The NGO behind the most rigorous compendium of climate solutions to date just published a major update. Project Drawdown’s lead data geek says it’s high time we start seeing climate solutions as an opportunity.

Through our “Ask An Advocate Anything” blog series, we chat with influential activists and campaigners, seeking to better understand their theories of change and explore how NGOs are challenging and collaborating with companies to advance business as a force for good.

The views and statements shared in the following interview are those of the interviewee alone and do not represent the perspective of Future 500. To learn more about how we approach these conversations, check out our Editorial Policy.

Tuning Up a Climate-Solutions Compendium for 2020

Three years ago, “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming” shot to the top of the  New York Times Bestseller list. Now Project Drawdown, the organization behind the book, has updated its prescription for a safe future. 

To unpack the update, we spoke with Chad Frischmann, the NGO’s Vice President & Research Director.

Project Drawdown is built upon an ocean of data and evidence. What kind of resources do you have access to?

We’re one of the world’s leading resources for those working to advance climate solutions. We assess the types of technologies and practices that, when taken together, can potentially achieve drawdown. The way we do that is we collect a lot of data, from all over the world—peer reviewed and widely cited studies—and we enter them into models that we built in-house. We then use the models to create what we call boundaries of possibilities.

How do you decide what science goes into the models, and what gets left out?

When we choose our inputs we look at the mean value of a given piece of research, not the high and not the low, because we don't actually want to be an advocate. We don’t want to be a critic, we want a conservative approach to assessment. We avoid double counting, look at the interaction of facts, the system dynamics and ensure we are within realistic boundaries. In the end we want science to speak for itself.

The original Project Drawdown book, released in 2017, was an exhaustive assessment. What prompted this update? 

In the last three years, we’ve seen new data and better data. In some cases, the solutions themselves have changed. For example, the costs of utility-scale solar are being driven down so far that it changes the nature of that technology’s contribution. Project Drawdown is a living research project. You'll see some of the solutions have dropped off the list and others added, and we get a better understanding of the facts as new data emerges.

You say in the 2020 Update that the business case for climate action is now overwhelming. Essentially the economics are sound. But nonetheless emissions continue to climb and markets are not responding at the needed scope, scale, and speed. Why? 

Well, I would say the markets are responding. We’re seeing uptake of renewable-energy systems across the board, we’re seeing the prices drop. We're seeing markets responding in the built environment as well, far more energy efficient buildings. However, you are right that it's not happening fast enough. It takes a while for markets to adjust, it takes a while for businesses to move, and shift from a fossil-fuel economy to a solution-oriented economy. That is going to take time to shift.

Of course the message from the activist community is that we don’t have that time anymore.

It’s true. We need to see more leadership in the corporate sector, more leadership at the policy level. And we need more leadership in individual choices, at the consumer level. We need to have a bottom-up, top-down, and middle-out approach—and by middle I mean the institutional change of corporations, educational institutions, and financial institutions.

We need to see a shift in mindset, to focus on solutions and opportunity, not just focus on risk but on solving and fixing the problem. Let's vision the future that we want and see this as an opportunity.

What are the biggest forces holding us back?

I think what's holding us back is simply that it takes time. And let's be reasonable, there are entrenched industries that are actively trying to hold on to what they have, so that has to change. But there are also other major barriers preventing the kind of acceleration that we need. People seem to understand that policy makers and decision makers, they get this. They’re very savvy; they know agriculture, they know land use, they understand health and education of course, but the actual specific solutions—the technology tracks that exist today—often people don’t even know them.

That's the value that Drawdown brings to the world. We list real, existing technologies and practices. You can go out and touch them, and implement them. And when people start to see what actually exists, and not just the contours of possibility, they can move much more quickly. 

America is of course obsessed with innovation. There’s a seductive notion, advanced by people like Bill Gates, that we can innovate our way out of the climate crisis. You have a line in your new edition that “now is better than new.” What do you mean by that?

There is this idea out there that some future technology will be invented and change everything. All that does is distract us. Even if, somehow, these future miraculous technologies do become scientifically valid and economically viable, well they're not going to scale with the speed that we need to really change the system. They're not going to come online and instantly transform everything overnight.

We have technologies in place today. You have a host of options and opportunities in front of you. We don’t need to have wishful thinking, the silver bullet coming in the future. Instead, I would challenge us to innovate and improve the technologies that already exist, make them go faster. 

You said earlier that you don't want to be a critic, you want the data to speak for itself. But the new update says, in one place, we must actively stop fossil fuel production expansion. It endorses divestment, describing it as “restricting the blood flow” of money. This rhetoric was absent in the original Project Drawdown. Why the shift?

That was implicit in the work that we’ve done. There are three core mechanisms to achieve drawdown, and one was to replace existing fossil-fuel technologies with clean and renewable alternatives. So that means stopping. Divestment is an important piece of this; we need to be disinvesting in technologies and practices that are causing problems and instead move that investment to solutions. In the report, yes, we do articulate that in a more direct way. I think that’s important for us to do.

The update also emphasizes the role of what you call “accelerators,” that is, things that speed up and scale up adoption, such as carbon pricing. Is civil disobedience an accelerator?

An accelerator is a direct mechanism that can increase the adoption of a specific solution. So looking at peaceful civil disobedience, going out there and peacefully protesting, it’s a vehicle for awareness and helping to enact policy changes. If an accelerator enables the adoption of a specific solution, well, it seems to me that civil disobedience accelerates all of them.

We hear Jeff Bezos is giving $10 billion to climate change work. Have you called him? 

Not yet. Do you have his number? 

I’m afraid not.

Well, like every other organization that’s out there working on this, I think we should be on his list of potential grantees, because Drawdown is creating a fundamental shift in the way we have access to knowledge. I think we’re well placed there. If anyone out there has his number, please let me know, okay?

Sure, we’ll pass it along. So in the original Drawdown you include nuclear power, obviously a profoundly challenging zero-emissions technology. But large hydro doesn't even get a mention anywhere that I could see. Why include nuclear but not hydro? 

That’s a fair question. We do include large scale hydro, not as a solution per se, but more as an existing technology. We feel large scale hydro can have a lot of impact on local ecosystems, local communities and livelihoods, and can cause a tremendous amount of damage. So what we’ve done is say, ‘Okay, look, let’s keep the existing large hydro facilities operational as, of course, they are already there. But because of the great disturbance in ecosystems, livelihoods, and the potential embedded emissions profile, we decided to keep it sort of like a ‘constant solution’ in the models. 

Well, nuclear has all those issues as well, but okay. There’s a lot of talk about recycling and composting in Drawdown, but there's no mention of circular economy models. Advocates of that approach say its climate potential is huge.

I’ll be honest with you, we didn’t update the waste management solutions in this round of the report, for the most part we didn't have the research capacity, but we have a new senior fellow working with us in industry, and they're going to be putting together a whole new update on all of the waste management solutions later this year. And circular will likely be a part of that.

It feels like we've entered an era where abundant evidence before our own eyes doesn't seem to galvanize action. What do you do when you have the very best data, the very smartest PhDs on earth, presenting all this information, but it doesn’t seem to inspire the needed response?

I think the jury is out on that one. We need to be engaging people. We’ve always said, ‘Let's talk with people about what they need from us, so we can then create tools for them that are not prescriptive but are actually meaningful.’ There’s an expression, ‘all models are wrong but some are useful.’ At Drawdown we're trying to create a tool that is based on scientifically valid data, that is rigorous, that is actually useful, and that provides a function that people want. When it becomes meaningful, it becomes embedded in the way you think and the way you act, in the way you feel. And that’s essential for us. That’s what we’re working towards and that’s how we overcome that inertia. It's a hard task but I think we're getting there.

We hosted a webinar with Chad Frischmann as part of the virtual Future 500 Summit at EarthX. Watch the recording of “Innovative Solutions for our Climate Emergency” with Project Drawdown and Ocean Climate Trust to learn more.

Which campaigner or organization should we profile for our next Ask An Advocate Anything blog? Send us your suggestions at info@future500.org. To get this series and other stakeholder insights delivered regularly to your inbox, subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

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