Now comes the hard part. After decades of inadequate efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and slow climate change, we are running out of time. We need a new strategy. 

From climate-fueled disasters to the just-completed COP28, climate change  has been much in the news this past year. At the same time, Project Drawdown has doubled down on our efforts to accelerate adoption of proven climate solutions.

In this latest in our series of monthly Ignite webinars, Project Drawdown executive director Jonathan Foley reflects on climate solutions action over the past year and shares exciting plans for 2024. 

Humanity CAN halt climate change before it’s too late – but to do so, we must be strategic about what, where, and how to focus our efforts for the biggest impact.

That’s the take-home message keynote speaker Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, shared at the Nest Climate Campus during Climate Week NYC 2023 in September.

Each and every one of us contributes to climate change – but some of us are going to need to do more to fix it. 

To avoid climate catastrophe, we must invest in the most effective “emergency brake” climate solutions as quickly as possible – through philanthropy, private investment, corporate spending, and government funding.

This will take a strategic, ecosystem-style approach in order to mobilize more climate funding and align existing funding with proven climate science and solutions, such as Project Drawdown’s scientific analysis showing that there are nearly 100 technologically and financially viable solutions for reducing, avoiding, or sequestering emissions.

The Biden Administration is backing industrial carbon capture schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Big Oil – bolstering their bottom lines and extending a PR lifeline that ensures they can continue polluting – all under the guise of climate action.

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?

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.

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.