Paul Hawken on One Hundred Solutions to the Climate Crisis

Environmentalist Paul Hawken believes that to motivate action on climate change, the focus needs to be on solutions rather the problem.  And, he says, those solutions – from changing the type of refrigerants used to reducing food waste – are already here.

Paul Hawken acknowledges that the subtitle of his latest book, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, is brash.  But the author and entrepreneur says he can get away with it because the plan he and his collaborators put forward is the first and only of its kind.

“We’ve never mapped, measured, and modeled the top solutions to global warming, after 40 years of this being in the public sphere,” he says in an interview with Yale Environment 360.  With this plan, he contends, “we have in hand now, in a practical way, the solutions that are needed in order to reverse global warming.”

The book, which he edited, represents the work of Project Drawdown, the organization he founded with the mission of researching and promoting a path to drawdown, the point at which the concentration of greenhouse gases begins to decline.  The volume includes descriptions of 100 of those solutions, 80 of which are currently in practice.  As Hawken puts it, “There are no wannabes.”

The solutions are ranked by the number of gigatons of CO2, or the equivalent, that they would avoid or sequester between the years 2020 and 2050.  They range from big difference-makers such as refrigerant management, wind turbines, and food waste to those that are important but not as impactful, including methane digesters, green roofs, and microgrids.

When it comes to global warming, Hawken says, we’ve been “focusing too much on the problem instead of the solution….  Regenerative development is development, whether it’s on an urban, transportation, housing, marine agriculture, or health level.  It’s development that actually heals the future as opposed to stealing from it, which is what we’re doing today.”

 Paul Hawken on One Hundred Solutions to the Climate Crisis