Carrying on the COP27 conversation

Three members of the Drawdown Lift team traveled to COP27 in November to represent Project Drawdown and promote climate solutions that generate tangible co-benefits for human well-being. Lift team members participated in and organized panel presentations; engaged with three Lift Advisory Council members, one Project Drawdown Board member, and multiple collaborating organizations; and met with leaders from several country delegations, including Bangladesh, Niger, Pakistan, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

The team published three articles during and after COP27 that highlight different aspects of the conversations and key outcomes from the meeting, particularly around the topics of climate justice, gender equality, and loss and damage, all of which are relevant for Drawdown Lift's work.

In “Project Drawdown: COP27 must answer calls for accelerated action and climate justice,”  Drawdown Lift program coordinator Carissa Patrone Maikuri called for an end to “siloed thinking.”  Instead, she wrote at Race to Resilience, we must “address multiple global crises together”  with the well-being of people and planet front and center.

“Beyond 8 billion: Focus on women, not population, for reproductive and climate justice,” centers the role of gender equity in climate solutions. “We need to turn away from dramatic headlines about the number of people on the planet and instead focus on the actual issue driving the continued rise of humans on Earth—a lack of rights, for women and girls in particular,”  I wrote in the piece, which published at Race to Resilience on November 14, the day for which gender was the COP27 theme.

“COP27: Balancing historic decisions and alarming shortcomings,” by Patrone Maikuri and Drawdown Lift research manager Yusuf Jameel, gave a shoutout to “a first small, yet symbolic, step”  the international conference took to advance climate justice: creating a mechanism for paying for climate-related losses encumbered by countries most affected by, yet often least responsible for, climate change.

I invite and encourage you to check out these thoughtful essays as you consider how you personally, and we as a society, might work to redress injustices while building a more secure future for ourselves and generations to come.