"Project Drawdown" was a book which came out in February 2018 in the UK, and which I found out about at an event I attended in Geneva.
The new "Drawdown Explorer" provides an update on the ideas, and suggests that some of them are not as effective as was thought earlier, and their potential impact has been reevaluated.
One issue here is that as CO2 levels rise, some elements of natural systems begin to change, particularly those involving plants.
Building upon thousands of hours of analysis by scientific experts from around the world, the Drawdown Explorer provides detailed information on the many technologies and practices proven or proposed to effectively reduce greenhouse warming pollution in the atmosphere.The Drawdown Explorer analyses solutions and puts them in four categories:
- Highly Recommended: solutions that meet all of Project Drawdown’s criteria for global climate solutions
- Worthwhile: solutions that can still help mitigate climate change but do not meet the scale to be considered a major climate solution
- Keep Watching: solutions that have potential but are not yet available in the real world – or the technology still lacks clear effectiveness, evidence, or a reasonable cost – and are not yet ready to be deployed
- Not Recommended: solutions that, at the end of the day, we do not recommend as a climate solution, either because they are not scientifically plausible or they present a high level of risk.
Browse the full complement of Drawdown Explorer solutions below, or filter by criteria of your choice using dropdowns or the table format.
Then click through to individual solutions to get a close-up view of current and potential impact – including, for recommended solutions, the optimal timing, cost, additional benefits, interactive maps showing where action can have the greatest impact, and specific advice for how you, whatever your role, can best put the solution to work.
Explore the solutions with students.
There's some useful work to do here to turn this website into an activity where students perhaps assess some climate solutions presented as cards - perhaps Top Trump style - or a Diamond-9 ranking activity or something else to suit your own preferred way of organising information of this kind.
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