Triple win: climate change, poverty, and biodiversity

Halting climate change, alleviating poverty, and stemming the loss of biodiversity are some of the most critical challenges humanity faces today. With finite resources to invest in addressing them, how do we decide where to focus our efforts?

Good news: We don’t have to pick one or another! Project Drawdown has identified a set of specific technologies and practices that address multiple challenges simultaneously and synergistically, creating an exciting opportunity for funders and development agencies to dramatically amplify impact while working to address the world’s most pressing needs.

In this latest Drawdown Ignite webinar, climate-poverty solutions scientist Yusuf Jameel and policy advisor Dan Jasper introduce these “triple-win” solutions and explore how strategic deployment in low- and middle-income countries can bring new hope for a better world within our lifetimes.

Top Takeaways

1. Solutions to three massive threats humanity faces today – climate change, poverty, and biodiversity loss – overlap, and numerous actions can address all three at the same time.
2. Efforts to alleviate poverty can increase or decrease demand for fossil fuels. As development proceeds, it’s critical to avoid “carbon lock-in” by favoring renewable over carbon dioxide–producing technologies.
3. Climate change and biodiversity loss are intricately intertwined. Climate change exacerbates biodiversity loss, and biodiversity loss exacerbates climate change. Thus, efforts to alleviate both simultaneously can have synergistic effects.
4. For greatest impacts, funding and action should focus on solutions that address multiple challenges at the same time. For example, shifting agricultural practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can also enhance food supply, improve gender equality, and protect habitat.
5. The ability to do so is unfortunately limited by inadequate funding, inappropriate use of available funding, and inequitable distribution of available funding.
6. Solutions include increasing funding for projects that address multiple challenges simultaneously, living up to funding pledges, increasing accountability to ensure funds are appropriately distributed, basing funding decisions on sound science, pursuing the greatest good rather than the greatest profit, and canceling debts owed by low and middle-income countries. 
7. Anyone can help by sharing this message with policymakers and joining advocacy organizations that recognize the importance of and promote intersectional action.

Useful Resources

• Climate–Poverty Connections: Opportunities for Synergistic Solutions at the Intersection of Planetary and Human Well-Being
• Desperate for hope? Linking human well-being and climate solutions is a way forward
• The win-wins of climate and biodiversity solutions
• Reflections from Bonn: Climate negotiations must face reality and rebuild credibility
• A rescue plan for people and the planet
• New IPCC report highlights urgent need to advance climate solutions and development simultaneously
• Key takeaways from Drawdown Lift’s Climate–Poverty Connections webinar series

This webinar is part of Project Drawdown’s monthly Drawdown Ignite webinar series. Drawdown Ignite provides information and inspiration to guide your climate solutions journey. View past Drawdown Ignite webinars on YouTube, and visit our Events page for updates on future webinars.