FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 21, 2024

San Francisco, CA – October 21, 2024 – Spark Climate Solutions, a leading non-profit organization dedicated to reducing climate risks through accelerating progress in neglected and high-impact climate fields, is thrilled to announce the appointment of Dr. Phil Duffy as the organization’s Chief Scientist. Dr. Duffy is a climate scientist and decades-long champion for—and leader in—climate action, which he’s done most recently as the Climate Science Advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Biden Administration, and the President and Executive Director of Woodwell Climate Research Center. Dr. Duffy’s leadership and expertise will help to propel more climate action and progress at Spark, particularly in under-resourced but high-potential climate risk mitigation areas.

With decades of experience in climate science and action, Dr. Duffy brings a wealth of knowledge from academia, research, and policy advisory roles. In his new role, Dr. Duffy will guide Spark Climate Solutions’s science-based programmatic work and support the development of new programs, promoting actionable, evidence-based solutions to mitigate climate risks.

Erika Reinhardt, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Spark Climate Solutions, praised the appointment: “We are thrilled to welcome Phil to our team. We share the same ethos of being science-led, deeply collaborative, and solely impact-focused. We’re excited to see what we can do together, and eager to further grow our efforts to bring science-based solutions to the forefront of the climate conversation and drive real-world change.”

“I am honored to join the team at Spark Climate Solutions and partner with Erika and David—Spark’s founders—and the team they’ve built to further their unique and important work towards filling in the missing pieces in our current climate response,” said Dr. Duffy. “Without accelerated climate action, the world we leave for our descendants will not be an easy one to thrive or even to live in. A better future is possible if we act more aggressively, including by developing new climate solutions and bringing them into practice quickly. That’s Spark’s mission, and their team has quickly demonstrated the ability to have an outsized impact. I am excited to partner with them to move even faster in the areas they're already working in and to explore possible new areas of focus.”

Read more from Phil on joining Spark

About Spark Climate Solutions:
A science-driven nonprofit founded in 2021, Spark Climate Solutions accelerates progress in emerging, high-impact climate fields. Our goal is to accelerate the timeline on which additional climate solutions may be viable and scalable in order to enable further climate risk mitigation. In each field we work in, this requires ensuring that strong innovation and science efforts, supportive policies, social license, solid financing, and talent capacity are all progressing, and as relevant to the specific field, our work can also encompass market creation and shaping, and governance considerations. To do so, we take a deeply collaborative field-building approach, doing a mixture of direct work in the field, regranting, and launching new initiatives in order to support the growth of talent, institutional capacity, and collective knowledge to set up the field for long-term success.

Media Contact: press@sparkclimate.org