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Street Roots • May 5-11,2017
The plan to save the world
‘D rawdown lays out the top 80 climate-change solutions already underway
BY E M IL Y GREEN
S T A F F W R IT E R
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I
f
round the globe, people are
cultivating food, harnessing energy
and building communities using
methods that have the combined potential
to reverse global warming.
Scaling up these methods would not only
stop greenhouse gas accumulation in the
atmosphere; it could actually draw more
carbon dioxide back into the
Earth’s reserves than the sum
of all emissions.
The result goes beyond
climate stabilization and
mitigation. This drawdown
could reverse our planet’s
disastrous course toward
climate catastrophe.
That’s according to a
coalition of nearly 200
researchers, scientists,
economists, biologists,
climatologists and other
relevant experts behind the
book “Drawdown: The Most
Comprehensive Plan Ever
Proposed to Reverse Global
Warming.”
11
At 240 pages, the plan to
B
save the world might not
11 seem as comprehensive as the
book’s title would suggest,
however the research and
calculations behind each
solution are immense.
Released on April 18, it’s
also the first plan of its kind.
Never before has anyone
calculated the cumulative
impact of implementing a
broad range of solutions on
a massive
PH O TO BY R A M O N D BALTAR
A
Paul Hawken
lays out the 80 most effective and
economically viable solutions to climate
change.
Each method is ranked according to how
much CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases it
has the potential to avoid or sequester by
2050.
The rollout of a comprehensive online
database that will make additional data,
tools and expanded models freely available
to the global public has been delayed. In the
meantime, each solution is summarized at
drawdown.org, and interested parties can
request data for each solution by filling out
an online form available on the website.
The coalition behind “Drawdown”
produced this plan with the hopes that
individuals, communities and governments
large and small would adopt the solutions
contained within it.
Already, the Drawdown team has agreed
to collaborate with the General
Commonwealth of Nations to integrate
solutions into the plans of its 52 member
countries. Combined, these nations
represent nearly one-third of Earth’s
population and include Canada, Australia,
U.K. and India. The U.S. is not a member.
While many of the team’s top methods,
such as wind turbines and solar farms, are
widely recognized as necessary steps in
addressing climate change, others are less
obvious.
For example, if business travelers
attended meetings electronically rather than
physically, it would save nearly 2 gigatons of
carbon dioxide emissions and $1.3 trillion in
travel expenses over 30 years.
The book highlights a company with
offices in Prague and Toronto that uses a
two-wheeled scooter with an attached tablet
to send its employees between offices. The
screen on the tablet displays the face of a
visiting virtual guest who can remotely
Control the scooter to tour the facility and
Another solution is bioplastic. According
to “Drawdown,” plastic production is
expected to triple by 2050, and today almost
all of it is petro-plastic, made from fossil
fuels. But experts estimate 90 percent of
plastics could be made from other sources,
such as plant derivatives, instead. If
bioplastic production was scaled to account
for 49 percent of the market
by 2050, it would avoid 4.3
gigatons of emissions.
The book’s editor and
According to the Drawdown
initiator, prominent
team’s Plausible Scenario:
environmentalist Paul
Hawken, admits that while
1. Refrigerant management
these are the most plausible
2. Onshore wind turbines
methods for achieving
3. Reduced food waste
drawdown, not all of them
are ideal.
4. Plant-rich diet
That’s because in
5. Tropical forests
maintaining objectivity, the
6. Educating girls
coalition included the
practices that have the most
7. Family planning
greenhouse-gas-reducing
8. Solar farms
ability, whether they liked
them or not.
9. Silvopasture
Instead, they evaluated
10. Rooftop solar
each potential solution by
asking whether it was
currently available and
scaling, if it was economically viable, if it
had the ability to significantly reduce
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, if
there were data available to model it to a
global scale, and if the positive benefits
outweighed any negative results.
That’s how nuclear energy came in at No.
20. If it remains on its current growth path,
the Drawdown team estimates, nuclear
power plants will avoid about 19 gigatons of
CO2 emissions by 2050. Reliance on the
hazardous energy source is also projected to
peak and then decline within that
timeframe.
Top 10 solutions
See DRAWDOWN