Reversing climate change goes beyond the math and science of reducing the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. It’s also about economic justice, social equity, and increasing the standard of living for all people across the planet. That’s the beauty of the approach presented in Drawdown. Not only does the suite of solutions tackle climate change, its co-benefits uncover a path forward that addresses human rights and ‘raises the boat’ for all people.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble. We are in Marin County today, which I haven’t really been up here before. It’s nice and rainy. Land of Robin Williams, that’s what I associate it with. Also Sausalito, I associate with his I don’t know if I got that from Jack Kerouac or something like that, but it’s really beautiful up here. Christophe, why don’t you introduce our guest and tell us what we’re doing up here.
Christophe Jospe: Sunny Sausalito. It was raining. Now I see sun out the window, so that’s nice. We could drive over the Golden Gate Bridge on our way back. Sitting across from Chad Frischmann at Drawdown, I noticed that Chad has a 585 area code, which is near and dear to my heart. I’m also from Rochester. It means we like you already, Chad, which is good. But let’s jump right into it. What’s your story? What’s your background? How did you... Oh, yeah.
Chad Frischmann: So I have been in the sustainable development, environmental conservation, indigenous people’s rights nexus for about the past, oh, I’d say 10 years or so. And looking at that through the lens of climate change. But this isn’t where my career started. I actually started prior to this as an art historian. I was working and teaching on the Renaissance art in the 16th century, principally, you know, looking at the differences between German and Turkish art in the 16th century. And I had a bit of an existential crisis myself. I went on a sabbatical for my PhD and went on a trip to sub-Saharan Africa.
And while being there and seeing and witnessing the beautiful environment and the people there and the needs that they had, I came back to Oxford and I said, I need to shift my life. And I moved here to Berkeley promptly and changed my entire career to this nexus to really looking at how we can solve the world’s problems. And of course, when you look at sustainable development and environmental conservation and particularly indigenous peoples who are really at the forefront of the impacts of climate change, really how we deal with global warming is through that nexus is incredibly important.
And so that’s really, I’ve kind of led me to Project Drawdown.
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. Yeah, I can kind of see the connection. And I do agree with you that when you look at it through the lens of indigenous peoples who may be most impacted and least able to actually deal with some of the challenges of warming or droughts or ocean acidification or what have you all. Kind of all adds up to realize we need a comprehensive solution that involves everyone. And what really inspired me about reading the Drawdown book, and both of us read it, and then I actually got the pleasure to see you speak last year at University of Washington, is there’s hope in it.
This climate change challenge, well, it may be existential. It’s not all doom and gloom. And actually, the solutions are out there. And part of the challenge is how to coordinate them and how to sort of make it all work and But for our listeners who maybe haven’t read the book Drawdown, what’s the elevator pitch? What is it?
Chad Frischmann: Well, you know, Drawdown is that point in time when we start to reduce atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. So it’s that turning point when we start to take out of the atmosphere more than we’re putting into it. And really, the proposition is really simple, right? If we can take out concentrations of greenhouse gases to reduce those concentrations, we can affect global cooling, a reversing of global warming. So what Drawdown is really about is how can we present a positive message of the opportunity in front of us? What are the solutions?
What are the technologies and practices when applied at global scale can shift us, shift us from a system? And in doing so, we can affect that pivot, that shift to a more regenerative system. And while we’re doing this, we happen to have the technologies and practice that can affect that reduction in concentrations of gases and thereby reverse global warming.
Ross Kenyon: And how many of these would you say could take place entirely with private sector action just through market signals for doing these things? And how many of them do you think are reliant on policy, would you say?
Chad Frischmann: That’s a very tough question to answer. It’s probably a mix, right? It’s definitely a mix of both. It’s individual behavior change. So when we think about agency, we think about the capacity to make decisions, right? And so the way we’ve analyzed all of these technologies and practices is across different levels of agency. So it’s an agency perspective. How can I as an individual make behavior changes? Like how can I change my diet? How can I change the way I interact with food waste? How do I change my mobility options, right?
Households, I’m a homeowner. What kind of technologies can Can I retrofit my home or when I’m buying a new home or constructing a new home? How can I make those changes? The decisions about the type of technologies that can actually reduce consumption of electricity and other energy, essentially. So households and businesses and landowners and utilities and policymakers and building owners. And when you start to look at it from the perspective of all the different levels of agency that are actually required to make the change that we need, It’s really empowering because we’re all in it together.
It’s no longer what I can do or what the government can do. It’s about what we can do at all different scales. And so these technologies of practices, I wouldn’t say, I wouldn’t even want to venture a guess as to quantify how many of them require. Sure.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, the thing that attracts us to Nori and the way that we go about this is if you can make it profitable or at least not a huge cost to people to do things that are in the public interest, then you have a much greater chance of success. So a lot of the ones that you propose in the book, there is an upfront investment on almost all of them, I believe. But oftentimes you believe the payoff is quite good. You think in general, that’s the way to think of it.
Chad Frischmann: Well, absolutely. I think the payoff comes in operational savings. And what we do is we actually are comparing the adoption of these technologies or practices in comparison to a quote unquote business as usual, a conventional technology. So when we’re thinking about savings, So we have to build the infrastructure and we have costs associated with the expanding electricity markets. So we have a choice. Not only can we convert existing electricity production, but When we have the opportunity to replace, we can go solar instead of conventional. And so when we compare those cost differentials, that’s where we get the net first cost, the net cost of implementation.
It’s whether we do coal or we do solar PV. And when we start to look at it from that comparison, we see the marginal first cost in many of these solutions are actually higher. So there’s, or sorry, I should say, there are savings to be accrued for those first costs. But when we compare the operational costs as well, it’s the same. The operation of a coal plant versus a wind farm, right? There’s no fuel cost required for a wind farm, so the costs for operation are much lower. And when you start to look at that over a long period of time, say the 30 years of our study and beyond, the lifetime operational savings are significantly higher for many, many of those solutions, including the many land use solutions and agricultural solutions.
Christophe Jospe: I love it. And I think just for our listeners, the book itself is really informative because it takes the 100 top solutions by bringing modelers and climate scientists and various postdocs and really smart people. Each of whom looks at a different solution and then models what’s the impact that this can have over the baseline that you have. And for our listeners to define what is drawdown, let me see if I can put it as succinctly as possible. It is the suite of actions that can slow and stop the accumulation. Well, yeah, another problem because we fixed it.
Chad Frischmann: There’s a few things to say there. First of all, you’re right. That’s a good way to put it. What I would say are there are three mechanisms to achieve drawdown. First is replacing energy, the current fossil fuel based energy infrastructure with clean, renewable alternatives and the Enabling Technologies, right? These are things like smart grids and grid flexibility and storage capacity. So we need to do the replacement of our energy system. We also need to reduce consumption. And that reduction in consumption not only comes from technologies that are more efficient, more efficient use of electricity and energy, but also our behavior change, right?
Behavior change, how we reduce how much we’re consuming because we’re really consuming so much on this planet, more than this planet can bear. And more than we actually need. I mean, just look at food waste. We waste about 20 to 30% of food waste in high-income countries. And that’s at point of market, point of consumption. That doesn’t need to be wasted. That can be diverted to other populations that have a need for that. So we’re overproducing. But I think the third piece is, you know, so reduction, replacement, and the third piece is sequestering carbon, which is what you’re alluding to.
This is a process we all know, we learned about in grade school, it’s called photosynthesis, right? It’s about taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it to plant biomass and soil organic carbon. That is the only process we know with certainty to reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon that are already up there. That’s the only way we know with certainty. There are some technologies that have the potential, if they become economically viable and if they work and they get tested, some technologies could have the potential to reduce that in different mechanisms.
But right now, restoring the natural carbon cycle is the only way we know with certainty to achieve drawdown. And you only get there by replacing energy infrastructure, reducing consumption, and adopting practices for land use and agricultural practices that have a net sequestration effect. And that’s how we do it.
Christophe Jospe: So I want to go back to this list. You’ve got a list and you did the calculations to look at the net effect of stopping the greenhouse gases, replacing the greenhouse gases, removing the greenhouse gases, and you added it all up. And you came about and said, okay, number one is refrigerate management. And I’d like to just dive into that a little bit because I think it’s instructive to understand the warming potential of certain greenhouse gases.
Unknown speaker: Mm-hmm.
Christophe Jospe: Not all carbon is created equal. CO2 or carbon dioxide is different from CH4, which is methane, which is different from chlorofluorocarbons or different F gases. And it sounds like there’s a lot of apples to oranges, but it’s really cool that not only are you able to compare that, but then alongside you’ve also got what are the co-benefits of some of these things? Like you said, how can reducing food or diverting food waste to not go into a landfill might actually help feed hungry people when it’s just an imbalance of some of these challenges?
Let’s start with number one. And again, I kind of want to go back to Ross’s question where you’ve got policy, you’ve got finance, you’ve got different, let’s call them prescriptive mechanisms. But it doesn’t seem like Drawdown is about prescribing one way. It’s just saying, here, let’s present these solutions to you and let’s Let’s present how these solutions are actually a better way of doing things. Sorry, that was a loaded question. Let’s unpack it. Well, there’s lots of different pieces there.
Chad Frischmann: You’re absolutely right. We’re not a prescription. We’re a plan in the sense that the plan already exists. People are already implementing these technologies to practice. These solutions, they’re scaling globally, right? What we’re doing is essentially reflecting the mirror back on itself, back on humanity. What are we actually doing? And then showing, describing what are these solutions that are scaling already and what are their potential impacts, right? But this is already happening. That’s what’s so beautiful about it. The technologies are here. Now, certainly new technologies are on the horizon. We call them coming attractions.
We highlight 20 of them in our book. These are technology solutions that when integrated into the system are going to have a significant impact. But it’s important to remember that we only achieve drawdown when we implement all 80 and more solutions together. That’s when we actually achieve that effect. We want to adopt these solutions whether or not global warming was a problem. These are technologies and practices. They’re not even scaling in many cases right now because of global warming. When we think of clean renewable energy, we think of abundant energy.
We think about energy resilience. We think about air pollution. When we think about family planning, girls’ education, this is about human rights, gender parity, about economic growth and independence, about human rights. When you think about agricultural production, we think about regenerative ag, we think about tropical trees, staple crops. This provides, increases soil health and productivity, it helps retain water, it improves livelihoods of farmers, it reinforces smallholder farming, and oh, by the way, it also sequesters carbon and helps to reverse global warming. All of these technologies, almost every one of them are scaling today because of the co-benefits.
And often the effect on climate is a second, third, fourth order benefit. And that’s what’s so beautiful about it. And that’s why when we’re adopting a drawdown, we’re adopting technologies and practices to achieve this. That’s how we pivot from that system that is exploitative and extractive to one that is restorative and regenerative. Now that’s one piece or maybe two pieces of the question you asked. Now in terms of refrigerant management, which I think you started with.
Unknown speaker: Yeah. That’s the number one impact.
Chad Frischmann: It’s the number one impact.
Unknown speaker: Let’s do it. Why not? What is that going to take?
Chad Frischmann: Well, you know what we’ve done is we’ve done a really kind of a crazy thing here, didn’t we, with the Montreal Protocol, where we did a great job in limiting chlorofluorocarbons, which have this effect on the ozone layer, right? So we did a good job with that. And so what was replaced, it was hydrofluorocarbons, HFCs. Now, the problem with this is that they are thousands of times more potent. So even if we put in a smaller quantity of those gases in the atmosphere, the effect is much, much greater, right? And that’s why it quantifies to be as that.
But what we’re talking about with refrigerant management is really about controlling energy. And destroying the HFCs at the end of life. It’s about disposal. How we, how our municipalities, how our government, how our individuals deal with the essentially disposal of refrigeration units, air conditioning. They go to landfills. And when they’re in landfills, the HFCs just leak out of those systems over time and they contribute to global warming. They contribute to atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, right? And what we can do is prevent this by disrupting. Destroying them at end of life.
And that requires, frankly, the business case is a hard business case to have. It will require some policies and financial mechanisms to support this and the engagement of municipalities and collection of these equipments and bringing them and transporting them to the proper disposal facilities. And it’s a huge net cost. You’ll see that’s the number one solution, but it’s also nearly a trillion dollars in costs. It’s almost $900 billion, I believe, in net operating costs. So that number includes both operational and the assumed implementation costs as well. That number is going to require some policy and financial mechanism to help achieve that over time.
If we can do that, we can really reduce So much is the number one solution. But if we also consider the fact that we have not included the Kigali Amendment, which was agreed to internationally in October of 2016, this is essentially a phasing out of the production and use of hydrofluorocarbons over time and difference between high income, medium and low income countries. We don’t account for the effects of the Kigali Agreement in our assessment. You know, if we included the phase-out of hydrofluorocarbons in addition to the destruction of existing refrigerant banks, that number of 89 gigatons or so would leap to about, we estimate, 160 gigatons.
And there are some studies that show if we shorten the phase-out period, it could be as high as 200 gigatons just from refrigerant management. So it is really our number one solution in many ways, but also very hard to achieve without policy or financial mechanisms.
Ross Kenyon: Is it possible just to recycle this? Okay. But it’s not profitable or it’s not cost effective compared to just making it new?
Chad Frischmann: That’s precisely the point. Yeah. Recycling facilities are quite difficult to extract the HFCs. They still exist. So, you know, there are natural refrigerant alternatives. In fact, carbon dioxide itself can be used as a natural refrigerant. Yeah. Dry ice. Dry ice. Precisely. Precisely. So actually by replacing them is much better potential than necessarily recycling them, though recycling has its own benefits as well.
Ross Kenyon: You go back to dry ice is like the ice boxes of old where like the guy would come around your street with the ice truck. Is that what you’re referring to?
Chad Frischmann: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: That’s the alternative.
Ross Kenyon: That’s pure carbon dioxide.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. All right. I mean, I hear everything you’re saying. The economist in me wants to say, well, there’s an externality, negative externality of putting the Carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And here we’re talking about CO2 equivalents of thousands of times. I’m not exactly sure what the number is for the hydrofluorocarbons. I know it’s high. If there were a mechanism to say if you put that CO2 into the atmosphere, you’re responsible for taking it back out or not putting it. And Nori’s approach is to say, we need to make the drawdown from the atmospheric side as quick as possible to motivate all these other things as well.
And so that’s why we’re looking at many of these solutions in the drawdown book, specifically for the carbon removal potential. And one of the points that you brought up, which we love because this is how we’re kind of initially supplying our marketplaces in the regenerative agriculture. Just like you say, it’s a win-win because the farmers have more drought-resistant crops, are not producing pollution from the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, which then creates algal blooms and all these challenges, all these expensive inputs that they need to now not pay for. Instead, it’s just planting cover crops and rotating your crops kind of specific to your soil type.
So we also read this book. We’re inspired. We say, okay, let’s get going. I mean, the sun has come out. We’re hopeful. But we know there’s a lot of work, actually. And we don’t want to get into the doom and gloom. We know that there’s a budget. We’ve already gone through whether we want to admit it or not. Time is up. And now it’s how do we not only pay down that debt, but also make sure that we’re not going to have more and more of a debt that keeps rising just artificially.
So, Chad, we like to sometimes ask some of our really smart guests if they can get in the driver’s seat. We’re going to make you king of the world for a second. And your mandate as king of the world is to solve climate change. How would you do it?
Chad Frischmann: Well, you know, I often say that if there was a God, however God that you believe in, if there is a God and they wanted to reverse global warming, they would initiate a global carbon tax. And that would be a mechanism through which significant change could occur across all of these solutions. However, short of that power as a king or a god, I’m not sure whether or not the policymakers of the global scale will be able to initiate the kind of carbon taxation system that will be effective. We hope that will be the case.
Of course, there are other mechanisms as well, other carbon pricing and markets that could be effective as well.
Christophe Jospe: It’s a very safe answer.
Ross Kenyon: You upgraded yourself from king to god.
Chad Frischmann: There you go, right?
Ross Kenyon: I’m not sure a king can do it. How’s it work on the consumption end? The attitude I personally take is I don’t really want to reduce any of the things that I’m consuming. I’d like to just pay the price for emitting the carbon dioxide that I’m producing. I don’t really want to change my lifestyle at all. I don’t want to travel less. I don’t Definitely not take the bus. I want to drive my own car. I want to have a fully autonomous vehicle.
Unknown speaker: You want to eat meat too, don’t you? You want to eat lots of meat?
Ross Kenyon: I definitely want to eat meat, yeah.
Unknown speaker: How much meat do you want to eat? That’s the question.
Ross Kenyon: I want to have a nice paleo, everything that I desire lifestyle. I want to pay the price of doing so, but I also don’t know. I think I’m closer to the mainstream than the outlier. I think the people who are really concerned about being very diligent about all their choices are probably a smaller group. I’m sure it’s growing too. Would you be okay with something where people were allowed to continue as they were, but then were just paying to remove the waste products that they were emitting?
Chad Frischmann: Well, I think the reduction component is an essential piece moving forward. If we think about social equity and economic disparity throughout the world, no matter how, at least given the current status of the globe, if every person on the planet had equal access and rights to do as much as you’re consuming or hope to consume, The planet would not be able to survive that. While you’ll be able to pay for it, many people will not be able to pay for that offset. So if we actually want to raise the boats for all people, I think that means coming to a balance of technologies that allow you to travel efficiently using an electric fully autonomous vehicle that is shared with society and that is operating on a fully renewable grid.
We need to think about this as a full system approach. The reduction requirements, your utility will not change, we think. We ask that your utility is not going to change substantially with this reduction as we actually consume a healthy diet. And if you take all the other externalities that you’re going to have to pay for, it doesn’t add up. We really need to be reducing our consumption. And approaching it from a very social equity approach. I mean, we need to think about how populations across the world, what they’re consuming and what they’re going to want to consume into the future, right?
So you could pay for it now, but are you limiting the capacity for others in the future to have restricted consumption patterns and who are they going to pay to offset in the future? I mean, we have to think about that now. And I think the quickest way that we can get there is actually realizing that there are technologies that we have currently that can reduce our consumption of energy. And there are behavior changes that we can make that don’t really impact our lifestyles all that much. We’re not talking about a vegan or vegetarian diet, though if you would like to have a vegan or vegetarian diet, you can.
We’re talking about actually lowering the consumption of meat to healthy levels, healthy levels, instead of over-consuming meat in high-income countries. And actually, when we think about plant-rich diets, for example, there’s a disparity between high-income and low-income consumption patterns. So when we talk about it’s really a healthy diet, it’s about increasing the caloric intake and meat consumption actually in low-income countries where they are currently deficient and lowering the overconsumption in high-income countries. And it’s the same with reduced food waste. It’s a disparity in high-income and low-income countries. In the high-income countries, we’re actually wasting and throwing out food that we’ve purchased that we’re not consuming.
Why would we do this? Why not purchase what you’re going to eat and eat what you purchase? Eat a healthy level of what you’re actually purchasing. And then all that extra production that doesn’t need, it’s all just waste and excess, that can then be diverted to other populations and raise their standard of living. And so I think we need to think about economic justice. We need to think about parity. We need to think about increasing the standard of living for people from all across the planet, while at the same time, I think that’s the point of Drawdown is these are technologies in practice that can do both.
Ross Kenyon: My hope in general approach is that as we move forward, technologically, we improve such that rather than bringing people in the west or global north down and bringing the global south up, hopefully, we just become much more efficient. Technology allows us to use resources much better. And we can sort of like rise everyone up to this level. It’s hard to sell people an idea of like, imagine your life now, but a worse version of it where you get less and you have to work more, you’re taxed more. So this might be unrealistic, you might disagree, but that’s my hope is like, Yeah, that like techno-optimist part of me.
But that’s the dream ticket. I think it’s easier to motivate people if you can get there. It might not be possible and I’d be willing to concede that too. But all the efficiency gains you’re talking about, yeah, I love all those hit the right part of my brain where I’m like, yeah, we shouldn’t throw away all that stuff. Like throwing food out of my fridge that I haven’t eaten, does that just hurt you? Every time I see like a wilted fennel, I’m just like crying. I’m like, come on.
Chad Frischmann: Yeah, well, you could get it. Well, if it’s wilted, you can compost it. Or if it’s wilted, you could actually make stock from it first and then compost it. Okay. Because the wilting of fennel is not going to, it doesn’t mean that it’s ready to be thrown away.
Christophe Jospe: I love where this conversation is going because you’re talking about systemic levels and the sort of thinking that has to go into some of these challenges. And hearing you talk about meat consumption brought to mind China, not to single out China because they’re, as a country, making great strides in certain decarbonization strategies. But you also have a rising population which looks at the Western world and says, hey, they’re eating a lot of meat. We want to eat a lot of meat too. And somehow that meat That cattle needs to get fed and it just so happens that it’s getting fed from soybeans that are grown in Brazil, which is creating deforestation and then you have the cattle grown in a very unsustainable way.
But you do have rising social equity and you have people who are moving out of poverty into a better standard of living and eating and consuming meat is part of that standard of living. We can’t tell Chinese people not to eat as much meat. How can you begin to kind of counteract the greenhouse gas emissions that come through that in the framework of drawdown?
Chad Frischmann: Well, of course, we can’t tell anyone what they can and cannot eat. It’s an individual choice. When we think about what’s happening in China, I think what we’re trying to say at Drawdown actually is, if we want to achieve this vision of the future that we actually want to achieve, right? Not stabilizing, not sustaining at a certain parts per million or a certain temperature rise. What does sustainability mean? It’s part of a system that is... Current, we’re sustaining what? We want to get beyond that to the regenerative piece. And we were saying like, look, you need to make these choices if you want to envision that future, right?
You know, in the Chinese context or the Indian context or a lot of low income countries where this effect is happening, it’s going to happen a lot all over the continent of Africa as economic development increases in population is going to increase quite substantially in sub-Saharan Africa and West Africa, et cetera. Sorry to deviate away from China at the moment, but I think it’s a broader issue here is what you’re talking about. Again, it’s not about eating meat. It’s about eating a healthy quantity of meat. And in our models, we actually do an evaluation of what we call business as usual dietary consumption for every country on the planet using over 450,000 data points that we’ve collected.
These are obviously not the perfect data points. It’s very hard to collect consumption patterns on a per capita basis across the world, but they’re the best we have right now. And when we do this, we construct a business as usual that estimates much higher increase in consumption of meat products and overconsumption in total. We’re looking at a business as usual case that says China, India are going to have a similar consumption. So what we’re trying to suggest is they can also go on this trajectory and instead of going that business usual, adopt plant-rich diet.
What we’re calculating is meat consumption. They continue to eat meat. They actually are elevating their consumption levels, consuming meat. And of course, a vegetarian, a vegan could be a choice they make as well. But we’re not making prescriptions about what everyone has to do in totality. We’re saying, look, A healthy lifestyle, a healthy diet. And to be perfectly honest, we’re fairly conservative in our estimations with these inputs, right? We prefer to edge on the side of being conservative. We don’t want to be an advocate. We don’t want to be a critic.
So we collect as many data points as possible. We create through statistical evaluation boundaries, and we choose the mean. Because if we chose the high end, we’re an advocate, right? We’re an activist.
Christophe Jospe: You’re no longer a mirror.
Chad Frischmann: No, exactly. If we chose the lowest number, what are we? We’re a critic. So we choose the mean. And that means we consider that to be conservative. That means it could be much higher. In theory, it could be much lower too. But that’s the variability we’re going to see at scale. So my point is, is that we err on the side of conservative. And when we think about increasing, say, meat consumption and To your question, we’re increasing it to a healthy level. And the math that we’ve done assumes that the population growth over time is adopting that healthy diet.
And so the difference there, the impact of a plant-rich diet already accounts for that.
Christophe Jospe: Your answer has definitely satisfied my question. A couple of things you said there. One, that you don’t want to make global warming or climate change less bad. You want to actually stop it and reverse it. We couldn’t agree more. I mean, we keep going back to a 1. 5 degree or 2 degree temperature. It’s about finding that concentration where we can live in a planet that’s healthy for seven generations to come and kind of going down those pathways where the bad things that past generations did, we can address in a responsible way.
There’s another question that kind of came up. You’re talking about math and assumptions and means and high ends and low ends. And there’s a whole bunch of data that Drawdown has gathered. One of the tenants that Nori has and really hopes to inspire and work with around the world is everything that we’re doing is out in the open. We kind of put open source data out there and say, hey, this is our best idea on how this looks and how it might work. What can we expect from Drawdown where you’ve got these great like data sets and the world wants to help contribute to it and get involved?
How can they do that?
Chad Frischmann: So first of all, what we put out April of 2017, we consider the foundation point. It’s just the beginning. It’s not the culmination. And if it was the culmination, the book drawdown and all the research that we’ve done to date, that research would be archived. And so it’s a living, ongoing project. And what we’re working on is actually a coalition of partners. We call it the drawdown coalitions, built on the notion of collective impact. How can we break silos and work together? Because this is too big of a problem. It’s too big of a global problem for us to continue to work in isolation and silos.
And so what we’re trying to do is not only with the research, but with many other ways of turning the research communications into action and implementation, working with organizational partners, individuals from all over the world under the principles of reversing global warming through solutions-oriented implementation and communication strategies, right? Easy. Concept of shared learning, co-creation, mutual support, and a feedback mechanism so that we can learn from all of the work that’s being done by partners and organizations and individuals around the world. And that can be incorporated into our research. So our interest is to be a clearinghouse of information.
And this is just phase one. So phase one is that global systems model that we’ve developed. But we’re also looking at a phase two of research that looks at the question, not what if, what if we were to achieve these implementation of these solutions at scale, but how to do it, how to look at contextual boundaries, states, countries, localities, municipalities. So how do we take the drawdown model, the drawdown research, And essentially democratize it, give it as an open source tool that can be used in place to create place-based analyses.
So that can be a form of decision making. Since models only have a certain facility of use, right? There’s only so much we can say about a global scale solutions. How they are used in place, that can only be done by people who have the local knowledge and understanding of different regions, the biophysical and socioeconomic conditions of place. And so that’s what we’re doing is we’re building an integrated software platform. From all of our models and integration models and solution-specific models that will allow users from all over the world to create their own drawdown technical assessments and models that reflect those contextual boundaries that they’ve identified.
And part of that process is we benefit because the research that gets done at the local, regional, municipal scale, the data acquisition, the data collection, all the work that’s being done there can integrate to the global. So the local feeds the global, the global as a framework for local decision-making and a tool for that. This is just one of the tools we’re using to help break those silos and start to really be an aggregate of the vast knowledge of humanity that is there, that is being implemented all over the world, and so that we can start to learn from each other, integrate into the system, and have a tool for decision makers at all scales.
That’s where we’re headed. That’s one piece of it, too. I mean, that’s the research side of it. There’s also the communication side. We have several books planned. We have Drawdown, the second edition. We want to be creating tools. Research tools, decision-making tools, communication tools that are useful to a diversity of audiences, the public as a whole, right? How do we communicate? How do we educate people from K through 12? How do we bring and draw it onto the higher education? How municipalities, policymakers, individual choices, consumers, we want to create tools and these communications that allow all different levels of agency to interact with what we’re doing.
But also then, you know, release it, make it open source, democratize it. Everything we’re building is going to be open sourced. Data is fully accessible and used and can be developed and expanded and grow as Drawdown goes out to the world.
Ross Kenyon: You have a lot of great stuff going on, it sounds like. We also love the open source ethos. It’s a key to our business as well.
Christophe Jospe: Well, it sounds like you have job security. You have a lot of stuff you’re working on.
Ross Kenyon: So Project Drawdown is here to stay, sounds like. Good for us. Can you take us off here, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, sure. Super exciting. As we also advance, I’m very happy to share all the data that might inform assumptions in different localities that help this collective effort feel super aligned in the goals. And I’m ready to roll my sleeves up and figure out how to do this thing.
Chad Frischmann: All right. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
