Drawdown Science

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?