Bill Gates’ Harmful Climate Strategy Pivot

Brian O’Donnell, Director, Campaign for Nature
October 29, 2025

Bill Gates’ philanthropy has positively transformed global public health, but the approach he now advocates for addressing climate change in his recent Climate Memo is wrongheaded. In the 17-page document, Gates urges a pivot from meeting temperature targets to reducing human suffering through adaptation. At first glance, it sounds pragmatic and compassionate. But the memo is dangerously shortsighted in two ways: it fails to recognize that climate change is part of a broader ecological crisis, and it perpetuates zero-sum thinking regarding finance that pits human well-being against cutting emissions.

In the memo, Gates does not mention nature once, not coral reefs, mangroves, peatlands, or tropical forests. The memo imagines a world separate from the natural one, where technology alone can fix our problems and the other species that share the planet are irrelevant. We all need to recognize that  the climate crisis is inseparable from the biodiversity crisis. The loss of natural systems will exacerbate human suffering. No climate solution will succeed if natural systems collapse.

Nature is not a second-tier issue, it is the foundation of climate stability, clean water, food security, and health. Forests, wetlands, and oceans absorb roughly half of global carbon emissions each year and protect communities from floods, droughts, and storms. When nature is degraded, human adaptation becomes far more difficult and far more expensive. 

Abandoning emissions targets would accelerate mass species loss, pushing already vulnerable island and mountain endemics and corals toward extinction. If we value polar bears, emperor penguins, pikas, and amphibians, we should be alarmed by Gates’s approach. A shift away from reducing emissions also abandons people in places like Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Mekong Delta, and Arctic Alaska, communities whose homelands are already being lost to rising seas, erosion, and thawing permafrost. The suffering these communities face is not a distant prediction, it is happening now.

Equally troubling is the memo’s zero-sum framing of spending on climate and human suffering. Gates assumes a fixed pool of financial resources, when this is precisely the moment to expand environmental and poverty capital. There is no mention of restoring USAID’s global development funding (or criticism of Trump’s and other world leaders’ cuts to poverty and environmental spending). The memo fails to advocate for taxing fossil fuel profits, or reforming harmful subsidies. Nor does Gates call on the ultra-wealthy, including those who signed his own Giving Pledge to honor their commitments. (A recent analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the overwhelming majority of Giving Pledge signers have not fulfilled their promise to give away half of their wealth). Meanwhile, billionaire wealth has more than doubled in the past decade. A modest global tax on these windfalls, or simply fulfilling philanthropic promises could provide billions for both poverty reduction and environmental priorities.

A world where nature continues its precipitous decline, and human welfare spending competes with environmental spending while the ultra-wealthy and fossil fuel firms prosper, is not a future we should accept. Gates is right to reject relentless doom and gloom messaging. But placing all of our faith in technology is dangerous and ultimately a path towards a diminished planet. Let’s instead envision a future where we support the world’s poorest and most vulnerable and protect the living systems that sustain us all.

For further comment or media inquiries, contact katy@campaignfornature.com.