Project Drawdown: reversing global warming

For Project Drawdown: a refrigerator full of food illustrates how many solutions an everyday appliance involves. Photo by Betsey Crawford

This photo of my refrigerator, with its usual groceries, though more attractively arranged than usual, represents some of the best and most exciting news I’ve ever heard. It goes back to a question environmentalist Paul Hawken posed: what can we do to reverse global warming?

Standard research typically focuses on ways to slow down global warming. But, Paul reasoned, if you’re on the wrong road, what’s the point of just slowing down? When he found no one could answer his question, he began assembling a team to spearhead the research themselves. Project Drawdown expanded into a worldwide coalition of scientists and other experts. They started gathering data, designed the system to analyze it, and came up with eighty things we can do today. Twenty that are still in the design stage. There were jaw-dropping surprises.

At bottom, there are two things you can do with excess airborne carbon and other related chemicals causing global warming. You can prevent their emissions or sequester them. Sequestering means pulling carbon from the air into the ground. To prevent emissions, we need to rethink many of the ways we conduct the business of agriculture, land use, waste management, transportation, energy production, and building. Project Drawdown addresses all of this.

The solutions are ranked from one to one hundred, in order of the amount of atmospheric carbon each reduces or prevents. Costs and savings are measured against estimates for business as usual for the next thirty years. The ranking doesn’t reflect importance, because they are all crucial steps that need to be taken. And they upend a lot of presuppositions. After all, who knew? No one was asking.

Educating girls and providing access to birth control would be the number one Project Drawdown solution if combined. They are numbers 5 and 6. Photo by Les Anderson via Unsplash.
Educating girls and providing access to birth control would be the number one solution if combined. They are numbers 5 and 6. Photo by Les Anderson via Unsplash.

I would suspect most of us would think transportation — cars, trucks, airplanes, shipping — would rank among the top ten. Not at all. They start in the thirties. To everyone’s amazement, refrigerant management was number one. “We were so disappointed,” Paul says. “So unsexy!” Which could also be said of reducing food waste, coming in at number three.

Another huge surprise was that educating girls and providing widespread access to family planning are numbers five and six. They would be number one if combined. Sixteen solutions pertain to food. Together, especially if you add in transport, they would dwarf the rest in the amount of carbon reduced.

Which brings us back to my refrigerator. A plant-rich diet is #4. Managed grazing (milk, eggs) is #19. Indigenous land use and tropical forests (shade-grown coffee, fair trade chocolate, heritage grains like quinoa) are #39 and #5. Growing food among trees shows up in four solutions. New approaches to rice farming cover two. This refrigerator connects so many solutions, I made a map:

What we do with our refrigerators involves 36 Project Drawdown solutions. Graphic by Betsey Crawford

Thirty-six solutions, almost half of the eighty available today, are involved in a common household item and what we put in it. What we eat, how we grow our food, how we transport it, whether we waste it. How we power our refrigerator, how we get rid of it when it no longer works. The plastic we use when we buy our groceries. Whether we recycle and compost. Whether our population will outpace our ability to care for it. Our relationship with our refrigerator is so important that the top ten solutions, marked by the small hot pink ovals, are all there.

All these interconnections in something so simple and common represent one thing that I love about Project Drawdown. The solutions aren’t complex and esoteric. They are all within our reach and some, like solar and wind power, are well underway. All of them are happening to some extent somewhere in the world. That was one of the guiding principles behind the research: what’s happening now? What do we already know? Scaling up is a doable challenge. Convincing ourselves, our representatives and the companies we deal with to move in these directions is a more complex challenge.

Onshore wind farms are the number two Project Drawdown solution. Photo by Betsey Crawford
Onshore wind turbines like these in southern California are the #2 solution, offshore is #22.

The Pachamama Alliance and Project Drawdown are teaming up to create a network of communities to spread the word. In March, I finished a five-session course given by the Alliance. Like the Drawdown website and book, the course was beautifully done and full of enthusiasm.

I was delighted that things that make my eyes glaze over, like refrigerant management and green cement, fire other people up. Being a plant person, I gravitated to agricultural and land use issues. But they all connect in so many ways that every solution will eventually meet at one intersection or another.

The passionate excitement around the project is a huge blessing. Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian psychologist and economist, looked at the effect of thirty years of scary, hard-to-fathom scientific evidence for climate disruption. He found that it drove people to lose the interest and faith many had in the 1980s and 90s.

People feel helpless and resistant when faced with apocalyptic framing. It’s important to know that installing solar panels, supporting organic farmers, buying LED lights, composting and recycling are important things we all can do. Promoting causes like educating girls, saving forests, and preserving indigenous land makes a difference.

Women grow 70% of the food worldwide, mostly on small farms. But women smallholders don't have the same access to resources and rights. With that access, their yield would rise by up to 30%, limiting the drive for deforestation for more land. Photo by Annie Sprat.
Women grow 70% of the food worldwide, mostly on small farms. But women smallholders (solution #62) don’t have the same access to resources and rights as men do. With that access, their yield would rise by up to 30%, limiting the drive for deforestation for more land. Photo by Annie Sprat via Unsplash.

These solutions are also important social justice issues and therein lie more connections. By rethinking the way we operate now, for the sake of the future, we will redress very profound injuries done to Earth and many of its people. The abrogation of rights, lands, and cultures; the dumping of toxic waste, especially in poor areas. Contamination of air, water and soil. Decimation of forests and wetlands. Sky-rocketing extinction of species. 

A wonderful bonus of all these interconnections is that we can all find something that matters to us. Then, in helping further one cause, we help further many more. We have a ready-made to-do list. In our class of sixteen, each of us chose a solution to pursue, and none overlapped. One man is taking a green cement proposal to his local school district, which has a building plan in the works. A chef is working with a landscape designer on a concept called agrihoods.

One woman is pursuing tropical forests and regenerative agriculture. Another is planning to raise money for girls’ education. One of my plans is to pursue the various threads involving trees. This is the profound blessing of gathering in community, which is central to the mission of the Pachamama Alliance.

Managed grazing is Project Drawdown solution #19. Here portable chicken coops are moved to an area recently grazed by cows. Photo by Betsey Crawford.
Managed grazing is #19. Here portable chicken coops (solar-powered!) are moved to an area recently grazed by cows whose pats attract bugs for the chickens to eat. The chickens are mostly uninterested in grass, so it has a chance to regrow after the cow’s recent grazing. Both fertilize the soil.

I’ve been a fan of Paul Hawken since I bought the perfect shovel from the Smith and Hawken catalog thirty years ago. He was a pioneering green entrepreneur, and I admired what he was trying to do with his business. His research into the millions of organizations worldwide working to save the planet has consoled and inspired me for a decade. He’s well known in the environmental and green business world, but he heads no large, clout-bearing organization. The first Drawdown office was Zoom.

A tiny team with a tiny amount of money sent out word to academics the world over to see if anyone was interested. They were inundated with responses and chose seventy Project Drawdown fellows from twenty-two countries who will continue to explore and refine their projections. As the information came in, they expanded the community with a 128-member Advisory Board. Their oversight will keep the science behind the recommendations impeccable.

Preserving and restoring forests are major Project Drawdown land use solutions. Here is preserved forest at the Wynn Nature Center in Homer, Alaska. Photo by Betsey Crawford
Preserving and restoring forests are major land use solutions.

I usually do my best not to use the same word over and over. But I find, despite dozens of suggestions in the thesaurus, that there is no adequate substitute for community. An excellent metaphor for life. One man with a question no one else is asking becomes a small community. They reach out and add seventy more. Soon, over two hundred people are involved.

Other whole communities — organizations like the Pachamama Alliance, businesses, universities, governing bodies — come on board and their members reach out to create communities. That’s what I’m doing now, hoping you will bring the news to your communities. Together we can transform an existential crisis into an opportunity to reimagine how we want to preserve and share the beauties and bounties of Earth.

Genesis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey is full of Project Drawdown solutions, including the array of solar panels in the lower right. Photo by Betsey Crawford

Genesis Farm in Blairstown, New Jersey is full of Drawdown solutions, starting with the array of solar panels in the lower right. Others include organic farming, forest preservation, recycling, water saving, plant-rich diet and composting.

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8 thoughts on “Project Drawdown: reversing global warming”

  1. Only you would have such an amazing refrigerator Betsey! Mine is so old and I have been wanting to get a newer, more efficient one, so thank you for the reminder. This is such an interesting article, so surprising, and so helpful. I am going to pass it on to some of my more environmentally conscious friends and try to be more conscious of some of these things myself. It’s a good time of year to remember that I can ride my bike someplace instead of always hopping in the car. Thank you!

    1. Thank you, Nancy. My frig doesn’t usually look like this, but it does contain the same things in a much less organized way. However, that certainly wouldn’t do for a photo. Thanks for passing it on.

  2. Posted this on our community website, and (I think!) shared on FB, and forwarded it to five more recipients. Beautifully done – especially the “fridge garden”… Love it. MLAA !!!

  3. Good to see this perspective on actions people can take or resolve to take on Earth Day. We are handing out our list of ten possibilities at church today. Thank you, Betsey.

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