Quick one: Last Week in Climate is back on Substack - and yes, I know this newsletter has moved around a lot. Substack, Beehiiv, back to Substack, then directly via inClimate. This time it’s staying put here (I hope).

Substack is just better at delivering this newsletter to your inbox (you might have gotten the last emails in spam?)

The platform emails (event invites, notifications, job alerts, DMs) will still come from inClimate directly (if you have an account) - but the newsletter lives here now.

Some updates to this newsletter:

I’ve organized things into sections you can (un)subscribe to individually:

Last Week in Climate: The weekly digest you already know. (Thursdays)

Sector Deep Dives: Each week I break down one climate or nature solution - what it is, why it matters, if it works, and where the gaps are. (Fridays)

Building inClimate: My ideas, questions, and thoughts about building all this. (occasionally)

People in Climate Stories of people building climate and nature solutions. (occasionally) → Let me know if you have someone in mind whose work I should write about!

You’re subscribed to those four and can manage your preferences anytime in your Substack settings.

Regular weekly digest will be in your inbox this Thursday. :)

P.S. While you wait - our first Sector Deep Dive on Ocean Restoration is already live on the new sectors page: inclimate.com/sectors. Click through the new feature and let me know what you think. I’m really really excited about this piece of the puzzle.

Tim

(If you previously unsubscribed from the newsletter on inClimate and are getting this anyway - sorry about that. Your Substack subscription is separate and I can’t sync those preferences back. You can unsubscribe at the bottom of this email, no hard feelings.)

Happy new year! (Can you still say that on the 14th?)

Before I get back to sending the weekly “Last Week in Climate” newsletter, I wanted to start 2026 by sticking to my December promise of sharing more thoughts, reflections, and the ideas behind inClimate 2.0 and behind these newsletters.

Today, I want to try and answer a question that I’ve been wrestling with for four years and that you have probably asked yourself:

How the heck do we stop the climate crisis?

Back in 2021, I was trying to figure out what my role should be in helping to stop the climate crisis.

Should I become a climate investor? Join a startup? Start my own thing?

I was wondering:

What is the highest-leverage thing I can work on to help solve it?

I found a lot of clarity in John Doerr’s book Speed & Scale. The idea is simple: cut emissions fast by transforming key systems, while pulling the right levers to make it happen.

I figured that in very simplified terms, our job was “just”:

1. Innovation: come up with better solutions

2. Scale: deploy them at unprecedented speed

I then understood that for the 2030 goal, reducing emissions by 50%, we’re mostly talking about scale.

According to the IEA (2023), around 80% of the emissions reductions needed by 2030 can be achieved with technologies that already exist.

So why aren’t we moving faster?

Scaling is a coordination problem

If the tech is largely here, the bottleneck isn’t ideas. It’s coordination.

To make climate solutions the default, I’d say we need to figure out:

• Capital: the right money in the right places

• Talent: a mass migration of great operators

• Policy: making the clean choice the easy choice

• Connectivity: an ecosystem where the right people find each other

That last one - connectivity - is the one I’m obsessed with because it ties into everything we need to do.

What if this is mostly a people problem?

Over the past four years, I’ve spoken to countless founders, investors, operators, policy makers and jobseekers; and I keep coming back to the same thought:

Wouldn’t a shocking number of their hurdles, questions, and bottlenecks disappear if they just found the right people to talk to sooner?

Because in practice:

• funding happens through relationships

• jobs happen through relationships

• policy moves through relationships

That’s how the world works.

But that is a terrible way to solve a global crisis on a deadline - to hope the right people run into each other and figure it out.

If we rely on chance meetings at conferences or random LinkedIn connections to scale these solutions, we’ll be too slow. The problem isn’t a lack of talent or capital. It’s that too many people and sectors are still working in silos.

Maybe if we lower the friction of finding the right people, insights, and opportunities, the whole ecosystem moves and scales faster?

If that holds true, isn’t there a better way to connect the dots?

The messy work of connecting it all

I’m convinced we can still move fast enough if we build better ways for people in this very complex and broad ecosystem to connect, coordinate, and share information.

What if we had one go-to platform to do just that?

1. Community: a go-to community platform that brings the right stakeholders across the ecosystem together - not just another Slack channel, but a dedicated platform, combined with in-person events and personalized matchmaking at scale.

2. Talent: a go-to platform for great talent to move into the climate and sustainability sector and for companies to find them easily. Not just another job board, an expensive course, or another recruiting agency that can’t scale.

3. Insights: a go-to platform that enables investors, corporates, and policymakers to get a better overview of the ecosystem, not just some lists and databases that they’re charged thens of thousands of euros for.

As someone who was looking for a job in climate, as a former venture capitalist and venture scout, and as someone who was trying to find his community in this ecosystem, I just wished we had these three elements in one dedicated platform.

So that’s what I’ve been building for the past four years now with inClimate.

It’s bloody complicated and I’m far from done, but it’s finally coming together with the new version of inClimate that I’m hoping to officially launch this month.

What do you think?

I could ramble on now about how exactly this will work as a platform, why I think we need to build this as a for-profit, and what I’m still struggling with, but I’ll leave that for another day.

If you have thoughts on this idea, I’d truly love your input.
What am I missing? What feels naïve? Where do you see the real bottlenecks?

Big hug from Barcelona,
Tim

PS: If you missed the big December update, or you’re not sure why you received this email, you can read it here.

Hi there,

If you’ve been around inClimate or the “Last Week in Climate” newsletter for some time, you might have noticed that I got a bit quiet since July and stopped sending the weekly digest.

There was a reason for that.

I launched inClimate 4 years ago now, with no tech skills, no proper business plan, no branding, or clear vision. I was just building things that I would have liked to use myself as a European jobseeker, as an investor, and for the climate founders I talked to every day in Berlin.

I honestly had no idea what I was doing, just some intuition and a curiosity to build something meaningful for the climate ecosystem. First just for Europe, then for everyone.

Fast forward to this summer and inClimate suddenly has 20k users, companies paying to hire through the platform, investors paying for deal flow, professionals paying for the community membership…

But all of this happened on a platform that someone with no tech knowledge had built. With a Canva logo…

There was no way to grow inClimate to 100k users or to build the features that users suggested - with this very shaky foundation.

So I spent the past 5 months thinking, sketching, rebuilding, and questioning what inClimate should actually look like if it’s meant to be useful and intuitive for us all in the long run.

That meant no newsletters, ghosting my inboxes, and just putting my head down.

Now, as we’re getting close to the end of the year, things are finally coming together. And hopefully (fingers crossed), I’ll officially relaunch the platform and the Last Week in Climate newsletter in January.

One thing that became very clear during this phase is that supporting all of you and the climate ecosystem is, at its core, just about connecting the right people.

Tools, platforms and technology matter. But what really moves things forward are people who care, connect, support each other, and keep going even when things feel slow or messy (like the current political climate + job market).

For a long time, I’ve wanted to share more of that human side. Not polished updates or growth numbers of inClimate, but the real process of building something that in the first place is meant to help people in the ecosystem. The doubts, the small wins, the mistakes, the moments where things click.

I’ve also wanted to tell more stories of the amazing people working on those climate solutions.

So this newsletter is going to shift a little.

Going forward, I’ll use this space to share more of the behind-the-scenes journey of building inClimate, along with stories and thoughts about the people building climate solutions around us.

Sometimes it’ll be reflective. Sometimes practical. Sometimes unfinished thoughts that I’d love to get your input on.

The more structured weekly climate updates will of course continue through a different channel, so you won’t miss those if that’s why you signed up.

If this sounds like something you’d enjoy reading, I’d genuinely love to have you here.

If not, that’s completely okay too.

I want this to be a space for people who are curious about how we can grow and support each other as an ecosystem, up close and human.

The working title is “People in Climate” - I’m still no branding genius - please help!

I’ll share more soon. :)

Wishing you all a great time with your loved ones over the holidays!

Big hug from Wiesbaden, Germany,

Tim