It’s time to elevate and expand corporate sustainability from the often siloed, underresourced work of small sustainability teams to the work of every team – harnessing the passion and expertise that every employee has to advance climate action.

Round after round of layoffs, deepest in the tech industry, have left over a quarter million workers wondering what’s next for their careers. I was one of them.

Last week’s release of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis report distills almost a decade of the latest climate science into an urgent, systemic call to action — imploring us to mobilize resources to tackle climate change and poverty at the same time if we are to ensure a just and sustainable future. Thankfully, climate mitigation solutions already exist for tackling both of these grand challenges of our time simultaneously. 

Project Drawdown has used rigorous science to identify and characterize nearly 100 practices and technologies that, if ambitiously implemented together, can achieve drawdown—the point when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere start to steadily decline, thereby stopping catastrophic climate change. 

Now, how do we scale them?

Today’s definition of business climate leadership centers on companies doing less harm, gradually reducing their emissions—and the damage they cause—over time. But this version of leadership neglects the many other levers companies have at their disposal to help or hinder our future on a livable planet.

These are exciting times for those of us working to put the brakes on climate change. We have been saying it for years—it’s both possible and necessary to stem the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere—and climate solutions are finally starting to get the attention they deserve.

We are reaching an important juncture within the corporate climate landscape. In a recent Deloitte survey of over 2,000 C-suite executives, 97 percent said “their companies have already been negatively impacted by climate change,” yet only 19 percent of these companies were identified as “leaders” in sustainability.

Five new implementation partners—Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Evergreen Action, Rewiring America, Seneca Solar, and The Outdoor Policy Outfit—also join the effort to turn the tide on climate change

There’s a hard truth about climate change: Meeting the Paris Accords—and limiting global warming to 1.5˚C or “well below” 2˚C—requires we stabilize emissions and then cut them nearly in half by the end of the decade.