Until now I haven’t explained the name of my blog; today I will rectify that. Drawdown is a book, a project, and a website, dedicated to analyzing, ranking, and explaining the already existing or emerging solutions to reversing global warming. It’s an amazing project with some solutions that surprised me when I first read them. I’ll give a very brief overview of the project in this post. The website is comprehensive and I highly recommend the book.
The term “drawdown” might typically be used to describe reductions in financial accounts or military forces. The Drawdown team uses it instead “to refer to reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.” From reading their materials, it’s clear when they say carbon, they refer to greenhouse gases beyond CO2. Analyses such as these rely on scientists’ ability to calculate the global warming potential of different gases. Thus any gas can be translated into its equivalent in CO2; this is sometimes written as CO2e, or carbon dioxide equivalent.
Drawdown’s analysis approach is data-driven, feeding that data into multiple models that assess potential pathways1 for the global adoption of the solutions. Their analysis compares three solution adoption scenarios to the baseline “business as usual.” In short, the environmental sciences and policy fields use “integrated assessment models” for some of their analysis, and Drawdown is no exception. These models utilize a broad set of multi-disciplinary information and include causal chains from action to consequences. Computational simulation and economic models are common components of these models.
The three scenarios are based on different adoption rates of the analyzed solutions. I reproduce them here:
Plausible Scenario: the case in which solutions on the Drawdown list are adopted at a realistically vigorous rate over the time period under investigation, adjusting for estimated economic and population growth.
Drawdown Scenario: the case in which the adoption of solutions is optimized to achieve drawdown by 2050.
Optimum Scenario: the case in which solutions achieve their maximum potential, fully replacing conventional technologies and practices within a limited, competitive market.
Drawdown’s solutions are grouped into sectors. Here I reproduce Figure 2 from their web page, which illustrates the drawdown impact for the sectors that they analyze. The sector listing in order from largest to smallest using their “Drawdown” scenario is:
- Food
- Electricity generation / Energy2
- Land use
- Women and girls
- Materials
- Transport
- Buildings and cities
A couple of things about these sectors jumped out at me. First, they aren’t the same as the emissions sectors in the UN analysis (see last week’s post for more, figure reproduced here). Second, there are some unusual sectors such as food and “women and girls.” Why might there be these differences? I think it must be due to the different focus of Drawdown. The project doesn’t just concern itself with emissions, but with carbon sequestration and energy efficiency.
Finally, here are the top ten solutions together with their impact on reducing atmospheric CO2e, implementation cost, and operational savings.
In summary, Drawdown is an inspiring and action-oriented plan for reversing global warming. I recommitted to vegetarianism after reading the book when I saw that eating a plant-based diet is the fourth-ranked solution. I trust the organization won’t mind that I use the same term in my blog’s title. After all, the more people that know about these solutions the better. And as I heard Drawdown’s founder, Paul Hawken, say in a talk, people don’t wake up saying “let’s go mitigate.” Instead, let’s talk drawdown, and do it with data science.
Footnotes
1. A pathway refers to a greenhouse gas concentration trajectory over time. See this introduction for more details.
2. Energy is used in the book, and “Electricity generation” is used in the website.
