also function as a virtual power plant, showing how neighborhoods can become engines of resilience (Utility Dive).

• Boiling Point Biology: Just two years of extreme heat exposure can accelerate biological aging by up to 12 days, according to a Taiwanese study of 25,000 adults–and the negative impact builds over time. The study raises long-term health concerns as heat waves become more frequent and shows how climate change is quietly compounding public health burdens. Older adults, outdoor workers, and those without air conditioning face the greatest danger (New York Times).

⚡ 9.0 – Innovate!

• Built to Beat Wildfire: New footage from the June 2025 Split Lake wildfire in Manitoba shows a fire-resilient community center surviving direct fire exposure without structural damage. The center was built with a prefabricated system, including magnesium cement sheathing, that neither ignites nor emits toxic smoke and stays stable under extreme heat. As wildfires grow more extreme,  fire-resilient construction can play a critical role in protecting infrastructure and advancing climate adaptation (prnewswire.com).

• America’s Exit, China’s Gain: The Trump administration’s cancellation of more than $18 billion in clean energy demonstration funding risks ceding global climate tech leadership to China, argues David M. Hart and Maximilian Hippold of the Council on Foreign Relations. As China ramps up over 100 large-scale innovation projects, the U.S. is weakening climate progress, investor confidence, and its own long-term competitiveness (Council on Foreign Relations).

OKR Highlight

The latest tool to accelerate clean energy innovation and deployment is Development-SAFE (D-SAFE), an investment mechanism designed to unlock early-stage funding and reduce risk for first-of-a-kind and early commercial projects.

Launched by Elemental Impact in 2024, D-SAFE has already secured nearly $7 million in commitments across nine companies, helping to garner more than $70 million in follow-on funding. This early capital is accelerating the growth of critical technologies from Nitricity, an organic fertilizer innovator, and Capture6, a company advancing water and carbon removal solutions.

To expand access, Elemental Impact recently released D-SAFE templates for broader use, along with a practical guide on how to customize the instruments for each investment.

By accelerating critical climate investment, tools like D-SAFE support Speed & Scale’s KR 10.3, which sets an annual target of $50 billion in climate-linked venture capital to achieve net zero.

💰 10.0 – Invest!

• Africa’s Climate Pitch: Leaders at the Africa Climate Summit rejected the framework of “climate aid,” instead urging investors to see the continent as a growth frontier. Ethiopia’s 5,000 MW dam and a massive reforestation drive are just two examples of this ambition. Delegates called for polluter taxes, climate justice, and financial flows that reflect Africa’s potential as a clean energy powerhouse (ABC News).

• Funding the First Movers: With U.S. federal climate funding shrinking, over a dozen top venture firms, including Khosla Ventures and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, have launched the All Aboard Coalition. Their aim is to raise $300 million by October to support climate tech startups ready for commercialization. As public backing wanes and first-of-a-kind projects struggle for capital, investors say collective private action is now essential to keep low-emissions innovation alive (Bloomberg).

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