Project Drawdown: four solutions against the climate crisis

What if we already have all the solutions to face the climate crisis?

We already have all the solutions to save the world, and they are present in Project Drawdown, a project founded in 2014 and aimed at giving its support in achieving the “drawdown”, that time in the future when greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will stop growing and will begin to decrease.

Climate action, declined in multiple areas, is the basis of the project, which aims to provide governments, universities, multinationals, policymakers and communities with solutions to the climate crisis. The peculiarity of Project Drawdown is that the solutions presented are all implementable from today. Surely not all of them will have the same impact, nor will it be possible to develop them in the same time frame, but each of them potentially has an important role in resolving the climate crisis: stopping climate change is possible, but it is essential to cooperate internationally to succeed. 

Every solution presented by Drawdown is feasible and economically realistic, and it is illustrated in two different scenarios: the first predicts a temperature increase of 2°C by the end of the century, while the second limits the increase to +1.5°C in the same period of time. The four solutions that would have the greatest positive impact on the climate in the thirty-year period (2020-2050), in the scenario of a global temperature increase of one and a half degrees, are the creation of wind farms on the ground and photovoltaic systems on an industrial scale, the reduction of food waste and the adoption of a plant-based diet. The greater reduction in CO2 equivalent emissions would derive from the increase in onshore wind farms aimed at producing about 22% of global energy, compared to the current 4%. This solution would save the emission of a quantity of greenhouse gases between 47 and 147 gigatons (one gigaton is equivalent to the mass of 10.000 fully loaded US aircraft carriers and each year the global average of emissions produced by all anthropogenic activities is of about 40 gigatons).

At the second place in the ranking of the most effective solutions to fight climate change is the exploitation of solar energy with photovoltaic panels, which would reduce between 42 and 119 gigatons of CO2 equivalent.

At the third place, with 90-101 gigatons subtracted, there is a decrease in food waste: in fact, one third of the food produced globally is not eaten, which means that there is an unimaginable waste of resources and an unnecessary production of emissions. In states where income is low, food waste usually occurs unintentionally and in the first part of the supply chain, therefore during the collection and storage of food, while in high-income countries, waste is “intentional”, since retailers and consumers discard food based on how it looks, on its color, dents in the packaging, and so on.

Finally, adopting a plant-based diet is undoubtedly one of the “small steps” that each person can take to be sustainable in daily lives and reduce environmental impact. In fact, the consumption of meat and products derived from animals feeds a highly polluting industry, which bases its income on the exploitation of the soil, deforestation and over-consumption of resources and direct emissions from livestock. A change of diet could lead to a reduction in emissions between 64 to 91 gigatons of CO2 equivalent.

So, is it true that we have all the solutions to solve climate collapse? Yes, we have the various ingredients but the main one is missing, the only one that can hold the entire project together: the political will to change things. Project Drawdown provides extremely concrete and realistic insights that governments around the world could take into consideration in the adoption and implementation of their climate and environmental policies, especially those aimed at decarbonisation: the recipe for “saving the world” is here, we just have to find the missing ingredient.