Top 5 Climate Solutions
Climate change – a daunting word, isn’t it? The massive problem of climate change can feel like a heavy, collective load weighing down on us. Politicians and scientists should seriously do something about it and find solutions for our climate. But me? My tiny little efforts? Can they change anything about the 50 billion tons of CO2 we emit every year?
It might feel like a lost battle, but in this article, I want to kindle hope.
Hope that change is possible and that our daily actions really do make a difference in our fight against climate change.
Of course, you and me alone won’t save the climate. But imagine ten, ten thousand, one million or 7.8 billion people each doing their tiny little bit to curb their greenhouse gas emissions!
What a difference we could all make…
Top climate solutions
Now admittedly, not everything we do will have the same impact on the climate. Some actions will do little, some will do much to lower our carbon footprint.
This is exactly what Project Drawdown aims at: to uncover the most substantial solutions to stop climate change. Because effective climate solutions already exist, we just need to apply them!
Let me introduce you to the top 5 climate solutions you can practice to have the biggest possible impact on stopping climate change! You might be surprised at some points…
The climate solution with the 5th largest impact on climate change is:
Climate Solution #5
Climate solution #5: Improved Clean Cookstoves
“Around the world, 3 billion people cook over open fires or on rudimentary stoves. The cooking fuels used by 40 percent of humanity are wood, charcoal, animal dung, crop residues, and coal. As these burn, often inside homes or in areas with limited ventilation, they release plumes of smoke and soot liable for 4.3 million premature deaths each year.
Traditional cooking practices also produce 2 to 5 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. They stem from two sources. First, unsustainable harvesting of fuel drives deforestation and forest degradation. Second, burning fuels during the cooking process emits carbon dioxide, methane, and pollutants from incomplete combustion that include carbon monoxide and black carbon.”
Luckily, there are good alternatives!
Just one example is the fireless cooker promoted in Uganda by the environmental charity A Rocha. So, even if you yourself use a clean cookstove, you can help families in developing countries transition to improved cookers by giving a gift with a difference.
What’s the climate solution with the 4th largest impact?
Climate Solution #4
Climate Solution #4: Tropical Forest Restoration
“In recent decades, tropical forests have suffered extensive clearing, fragmentation, degradation, and depletion of biodiversity. Once blanketing 12 percent of the world’s landmass, they now cover just 5 percent. While destruction continues in many places, tropical forest restoration is growing and may sequester as much as six gigatons of carbon dioxide per year.
As a forest ecosystem recovers, trees, soil, leaf litter, and other vegetation absorb and hold carbon. As flora and fauna return and interactions between organisms and species revive, the forest regains its multidimensional roles: supporting the water cycle, conserving soil, protecting habitat and pollinators, providing food, medicine, and fiber, and giving people places to live, adventure, and worship.”
While tropical forests might seem distant to us who don’t live in the tropics, our daily consumer choices do have a real impact on deforestation!
Learn what drives deforestation and what you can do personally to save our forests and combat climate change!
The action that might have an even bigger impact on climate change is…
Climate Solution #3
Climate Solution #3: Renewable Energy
Sooner or later, our planet will run out of fossil fuels. We all know it, but we fear to come to terms with this truth. The only alternative in the long run? Renewable energy!
Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, have a huge potential to stop climate change.
Top climate solution: Wind
“Wind energy is at the crest of initiatives to address global warming in the coming three decades. Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply nearly 4 percent of global electricity, and it will soon be much more. In 2015, a record 63 gigawatts of wind power were installed around the world.
The wind industry is marked by a proliferation of turbines, dropping costs, and heightened performance. In many locales, wind is either competitive with or less expensive than coal-generated electricity—and it has no fuel costs and no pollution. Ongoing cost reduction will soon make wind energy the least expensive source of electricity, perhaps within a decade.”
Top climate solution: Sun
“The sun provides a virtually unlimited, clean, and free fuel at a price that never changes. Solar farms take advantage of that resource, with large-scale arrays of hundreds, thousands, or in some cases millions of photovoltaic (PV) panels.
In many parts of the world, solar PV is now cost-competitive with or less costly than conventional power generation. In tandem with other renewables and enabled by better grids and energy storage, solar farms are ushering in the clean energy revolution.”
And we can all be part of that clean energy revolution! It’s time to leave behind the era of fossil fuels, which led to climate change in the first place.
Whenever possible, we can choose to source our electricity from renewable sources.
And now, let’s look at one of the most powerful things we can do to stop climate change! It might surprise you how simple it is…
Climate Solution #2
Climate Solution #2: Plant Rich Diets
“Shifting to a diet rich in plants is a demand-side solution to global warming that runs counter to the meat-centric Western diet on the rise globally. That diet comes with a steep climate price tag: one-fifth of global emissions.
Plant-rich diets reduce emissions and also tend to be healthier, leading to lower rates of chronic disease. According to a 2016 study, business-as-usual emissions could be reduced by as much as 70 percent through adopting a vegan diet and 63 percent for a vegetarian diet, which includes cheese, milk, and eggs. $1 trillion in annual health-care costs and lost productivity would be saved.”
But as always in agriculture, a host of factors determine how good or bad a specific food is for the environment and for climate change. While animal products generally have a higher carbon footprint than plant-based food, completely switching to a vegan diet might do more harm than good. I discussed this in-depth in my two-part series about animal vs. plant-based diets:
In the end, food journalist Michael Pollan’s rule seems to hold true:
“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Sticking to a diet rich in plants and whole foods, with a moderate intake of regeneratively raised animal products, might be the most effective way for an individual to stop climate change. Another (deliciously) simple top climate solution!
But what’s the most effective way of combatting climate change?
Climate Solution #1
Climate Solution #1: Reduced Food Waste
The #1 top climate solution is…reducing food waste!
Significantly reducing our food waste ranks as the most important solution for climate change! Does this surprise you?
Between 25% and 50% of all food produced in the world is wasted (for different reasons both in developed and developing countries!). This means that all the resources that went into producing that food were wasted, too! Agricultural machinery, gas, fertilizers, pesticides, water. To make matters even worse, the food that is wasted mostly ends up in landfills. There, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas nearly 30 times more potent for climate change than carbon dioxide.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization food waste contributes eight percent to total global greenhouse gas emissions. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-highest emitter!
In developing countries, food waste mainly occurs because of poor storage capacities. Here, improving infrastructure for storage, processing, and transportation is essential. In so-called developed countries, however, consumers are responsible for the largest share of food waste. This means that reducing the amount of food we waste in our households may just be the most important thing we can do to stop climate change!
A surprisingly simple one among the top climate solutions, if you know how to implement it! In this post, you can read about 5 practical ways to reduce food waste.
Embracing your next Climate Solution
Learning about what causes climate change and what we can do to act against it is the first step. Putting these insights into practice is the next step.
However, we’ll never quite be able to cut our emissions to zero – personally, as well as globally.
So, if you want to take your commitment to our planet even further, you can start offsetting your carbon emissions. A wonderful way to do that is via Climate Stewards, an environmental charity that does brilliant, earthed & ethical work to implement these top climate solutions and help communities become more resilient.
Specifically, Climate Stewards encourages you to calculate your carbon footprint, reduce it if you can, and offset the rest. Offsetting means compensating for every tonne of CO₂ you emit. They do this by supporting community forestry, water filter, solar and cookstove projects in the developing world. Head over to their website to learn more!
Did some of these climate solutions surprise you? What will be your next step in 2021?
Sources:
Images from Unsplash.com
Excerpts from the book Drawdown
Thank you!!1