Climate change is a global problem that requires a co-ordinated, ambitious and large scale research program to halt or, indeed, to reverse it. The evidence, accumulated over the past few years, is now overwhelming and clearly shows that this problem has been caused by mankind’s unrestrained consumption of fossil fuels. The realisation of this central point is the reason so many countries came together last year (2016) in Paris, under the auspices of the United Nations, to develop an ambitious plan to combat climate change. It is, however, often difficult to persuade countries that they should allow their own research funding to be spent on transnational research projects where they would also be paying for research carried out by foreign scientists working outside the funding country’s borders. This requires the funding countries to put aside narrow self-interest and to have the confidence that these funded projects are the optimal ones to solve the problem, in this case to mitigate climate change. To overcome the very practical issues involved, a ‘Grand Challenge’ approach has been proposed in an open letter that was published in Nature [1]. This type of approach has been previously used to great effect in tackling major health related diseases (http://www.grandchallenges.org/). In this approach, a panel of the world’s best experts come together to establish a road map that sets out research steps needed to overcome the problem, with the best international teams then assembled to carry out the required science. This process allows both governments and philanthropic funders to be fully assured that their money is being appropriately spent. More recently in Marrakesh a group of twenty-three countries and the EU agreed to establish Mission Innovation. The aim of this forum is to coordinate increased funding to tackle both climate change and the problems it is causing. Table 1 details the seven major areas that were identified where this effort should be focused. In the context of this paper it is Challenge No. 5, ‘Converting Sunlight Innovation Challenge – to discover affordable ways to convert sunlight into storable solar fuels,’ that is relevant here. Research into artificial photosynthesis, the subject of our recent conference, is designed exactly to do this. Currently electricity can be efficiently produced from clean renewable sources of energy using solar panels, wind turbines, etc. [2, 3, 4]. However, we do not yet have sufficiently ‘smart’ grids to properly cope with the complicated problems associated with mid- to long-term electricity generation, such as; the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, the intermittency of renewable sources of energy and the difficulty in storing large amounts of electricity for long periods of time [5]. It is apparent ways of storing electricity in chemical bonds are urgently needed, i.e., as a fuel, and artificial photosynthesis aims to do exactly this.