How to prevent climate change to avoid natural disasters and pollution

A
woman wades through a submerged street at the UNESCO heritage
ancient town of Hoi An after typhoon Damrey hit Vietnam in
2017.
Thomson
Reuters

• An initiative called Project Drawdown is bringing
  researchers together to figure out the best ways to cool down
  the planet and prevent more damaging floods,
  hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and starvation.
• Chad Frischmann, vice president of the project, spoke
  about the group’s plan at TED’s New York offices.
• The solutions he proposed all exist already, and many
  have to do with better management of our food systems — wasting
  less and reducing spoilage.

There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty going around about the

future of our planet.

Sea levels are rising, we could soon face a “Hothouse
Earth” scenario, and severe flooding from torrential
rains is expected to get worse. If the atmosphere keeps heating
up, some towns could even be threatened by wayward
icebergs.

But Chad Frischmann doesn’t think things are so bleak.

He’s vice president of an initiative called Project
Drawdown: a group of scientists, researchers, and writers
who’ve calculated how to cool the planet over the next 30 years
by reducing the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The
two-pronged plan is designed to both cut planet-warming emissions
from fossil fuels and also suck more carbon dioxide into the
ground, largely via photosynthesis. 

“Drawdown is a new way of thinking about and acting on global
warming,” Frischmann told an audience gathered at TED’s New York
conference stage last week. As he spoke, world leaders were
gathered on the other side of Manhattan at the United Nations,
debating the best ways to solve extreme poverty, disease, and
malnutrition.

Frischmann said that solving those issues and tackling climate
change are part of the same puzzle. He’s convinced his drawdown
plan can improve lives around world by feeding the hungry and
educating young minds, all while reducing the Earth’s temperature
a bit for future generations.

He listed the top 20 ways that everyone — consumers, policy
makers, food growers, and energy providers — could reduce
greenhouse gas emissions.

Some of the solutions he proposed are already in use; these
include universal education, family planning, sustainable
refrigerants, better farming methods, and more wind power. 

“We have real, workable technology and practices that
can achieve drawdown,” Frischmann said. The problem is that the
necessary changes to the ways we put food on the table and
generate energy aren’t happening fast enough.

“What we need is to accelerate the implementation,” he
said. 

A wish list for the planet

Chad
Frischmann is vice president of Project Drawdown, a multi-pronged
plan to reverse global warming.
Ryan
Lash / TED

Below is Frischmann’s ranking of the best ways to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions, based on how many gigatons (billions of
tons) of carbon dioxide emissions each approach could be
expected to cut over a 30-year period. 

The solutions are grouped into a few key topic areas, like energy
sources, food, and education of women and girls.

For example, according to Project Drawdown’s calculations, by
adopting a more plant-rich diet and eating less beef, we could
cut more than 66 gigatons (that’s billions of tons) of carbon
dioxide emissions over the next 30 years. Other solutions include
changing the way we cool our offices and homes, using less
fertilizer on crops, improving soil health, regrowing forests,
and restoring carbon-sucking
peat bogs.

The cost of implementing all the
solutions in Project Drawdown is estimated to be $1 trillion
a year over the next 30 years, according to Frischmann.

“I
 know that sounds like a lot,” he said,
but he reminded the crowd that
 global GDP
is now above $80 trillion a year, so it would cost less than
1.25% of our annual purse to enact these potentially
planet-saving strategies.

Here are the top 20 things on the Project Drawdown
list:

Business Insider

The number one way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, according
to the list, is to change the way we keep food and buildings
cool.

Currently, air conditioners and refrigerators run on
hydrflurocarbons, also known as HFCs, which heat
up the planet. HFCs will start being phased out in
high-income countries in 2019 as part of the Kigali accord, but
they’ll still be used in other corners of the globe, where
incomes are rising and more people are buying fridges and A/C
units. Plus, we’ll still have to make sure
to properly dispose of all HFC-powered fridges and air
conditioners; otherwise the refrigerant left inside could become
a huge source of emissions.

[Read more: The
one thing a renowned climate scientist does to reduce her own
impact on the environment]

But the number one solution to global warming may have nothing to
do with energy

Eight of the other 20 items on the list have to do with the way
our food system is set up, from how we till and fertilize land to
what we consume. That ‘s something anyone can take action on
right now, Frischmann said. 

“The decisions we make every day about the food we produce,
purchase, and consume are perhaps the most important
contributions every individual can make to reversing global
warming,” he said, adding, “we don’t need to cut down forests for
food production. The solutions to reversing global warming are
the same solutions to food insecurity.” 

But beyond food and farming, there’s another powerful weapon that
the Project Drawdown list doesn’t fully highlight.

“Taken together, educating girls and family planning is the
number one solution to reversing global warming,” Frischmann
said. 

Letting more girls continue their education, receive wanted
contraception, and space out their youngsters as they’d like
could cut around 120 billion tons of greenhouse gases that we’d
otherwise emit over the next 30 years, according to Project
Drawdown’s calculations.

That’s because better control of the population size would reduce
demand for energy, food, travel, buildings, and all other
resources on the planet.