Unless you're deeply involved in climate policy, you may not be aware that crucial international climate negotiations recently wrapped up in Bonn, Germany. These annual talks laid the groundwork for issues to be discussed at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Despite their importance for global climate action, however, these mid-point meetings don’t get nearly as much attention as they deserve.
In 2019, Bay Area data scientist Louis Potok was looking for an opportunity that not only would satisfy his entrepreneurial itch but also do good for the planet. When he came across a copy of Drawdown, the book, and saw refrigerant management at the top of the list of impactful climate actions, he knew he had found it. A year later he launched Recoolit, a company that captures and destroys refrigerants that otherwise would be released to the atmosphere during air conditioning maintenance and sells carbon credits corresponding to the reduced climate impact. Today Recoolit is reducing the atmospheric load of these particularly powerful greenhouse gases with a special focus on Indonesia and other countries where a warming climate is increasing demand for residential and commercial climate control.
The Drawdown Solutions Library is a valued resource for Stewart Investors, a private investment firm with US$20 billion in assets and a focus on companies in emerging economies. Funding areas amplified with guidance from Project Drawdown include metals recycling, plastics reduction, and improved fisheries management. “We use Project Drawdown to help us understand the role companies can play in climate solutions and we map investee companies to Project Drawdown’s collection of climate solutions, which if scaled up, can help to deliver the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature goal,” the company reports. “Our focus is on whether the companies themselves are making a meaningful contribution to delivering the solutions.”
I have worked in the sustainability space for almost a decade. In that time, I have witnessed my parents struggle to tell their friends what their daughter does for work; my friends who work in tech smile and nod when I talk about climate policy; and strangers apologize to me for not recycling.
Eric Toensmeier is a writer, trainer, and consultant working on agricultural climate change mitigation. Eric has served as a senior fellow with Project Drawdown and the Global Evergreening Alliance, and a lecturer at Yale University. He specializes in agroforestry and perennial crops. At Project Drawdown, he supervises research fellows assessing solutions in the Food, Agriculture, Land, and Ocean and Nature-Based Carbon Removal sectors. His books include The Carbon Farming Solution and Trees with Edible Leaves.
Reducing methane emitted by agriculture, fossil fuels, and landfills is one of the most important and effective actions we can take to stabilize Earth’s climate.
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