Drawdown Science

I’ll admit it: I like beef. Like many Americans, I was brought up to believe that beef was a central part of a traditional family meal. My mom made it. My kids ate it. Marketing campaigns told me it was healthy. Everywhere I went, I saw Americans eating lots of it. And for many years, I didn’t question these choices.

Getting clean, affordable, reliable electricity has always been a challenge for the electric sector. Electrical grids must balance supply and demand almost instantaneously to keep from interrupting service or damaging equipment – and curbing emissions means the game is changing. 

As North America electrifies to meet the challenge of climate change, leaders and engineers must simultaneously update our underprepared electrical grid.

To meet climate and health goals, countries must fund black carbon reduction at the scale and urgency that the threat warrants.Growing up, visiting my grandparents in rural India was the highlight of my summer vacation. In the 1990s, before social media began to consume pastimes, frolicking around with my cousins and admiring the beautiful nature was enough to satiate my childish heart.

To stop climate and build a sustainable future, food matters – a lot! What we eat and how we grow it is responsible for around 20–35% of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. 

Agriculture has disrupted the planet more than anything we have ever done, including burning fossil fuels. A sustainable future depends on recognizing this fact – and radically changing how we farm and eat.More than any other invention in human history, agriculture has radically transformed civilization and our relationship with the natural world.How did this happen?

There’s no question about it: We have all of the solutions to climate change we need. But which solutions should we deploy, and when and where should we deploy them, to have the biggest impact in the least amount of time? 

From how they're built to how they're run, buildings are a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore building better is essential for stopping climate change and creating a healthier, more sustainable planet.

The global food system isn’t broken, yet it needs fixing. 

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. 

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?

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.

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

The planet is now more than 1.1°C warmer than before the Industrial Revolution – and it shows. This summer, we’ve experienced punishing heat waves, devastating floods, and toxic levels of wildfire smoke filling our skies. As temperatures climb, the risk of extreme weather rises, too. And we’re facing an even hotter, more dangerous future. Humans are conducting an unprecedented experiment on the entire planet, and no one is sure exactly how bad it will turn out.

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.

It’s Net Zero Buildings Week! Time to celebrate the progress we’ve made in making buildings better for people and for the rest of life on this planet. And time to get real about where the net zero concept is useful and where it’s not.

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?

This article is the second in a series introducing the members of Project Drawdown’s new science team.

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.

This story was originally published by The Revelator.  What’s better for plants and wildlife is better for the climate. But where do we start to accomplish the best results?