By Abby Schultz
In an annual public letter, philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates makes clear he remains concerned about climate change and believes market forces alone won't lead to the technologies required to reduce climate-causing emissions.
"If we don't limit climate change, it will join poverty and infectious disease in causing enormous suffering, especially for the world's poorest people," Gates wrote.
The message is included in an annual "year ahead letter" published Friday on his blog, in a section titled, "Will the world prioritize scaling innovations that improve equality?" It appears to nod to comments Gates made in an October post when he wrote, "Although climate change will have serious consequences -- particularly for people in the poorest countries -- it will not lead to humanity's demise."
In the letter, Gates emphasized that he hasn't taken his eye off the challenge presented by climate change. "I will be investing and giving more than ever to climate work in the years ahead," he wrote, while adding that he will also continue to "give more to children's health," which is the priority of the Gates Foundation.
In December, the foundation published a report noting that deaths of children under five rose in 2025 for the first time after declining steadily year-after-year this century.
Gates' year-ahead letter is framed as an optimistic vision of the future "with footnotes." He leads these caveats -- which form the bulk of the letter -- with a call for philanthropists and wealthy countries to provide aid to those in need, domestically and globally. Gates, who is worth about $118 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, begins with philanthropy, telling his wealthy peers that giving "should grow rapidly in a world with a record number of billionaires and even centibillionaires."
Last May, Gates said he would give away "virtually all his wealth over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world" -- an estimated $200 billion -- and will close the foundation he co-founded. Bloomberg adjusted Gates' wealth downward last summer in part to reflect an acceleration in his charitable giving.
In the blog post, Gates also implores rich nations to restore funding cuts that the foundation said led to the rise in deaths among children last year. If healthcare funding falls by 20%, it will cause 12 million more childhood deaths by 2045, he wrote.
These cuts "won't be reversed overnight even though aid represented less than 1% of GDP even in the most generous countries," Gates said. "But it is critical that we restore some of the funding."
Though he didn't name specific countries, the foundation earlier cited a nearly 30% cut to global health aid in 2025 by the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, and several other wealthy countries.
Gates's optimism is grounded in his hopes for innovations in climate, healthcare, and education -- among other areas -- that can be accelerated by artificial intelligence. Still, his caveats include the question: "Will we minimize negative disruptions caused by AI as it accelerates?"
The two major challenges AI faces, according to Gates, are its use by bad actors and the disruptions it can cause to the job market.
If the world had heeded his 2015 TED talk warning of the need to prepare for a pandemic, the suffering caused by the Covid-19 pandemic could have been "dramatically less," he said. "Today, an even greater risk than a naturally caused pandemic is that a nongovernment group will use open source AI tools to design a bioterrorism weapon."
Job market disruptions are already evident, and Gates expects they will continue to grow in the next five years. "We should use 2026 to prepare ourselves for these changes -- including which policies will best help spread the wealth and deal with the important role jobs play in our society," he said.
Gates' October comments on climate ahead of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Brazil rejected a "doomsday" view of climate change and argued that more resources were needed to "improve life in a warming world." His year-ahead outlook also references the continuing need to fund innovations to adapt because "even in the best case the temperature will continue to go up."
But he also emphasized that emissions need to be cut more by replacing "all emitting activities with cheaper alternatives," and by developing innovations to cut industrial and aviation emissions. It's why he founded the climate investing fund Breakthrough Energy a decade ago, he wrote, "and why I will continue to put billions into innovation."
Gates also urged governments to act. "Government policies in rich countries are still critical because unless innovations reach scale, the costs won't come down and we won't achieve the impact we need," he said.
Write to Abby Schultz at abby.schultz@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 09, 2026 13:57 ET (18:57 GMT)
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