Paul Hawken and the Project Drawdown experts thought they knew what to expect when they modeled and ranked 80 solutions that could reverse climate change. But the data had some surprises in store. 

Most prominently was that even when the solutions are modeled in terms of what they call a “Plausible Scenario”—a conservative measure of projected solution implementation that is “reasonable yet optimistic”—society still makes great strides toward achieving drawdown, the point where greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere begin to decline. 

Together, all 80 reduce or sequester carbon by 1,051 gigatons by 2050 in the Plausible Scenario. Using the scenario that gets us to drawdown—which requires ramping up the solutions a bit more than the conservative measure, particularly renewable energy—they reduce or sequester carbon by 1,442 gigatons by 2050. 

Below are the top ten solutions, ranked in terms of emissions reduction potential over a 30-year period. For the other 90 solutions, we highly recommend you read Drawdown: the Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin Books, 2017), edited by Paul Hawken. —the Green America editors 

Top 10 Solutions to Reverse Climate Change

1. Refrigerant Management

Tell Walmart to eliminate HFCs

The problem: Every refrigerator, supermarket case, and air conditioner contains chemical refrigerants that absorb and release heat, making it possible to chill food and keep buildings and vehicles cool. Refrigerants, specifically chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), were once key culprits in depleting the stratospheric ozone layer, which is essential for absorbing the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, CFCs and HCFCs have been phased out of use.

It took two short years from the discovery of the gaping hole over the Antarctic for the global community to adopt a legally mandated course of action. Now, three decades later, the ozone layer is beginning to heal. 

Refrigerants continue to cause climate change, however. Huge volumes of CFCs and HCFCs remain in circulation, retaining their potential for ozone damage. Their replacement chemicals, primarily hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), have minimal deleterious effect on the ozone layer, but their capacity to warm the atmosphere is 1,000 to 9,000 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, depending on their exact chemical composition.

Solutions in progress: In October 2016, officials from more than 170 countries gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to negotiate a deal to address the problem of HFCs. Despite challenging global politics, they reached a remarkable agreement. Through an amendment to the Montreal Protocol, the world will begin phasing HFCs out of use, starting with high-income countries in 2019 and then expanding to low-income countries—some in 2024, others in 2028. HFC substitutes are already on the market, including natural refrigerants such as propane and ammonia. Unlike the Paris Climate Agreement, the Kigali deal is mandatory, with specific targets and timetables.

Work to be done: The process of phasing out HFCs will unfold over many years, and they will persist in kitchens and condensing units in the meantime. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 700 million air conditioning units will have come online worldwide by 2030. 

Refrigerants currently cause emissions throughout their life cycles, but 90 percent of emissions happen at disposal. After being carefully removed and stored, refrigerants can be purified for reuse or transformed into other chemicals that do not cause warming. 

The Kigali Accord ensures a step change is coming, and other practices focused on existing stocks could reduce HFC emissions further.

Green America resources: Green America's Cool It! Campaign urges supermarkets to curb their extremely harmful HFC use, starting with the biggest offender: Walmart. You can also get tips on reducing your need for air conditioning and saving energy at home in our article,“Ten Easiest Ways to Cut Your Energy Use in Half.”

Impact

Project Drawdown analysis includes emissions reductions that can be achieved through the management and destruction of refrigerants already in circulation.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction (Plausible Scenario): 89.74 gigatons (GT) of reduced CO2-equivalent (CO2-e—the common measure for all greenhouse gases) by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires greater refrigerant management): 96.49 gigatons of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): The costs to establish and operate recovery, destruction, and leak avoidance outweigh the financial benefit: –$902.8 billion net savings.

2. Wind Turbines (Onshore) 

The problem: Fossil fuels sidelined zero-emission wind energy during the mid-twentieth century. Wind energy has its challenges. The weather is not the same everywhere. The variable nature of wind means there are times when turbines are not turning. Critics argue that turbines are noisy, aesthetically unpleasant, and at times deadly to bats and migrating birds.

Another impediment to wind power is inequitable government subsidies. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the fossil-fuel industry received more than $5.3 trillion worldwide in direct and indirect subsidies in 2015. In comparison, the US wind-energy industry has received $12.3 billion in direct subsidies since 2000.  

Solutions in progress: Today, 314,000 wind turbines supply 3.7 percent of global electricity. It will soon be much more. In 2015, a record 63 gigawatts of wind power were installed around the world, despite a dramatic drop in fossil-fuel prices. In many locales, wind is either competitive with or less expensive than coal-generated electricity.

In the US, the wind-energy potential of just three states—Kansas, North Dakota, and Texas—would be sufficient to meet electricity demand from coast to coast. 

Current technologies make it easier to overcome fluctuations in supply and demand. Interconnected grids can shuttle power to where it is needed. Newer turbine designs address concerns over bird and bat deaths with slower-turning blades and siting practices to avoid migration paths.

Ongoing cost reductions will soon make wind energy the least expensive source of installed electricity capacity, perhaps within a decade.

Work to be done: The ways and means for the United States to be fossil-fuel- and energy-independent are here. What is often missing is political will and leadership to reverse climate change.

On the policy side, energy portfolio standards can mandate a share of renewable generation. Grants, loans, and tax incentives can encourage construction of more wind capacity and ongoing innovation. 

Wind energy is part of a system. Investment in energy storage, transmission infrastructure, and distributed generation is essential to its growth. For the world, the decision is simple: Invest in the future or in the past. 

Green America resources: Green America’s Divest/Invest campaign encourages people to divest from the top 200 fossil-fuel companies and reinvest in sustainability. 

Impact

An increase in onshore wind from 3 to 4 percent of world electricity use to 21.6 percent could result in:

GHG gas reduction (Plausible Scenario): 84.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires greater wind-energy increase): 146.5 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): $1.2 trillion, though costs are falling annually and could deliver more savings.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): Onshore wind turbines can deliver a net savings of $7.4 trillion over three decades of operation.

3. Reduced Food Waste 

The problem: A third of the food raised or prepared does not make it from farm or factory to fork. That number is startling, especially when paired with this one: Hunger is a condition of life for nearly 800 million people worldwide. And this one: The food we waste contributes 4.4 gigatons of CO2-equivalent into the atmosphere each year—roughly eight percent of total anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.

In places where income is low and infrastructure is weak, food loss is typically unintended and structural in nature—bad roads, lack of refrigeration or storage facilities, poor equipment or packaging, a challenging combination of heat and humidity. Wastage occurs earlier in the supply chain, rotting on farms or spoiling during storage or distribution.

In regions of higher income, unintentional losses tend to be minimal; willful food waste dominates farther along the supply chain. Retailers reject food based on bumps, bruises, coloring—aesthetic objections of all sorts. Other times, they simply order or serve too much, lest they risk shortages or unhappy customers.

Similarly, consumers spurn imperfect spuds in the produce section, overestimate how many meals they will cook in a week, toss out milk that has not gone bad, or forget about leftover lasagna in the back of the fridge.

Basic laws of supply and demand also play a role. If a crop is unprofitable to harvest, it will be left in the field. And if a product is too expensive for consumers to purchase, it will idle in the storeroom. 

Regardless of the reason, the outcome is the same. Producing uneaten food squanders a whole host of resources—seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial capital—and generates greenhouse gases at every stage—including methane when organic matter lands in the global rubbish bin. 

Solutions in progress: The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals call for halving per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030, as well as reducing food losses along production and supply chains.

Work to be done: The interventions that can address key waste points in the food chain are numerous and varied. In lower-income countries, improving infrastructure for storage, processing, and transportation is essential. Strengthening communication and coordination between producers and buyers is also paramount for keeping food from falling through the cracks. Given the world’s many smallholder farmers, producer organizations can help with planning, logistics, and closing capacity gaps. In higher-income regions, major interventions are needed at the retail and consumer levels. Most important is to preempt food waste before it happens, for greatest reduction of upstream emissions, followed by reallocation of unwanted food. 

Standardizing date labeling on food packages is an essential step. Currently, “sell by” or “best before” dates and the like are largely unregulated designations, indicating when food should taste best. Though not focused on safety, these markers often confuse consumers about expiration. 

Education is another powerful tool, including campaigns celebrating “ugly” produce and public feasts made from nearly wasted food. National goals and policies can encourage widespread change, as well.

Green America resources: Get ideas from our “Tackling Food Waste” issue of the Green American.

Impact

If the world reduces its food waste by 2050, it would see the following:

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 70.53 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires greater food waste reduction): 83.03 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050..

Cost (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.

4. Adoption of a Plant-Rich Diet 

A vegan dessert from Candle Cafe, a vegan, local, and organic restaurant in New York City that also offers frozen vegan meals and vegan cookbooks. Photo courtesy of Candle Cafe.

The problem: The Western diet comes with a steep price tag for climate change. The most conservative estimates suggest that raising livestock accounts for nearly 15 percent of global greenhouse gases emitted each year; the most comprehensive assessments of direct and indirect emissions say more than 50 percent.

Outside of innovative, carbon-sequestering managed-grazing practices described in another section of Drawdown, the production of meat and dairy contributes many more emissions than growing their sprouted counterparts—vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes. 

Ruminants such as cows are the most prolific offenders, generating the potent greenhouse gas methane as they digest their food. In addition, agricultural land use and associated energy consumption to grow livestock feed produce carbon dioxide emissions, while manure and fertilizers emit nitrous oxide. If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Overconsumption of animal protein also comes at a steep cost to human health. Eating too much of it can lead to certain cancers, strokes, and heart disease. Increased morbidity and health care costs go hand in hand.

Solutions in progress: With billions of people dining multiple times a day, imagine how many opportunities exist to turn the tables. It is possible to eat well, in terms of both nutrition and pleasure, while eating lower on the food chain and thereby lowering emissions. 

Work to be done: A groundbreaking 2016 study from the University of Oxford modeled the climate, health, and economic benefits of a worldwide transition to plant-based diets between now and 2050. 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). The model also calculates a reduction in global mortality of six to ten percent. 

The case for a plant-rich diet is robust. That said, bringing about dietary change is not simple because eating is profoundly personal and cultural. For individuals to give up meat in favor of options lower on the food chain, those options should be available, visible, and tempting. 

Meat substitutes made from plants are a key way to minimize disruption of established ways of cooking and eating. Between rapidly improving products, research at top universities, venture-capital investment, and mounting consumer interest, experts expect markets for non-meats to grow rapidly. 

Beyond promoting “reducitarianism,” if not vegetarianism, it is also necessary to reframe meat as a delicacy, rather than a staple. First and foremost, that means ending price-distorting government subsidies, such as those benefiting the US livestock industry. Debunking protein myths and amplifying the health benefits of plant-rich diets can also encourage individuals to change their eating patterns.  

Green America resources: Read about how the world could eat less meat and the impacts it could have in our “Don’t Have a Cow” issue of the Green American.

Impact:

If the world reduces its meat consumption by 2050, it would see the following:

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 66.11 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires further reduction of meat consumption): 78.65 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): Too variable to be determined.

5. Tropical Forest Restoration

Sustainable forest management in Indonesia. At least 751 million acres of land in the tropics could be restored to intact forests, reducing 62.1 gigatons of CO2. Photo by Biosphoto via Alamy.

The problem: In recent decades, tropical forests—those located within 23.5 degrees north or south of the equator—have suffered extensive clearing, fragmentation, degradation, and depletion of flora and fauna. Once blanketing 12 percent of the world’s land masses, they now cover just five percent. 

When we lose forests, primarily to agricultural expansion or human settlement, carbon dioxide discharges into the atmosphere. Tropical forest loss alone is responsible for 16 to 19 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions caused by human activity. 

Solutions in progress: Restoration of tropical forests, both passive and intentional, is now a growing trend. As forest ecosystems come back to life, trees, soil, leaf litter, and other vegetation absorb and hold carbon, taking it out of global-warming rotation. 

In 2011, the Bonn Challenge set an ambitious target of restoring 370 million acres of forest worldwide by 2020. The 2014 New York Declaration on Forests affirmed that aim and added a cumulative target of 865 million acres restored globally by 2030. Should the world accomplish that goal, a total of 12 to 33 gigatons of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere and become terrestrial once again. 

Work to be done: “More than 4.9 billion acres [of forests] worldwide offer opportunities for restoration—an area larger than South America,” a team of researchers from the World Resources Institute reports. Three-quarters of that land would be best suited to a “mosaic” forest-restoration approach, blending forests, trees, and agricultural land uses. Up to 1.2 billion acres are ripe for full restoration of large forests with dense canopy cover. The opportunities are enormous, and the majority of it lies in tropical regions. In a median time of 66 years, tropical forests can recover 90 percent of the biomass that old-growth landscapes contain.  

Given the interconnectedness of people and forests, a particular framework for restoration has emerged: forest landscape restoration. The approach, proposed by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, means “regarding the landscape as an integrated whole ... looking at different land uses together, their connections, interactions, and a mosaic of [restoration] interventions.” 

It means there is no single formula for forest restoration. Making restoration a collaborative process can ensure it is done with and for local communities, and that root causes of forest damage are addressed.

The bulk of restoration opportunities lies primarily within low-income countries in tropical regions. Those countries cannot manage the level of investment required, nor should they, since the benefits of restoration provide value and a service to all. The relevant stakeholders are the entire human race, and some bear greater responsibility for the problem of climate change than others.

Because forest restoration is such a potent solution to climate change, commitments and funding need to be a global priority. And because restoration efforts have ranged from success to failure, we need to analyze why, scale best practices, and eliminate those that do not work.  Initiatives need to respect land rights and tenure, especially those of Indigenous people. 

Green America resources: Green America’s Skip the Slip campaign helps forests around the world by urging companies to shift away from using millions of pounds to unrecyclable paper receipts and use online receipts instead. In other sectors, Green America's campaigns work to protect our forests by moving towards recycled paper or online.

Impact 

In theory, 751 million acres of degraded land in the tropics could be restored to continuous, intact forest. Project Drawdown’s Plausible Scenario assumes restoration could occur on 435 million acres, resulting in:

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 61.2 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires more restoration): 89 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050..

Cost (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): Data too variable to be determined.

6. Educating Girls

Sunita was once forced to weave carpets and perform domestic work from 4 a.m. late into the night. Now, she attends school through GoodWeave’s education program. GoodWeave rescues child weavers from carpet looms in South Asia and invests in their education and rehabilitation. It also certifies carpets and looms as being free from child labor. Photo by U. Roberto Romano for Goodweave.

The problem: Today, more than 130 million girls are denied the fundamental right to attend school and lay a foundation for their lives. The situation is most dire in secondary classrooms.

Economic barriers include lack of family funds for school fees and uniforms, as well as prioritizing the more immediate benefits of having girls fetch water or firewood, or work a market stall or a plot of land. 

Cultural barriers encompass traditional beliefs that girls should tend the home rather than learn to read and write, should be married off at a young age, and, when resources are slim, should be skipped over so boys can be sent to school instead. 

Schools that are farther afield put girls at risk of gender-based violence on their way to and from, while other dangers and discomforts are present at school itself. Disability, pregnancy, childbirth, and female genital mutilation also can be obstacles. 

The education gap also matters for global warming. According to the Brookings Institution, “The difference between a woman with no years of schooling and with 12 years of schooling is almost four to five children per woman.” Women with more years of education have fewer, healthier children and actively manage their own reproductive health.  

In the poorest countries, per capita greenhouse-gas emissions are low. From one-tenth of a ton of carbon dioxide per person in Madagascar to 1.8 tons in India, per-capita emissions in lower-income countries are a fraction of the US rate of 18 tons per person per year. Nevertheless, changes in fertility rates in those countries would have multiple benefits for girls and women, families, communities, and society. 

Solution in progress: Nobel laureate and girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai has famously said, “One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world.” An enormous body of evidence supports her conviction. For starters, educated girls realize higher wages and greater upward mobility, contributing to economic growth. Their rates of maternal mortality drop, as do mortality rates of their babies. They are less likely to marry as children or against their will. They have lower incidence of HIV/AIDS and malaria. Their agricultural plots are more productive and their families better nourished. They are more empowered at home, at work, and in society. 

Education is the most powerful lever available for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, while mitigating emissions by curbing population growth. 

Education also shores up resilience to climate change impacts. For example, a 2013 study found that educating girls “is the single most important social and economic factor associated with a reduction in vulnerability to natural disasters.” This decreased vulnerability also extends to their children, families, and the elderly.

[Editor’s note: Increasing women’s involvement in the energy sector also leads to “more effective clean-energy initiatives, greater returns on investment in clean energy, and expanded emissions-reduction opportunities, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.] 

Work to be done: In 2011, the journal Science published a demographic analysis of the impact of girls’ education on population growth. It details a “fast track” scenario, based on South Korea’s actual climb from one of the least to one of the most educated countries in the world. If all nations adopted a similar rate and achieved 100 percent enrollment of girls in primary and secondary school by 2050, there would be 843 million fewer people worldwide than if current enrollment rates sustain. 

The encyclopedic book What Works in Girls’ Education (Brookings Institution Press, 2015) maps out seven areas of interconnected interventions: 1) Make school affordable. 2) Help girls overcome health barriers. 3) Reduce the time and distance to get to school. 4) Make schools more girl-friendly. For example, offer child-care programs for mothers. 5) Improve school quality.  6) Increase community engagement. 7) Sustain girls’ education during emergencies. For example, establish schools in refugee camps. 

Green America resources: Green America’s Labor programs and End Smartphone Sweatshops campaign promote solutions that raise family income, get children out of factories and fields, and allow more children to go to school.

Impact

Because educating girls has an important impact on family planning (#7), Project Drawdown allocated 50 percent of total potential emissions reduction to each solution.

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires helping more girls attend school): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): By closing an annual financing gap of $39 billion, universal education in low- and lower-middle-income
countries could be achieved.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): The return on investing in girls is incalculable.

7. Family Planning

Kenya has made significant gains in education, with more than 80 percent of all boys and girls currently enrolled in primary schools, and 50 percent of boys and girls in secondary schools, Poverty is the main reason for low enrollment, and boys receive priority for higher education when there are financial constraints.Courtesy of Project Drawdown.

The problem:  Securing the fundamental right to voluntary, high-quality family-planning services, so women can have children by choice rather than chance and can plan their family size and spacing, is a matter of autonomy, dignity, and, yes, climate change. 

225 million women in lower-income countries say they want the ability to choose whether and when to become pregnant but lack the necessary access to contraception—resulting in some 74 million unwanted pregnancies each year. The need persists in some high-income countries as well, including the US, where 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended.

Challenges to expanding access to family planning range from basic supply of affordable and culturally appropriate contraception to education about sex and reproduction; from faraway health centers to hostile attitudes of medical providers; from social and religious norms to sexual partners’ opposition to using birth control. 

Currently, the world faces a $5.3 billion funding shortfall for providing the access to reproductive health care that women say they want to have. After being silent on the topic of family planning for more than 25 years, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change included access to reproductive health services in its 2014 synthesis report and pointed to population growth as an important factor in greenhouse-gas concentrations. (See #6 for statistics on per capita emissions.) Growing evidence suggests that family planning has the additional benefit of building resilience—helping communities and countries better cope with and adapt to inevitable changes brought by climate change.  

Solutions in progress: The success stories in family planning are striking. Iran put a program into place in the early 1990s that has been touted as among the most successful such efforts in history. Completely voluntary, it involved religious leaders, educated the public, and provided free access to contraception. As a result, fertility rates halved in just one decade. 

In Bangladesh, average birth rates fell from six children in the 1980s to two now, as the door-to-door approach pioneered in the Matlab hospital spread across the country: female health workers providing basic care for women and children where they live. Family planning requires social reinforcement—for example, the radio and television soap operas now used in many places to shift perceptions of what is “normal” or “right.” 

Work to be done: Honoring the dignity of women and children through family planning is not about centralized governments forcing the birth rate down—or up through natalist policies. Nor is it about agencies or activists in rich countries, where emissions are highest, telling people elsewhere to stop having children. It is most essentially about freedom and opportunity for women and the recognition of basic human rights.

Currently, family-planning programs receive just one percent of all overseas development assistance. That number could double—a moral move that happens to have meaning for the planet. 

Green America resources: Green America’s Labor and Clean Electronics programs support solutions that help women earn their own incomes and determine their own futures. 

Impact

Because educating girls (#6) has an important impact on family planning, Project Drawdown allocated 50 percent of total potential
emissions reduction to each solution.

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires providing more women with family-planning access): 59.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost & savings (Plausible Scenario): Inappropriate to monetize a human right.

8. Solar Farms

OCI Solar Power’s 60-acre Alamo 3 solar farm in Converse, TX, generates 5.5 megawatts (AC) of power for nearly 1,240 homes. Courtesy of OCI Solar Power (OCISolarPower.com)

The problem: The era of fossil fuels is over, and the only question is when the new era of clean energy will be upon us. Solar photovoltaics are only two percent of the global electricity mix at present. 

Solutions in progress: Solar farms are large-scale arrays of hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or, in some cases, millions of panels that achieve generating capacity in the tens or hundreds of megawatts. These solar farms operate at utility scale, more like conventional power plants in the amount of electricity they produce.

The first solar photovoltaic (PV) farms went up in the early 1980s. Now, these utility-scale installations account for 65 percent of additions to solar PV capacity around the world.

If Ukrainian officials have their way, Chernobyl, the site of a mass nuclear meltdown in 1986, will house a 1-gigawatt solar farm, which would be one of the world’s largest.

Public investment, tax incentives, technology evolution, and brute manufacturing force have chipped away at the cost of creating PV, bringing it down to 65 cents per watt today. The decline in price has always outpaced predictions, and drops will continue. Informed predictions about the cost and growth of solar PV indicate that it will soon become the least expensive energy in the world. It is already the fastest growing. 

Compared to rooftop solar, solar farms enjoy lower installation costs per watt, and their efficacy in translating sunlight into electricity is higher. When their panels rotate to make the most of the sun’s rays, generation can improve by 40 percent or more. 

Work to be done: No matter where solar panels are placed, they are subject to the diurnal and variable nature of solar radiation and its misalignment with electricity use, peaking midday while demand peaks a few hours later. That is why, as solar generation continues to grow, so should complementary renewables that are constant, such as geothermal, and that have rhythms different from the sun, such as wind, which tends to pick up at night.

Energy storage and more flexible grids that can manage the variability of production from PV farms will also be integral to solar’s success.

The International Renewable Energy Agency already credits 220 million to 330 million tons of annual CO2 savings to solar PV. Could solar rise from two percent of the global electricity mix to meet 20 percent of global energy needs by 2027, as some University of Oxford researchers calculate? Thanks to complementary government interventions and market progress, there are many promising signs. 

Green America resources: Green America’s Solar Catalyst and Solar Circle programs have played a major role in accelerating solar in the US and abroad. Our new campaigns put pressure on AT&T, Verizon, and Amazon to power their massive servers with clean energy.  

Impact

Utility-scale solar is currently 0.4 percent of global electricity generation. Project Drawdown assumes it will grow to ten percent.

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 36.9 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—assumes higher growth): 64.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): –$80.6 billion. (Solar farms are cheaper to install than fossil-fuel alternatives, so there’s actually a
savings on implementation.)

Savings (Plausible Scenario): $5.02 trillion in net savings.

9. Silvopasture

A silvopasture field in Sweden, combining pastureland with climate-cooling trees. Photo by Bo Jansson (Alamy).

The problem: In Brazil and elsewhere, headlines condemn ranching as a driver of mass deforestation and attendant climate change. Cattle and other ruminants require 30 to 45 percent of the world’s arable land, and livestock produce roughly one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions. 

Solutions in progress: Conventional wisdom says cows and trees do not belong together. The practice of silvopasture challenges this assumption of mutual exclusivity and could help shape a new era for the acreage dedicated to livestock and their food. 

From the Latin for “forest” and “grazing,” silvopasture is just that: the integration of trees and pasture or forage into a single system for raising livestock, from cattle and sheep to deer and ducks. Rather than seeing trees as a weed to be removed, silvopasture integrates them into a sustainable and symbiotic system. Silvopasture is currently practiced on 351 million acres of land globally.  

The dehesa system of silvopasture, famous for the jamón ibérico (Iberian ham) it yields, has been cultivated on the Iberian Peninsula for more than 4,500 years. More recently, silvopasture has taken root in Central America, thanks to the work of champions such as the Center for Research in Sustainable Systems of Agriculture, based in Cali, Colombia. In many places in the US and Canada, livestock and trees can be found intermingling. 

That intermingling takes a variety of forms. Trees may be clustered, evenly spaced, or used as living fencing. Animals may graze in grassy alleys between rows of arboreal growth. Most silvopastoral systems are similar in spacing to a savanna ecosystem. They can be created by planting trees in open pasture, letting those that sprout mature, or by thinning a woodland or plantation canopy to allow for forage growth. 

Soil is the other essential component—and key to the potential silvopasture has for mitigating climate change. Silvopastoral systems sequester carbon in both the biomass above ground and the soil below. Pastures that are strewn or crisscrossed with trees sequester five to ten times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless.

Moreover, because the livestock yield on a silvopasture plot is higher, it may curtail the need for additional pasture space and thus help avoid deforestation and subsequent carbon emissions. 

Some studies show that ruminants can better digest silvopastoral forage, emitting lower amounts of methane in the process.
From a financial and risk perspective, silvopasture is useful for its diversification. Livestock, trees, and any additional forestry products, such as nuts, fruit, mushrooms, and maple syrup, all come of age and generate income on different time horizons. Because the land is diversely productive, farmers are better insulated from financial risk due to weather events. 

Silvopasture can also cut farmers’ costs by reducing the need for feed, fertilizer, and herbicides. Because the integration of trees into grazing lands enhances soil fertility and moisture, farmers find themselves with healthier, more productive land over time. 

Work to be done: Though the advantages of silvopasture are clear, its growth has been limited by both practical and cultural factors. These systems are more expensive to establish, requiring higher up-front costs in addition to the necessary technical expertise. There is less incentive to plant trees and protect them where pastures are plentiful, fire poses a risk, or land ownership is unclear. 

Layered on these challenges is the stubborn belief that trees and pasture are not compatible—that trees inhibit the growth of pasture fodder rather than enrich it. Farmers may ridicule one another for shifting to an alternate approach. 

These social impediments make peer-to-peer engagement and direct experience of silvopasture’s benefits key accelerants. To address economic obstacles, international organizations such as the World Bank and NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy are making loans to enable silvopasture installation—loans a typical bank would not provide. 

As the impacts of global warming progress, silvopasture can help farmers and their livestock adapt to erratic weather. Trees create cooler microclimates and more protective environments, and can moderate water availability. Therein lies the climatic win-win of silvopasture. 

Green America resources: Green America’s Re(Store) It! and Carbon Farming programs are accelerating the shift to regenerative agriculture, including silvopasture practices.

Impact

Project Drawdown estimates adoption of silvopasture expanding to 554 million acres by 2050 out of 2.7 billion theoretically suitable:

GHG reduction (Plausible Scenario): 31.19 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050.

GHG reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires higher rate of adoption): 47.5 GT of reduced CO2-e by 2050..

Cost (Plausible Scenario): $41.6 billion net cost.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): $699.4 billion net savings.

10. Rooftop Solar

An Uros mother and her two daughters live on one of the 42 floating islands that the Uru constructed from totora reeds on Lake Titicaca. This solar panel replaced  kerosene and provided electricity to the family for the first time. Photo courtesy of Drawdown.

The problem: The era of fossil fuels is over, and the only question is when the new era of clean energy will be upon us. Solar photovoltaics are only two percent of the global electricity mix at present. 

Solutions in progress: Solar photovoltaics (PV) have seen exponential growth over the past decade. In 2015, distributed systems of less than 100 kilowatts accounted for roughly 30 percent of solar PV capacity installed worldwide. 

While the production of PV panels, like any manufacturing process, involves emissions, they generate electricity without emitting greenhouse gases or air pollution. When placed on a grid-connected roof, they produce energy at the site of consumption, avoiding the inevitable losses of grid transmission. They can help utilities meet broader demand by feeding unused electricity into the grid, especially in summer. This “net metering” arrangement can make solar panels financially feasible for homeowners, offsetting the electricity consumers buy at night, when the sun is not shining.

Rooftop PV is accelerating access to affordable, clean electricity and thereby becoming a powerful tool for eliminating poverty. It is also creating jobs and energizing local economies. In Bangladesh alone, 3.6 million home solar systems have generated 115,000 direct jobs and 50,000 more downstream. 

Roof modules are spreading around the world because of their affordability. Solar PV has benefited from a virtuous cycle of falling costs, driven by incentives to accelerate its development and implementation, economies of scale in manufacturing, advances in panel technology, and innovative approaches for end-user financing.

Small-scale PV already generates electricity more cheaply than it can be brought from the grid in some parts of the US, in many small island states, and in countries including Australia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and Spain. 
Work to be done: See #8 “Solar Farms.”

Green America resources: Join with your neighbors to drive down the costs of rooftop solar. Read our “Community Solar for All” issue of the Green American.

Impact

Project Drawdown estimates that rooftop solar PV can grow from .4 percent of electricity generation globally to 7 percent by 2050.

Carbon reduction (Plausible Scenario): 24.6 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Carbon reduction (Drawdown Scenario—requires more solar rooftops): 43.10 GT of reduced CO2 by 2050.

Cost (Plausible Scenario): $453.1 billion net cost.

Savings (Plausible Scenario): $3.46 trillion net savings.

How Green America Campaigns Stack Up

We thought it would be fun to see where Green America’s climate-related campaigns stack up on the Project Drawdown
top 100 climate-change solutions. The solutions are ranked by the amount of greenhouse gases they reduce by 2050. Here’s how our efforts came out:

Climate Action: Growing Renewables: A big part of our Climate Action program aims to grow renewable energy generation in the US. In 2002, our Solar Catalyst project mapped out the future of solar power in the US. Today, Climate Action supports tax incentives for solar and wind, and helps investors move their money into companies coming up with climate solutions. We also developed the idea for Clean Energy Victory Bonds, which would allow individuals to invest in green energy for as little as $25, through a government Treasury bond. Ranking: Rooftop solar: #10, with 24.6 gigatons (GT) CO2-equivalent (CO2-e) reduced. Solar Farms: #8, with 36.9 GT reduced. Wind Turbines: #2, with 84.6 GT reduced.

Re(Store) It! and Carbon Farming: These campaigns aim to promote regenerative agriculture—through encouraging farmers to practice it, retailers to sell products farmed in this manner, and consumers to look for products grown through regenerative methods. Ranking: Regenerative Agriculture is #11, with 23.14 GT of CO2-e reduced.

Better Paper Project: Our Better Paper Project aims to conserve the world’s forests by advocating for recycled paper
use. Currently, we’re working with magazine publishers to switch them from virgin-pulp paper to paper with at least
some recycled content—particularly Smithsonian Magazine and college and university alumni magazines. The Project’s new “Skip the Slip” campaign asks retailers to offer digital receipts and consumers to skip paper receipts. Ranking: Recycling is #70, with 0.90 gigatons of CO2-equivalent reduced. Saving tropical forests ranks #5 (see p. 23), and saving temperate forests ranks #12, with 22.61 GT of CO2-e.

Fair Trade: Our Fair Trade program empowers women and girls by increasing family income, allowing girls to go to
school (see #6).

Green Living: Our website and publications are filled with practical articles on many of the Project Drawdown solutions, including the ones corresponding to our program areas mentioned above, as well as ride-sharing (#75), investing in
women (#62), composting (#60), saving water (#46), buying an electric car (#26), eating less meat (#4), reducing food waste (#3), and more.

In addition, our “Climate Justice for All” issue of the Green American highlights leaders around the world who are working to reduce climate-change impacts to communities of color, who are often hardest hit by them.

The solutions to climate change are within our abilities, and they improve life for every being on this planet.

If you’re part of the movement for a just and sustainable future, or you're interested in solutions to reverse the climate crisis, chances are you’ve heard of Paul Hawken. To say that Hawken has an interesting background is a bit of an understatement.  

You might know him as a green entrepreneur. Starting in the 1960s, he founded several pioneering green businesses, starting with the Erewhon Trading Company, one of the first natural-food companies in the US to rely solely on sustainable agricultural methods. 

You might know him as a bestselling author. He’s published several books on the green economy, five of which have become national bestsellers—including The Ecology of Commerce (HarperCollins, 1993), which professors from 67 business schools voted as the number-one college text on business and the environment. His 1987 book, Growing a Business (Simon & Schuster), was the subject of an acclaimed 17-part PBS miniseries, which he hosted and produced.

You might know him as a compelling public speaker. In addition to being a regular on our Green Festival circuit, Hawken has given hundreds of talks around the world, at colleges and universities, to government agencies, and before world leaders.

But what he’d like you to know him for now is as a champion of 100 scientific solutions that can solve the climate crisis.

Hawken’s latest New York Times bestseller, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (Penguin Books, 2017), is the compilation of research from more than 200 scientists, policymakers, and experts, detailing 100 bold solutions that could get the world to “drawdown”—or the point where greenhouse gases in the atmosphere peak and then begin to decline—and beyond. He’s also launched a new organization, Project Drawdown (drawdown.org), to help get us there.  

Green America editor-in-chief Tracy Fernandez Rysavy talked with Hawken about Project Drawdown and what everyone can do to help it succeed. 

100 Reasons for Hope on Climate: Project Drawdown created climate and financial models for 80 solutions to climate change, and examined 20 more solutions that are forthcoming in the future. The researchers found that if the world implements the initial 80 solutions over a 30-year period using a “reasonable yet optimistic forecast,” the total amount of CO2 avoided and sequestered amounts to 1,051 gigatons by 2050. To achieve “drawdown,” or the point where greenhouse gases in the atmosphere begin to decline, we’d need to ramp them up a bit more, particularly renewable energy, to get to 1,442 gigatons by 2050. 

Green American/Tracy Fernandez Rysavy: What is Project Drawdown, and how did it come about?

Paul Hawken: Drawdown started at two different times: In 2001, the Third Assessment of the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] came out. [Editor’s note: The IPCC Third Assessment Report is widely known for establishing a scientific near-consensus that unnatural levels of global warming are occurring and are caused by human activity.] I began to ask people, “Where do we stand? Do we have the solutions at hand? Can we reverse this? Why are we not talking about reversal?” 

Then, as now, the discussion was about slowing, stabilization, and mitigation. I said we should do the research and find out what technologies we have at hand that can reduce emissions or sequester them. Everybody I talked to at big NGOs [non-governmental organizations]  thought it was a great idea but didn’t have the expertise. And I said, “I don’t either.”

For a couple of years, I was trying to induce somebody to do the work, and nobody wanted to. Eventually, I stopped asking. Then Bill McKibben’s piece in Rolling Stone came out in July of 2012. The title was “Global Warming’s Terrifying Math,” based on Mark Campanale’s research at the Carbon Tracker Initiative. Mark had been a financial analyst, so he analyzed the balance sheets of all the gas and oil companies, and basically pointed out that they had assets that are called unburnable carbon. In other words, if those assets were combusted, the Earth would be more like Venus—we wouldn’t even be here to combust them. According to Mark, Bill turned that data into poetry. 

I had many friends come to me in despair after reading Bill’s piece. Many of them independently said, “It’s game over. We’ve lost.”

I remembered what I’d been proposing in 2001. I also thought that when people give up, it’s an opening, not a closing. Surrender is usually an opening. 

So with a few friends,we created Project Drawdown to map, measure, and model the most substantive solutions to global warming in terms of impact. These are solutions that are currently in place, at hand, and that are all scaling. We wanted to know what we can do with what we have now. 

We ended up with 100 solutions that, if we continue to scale them at a reasonable level, achieve “drawdown,” that point in time when greenhouse gases peak and go down on a year-to-year basis.

Green American/Tracy: What was so exciting for me in reading your book is that for the first time, experts are talking about reversing climate change, not just mitigating it.

Paul Hawken: Exactly. “Mitigation” means to reduce pain, severity, and seriousness. Can we make global warming less severe? What an underwhelming goal that is. Mitigation is for triage in an ER, but it’s not for civilization and the Earth. 
The science on climate change is an extraordinary problem statement. The headlines that come out about extreme weather, fire, ocean acidification, and so on, all validate the problem statement. But what’s happening is that we keep immersing ourselves in the problem statement rather than accepting it and saying, “Got it. The problem statement is correct. Now let’s work on the solutions.”

Today, we have knowledgeable people constantly repeating the idea that what we need is solar, wind, Elon Musk, and cutting back on how many burgers we eat. The implication is that if we move to clean energy and electric vehicles, we get a hall pass to the 22nd century. That’s a scientific howler. It’s not true. Of course, those are crucial solutions, no question—we can’t achieve drawdown without them, but it requires more than that. The system caused the problem, so it’s the system that heals it. That means we need all of the solutions, large and small.

Project Drawdown did the math on the most impactful solutions, pure, straight, and simple. Without bias. Without a foregone conclusion. Without the idea that we knew what the most substantive solutions are. 

Over 230 people are involved—we are a coalition. We are a “we.” We didn’t try to be right. We just tried to do the math. 
When you look at the back of  book (or website) and see the bios of who is involved, you meet some wonderful, knowledgeable people. 

Green American/Tracy: Tell me more about the math.

Paul Hawken: There are only two things we can do about global warming: Stop putting greenhouse gases up there, and bring them back home to Earth. 

With a group of Research Fellows from 22 countries—all with extensive academic and professional experience from some of the world’s most respected institutions—we gathered comprehensive lists of climate solutions and winnowed them down to those that had the greatest potential to reduce emissions or sequester carbon from the atmosphere. We then compiled literature reviews and devised detailed financial and climate models for each. 

The analyses were put through a three-stage process including review by outside experts, who evaluated the inputs, sources, and calculations. We also engaged a 120-person advisory board made up of diverse and prominent engineers, agronomists, politicians, writers, economists, climatologists, biologists, botanists, financial analysts, architects, and activists who reviewed and validated the final text.  

With respect to greenhouse gases, we relied completely on peer-reviewed science, using the more conservative data where there is a spread. On the financial side, the measurement of cost and return, we only used data from the most respected international organizations: the  IEA, FAO, World Bank, IPCC, etc. And again, we were conservative on costs and the rate at which costs would go down. The data employed in the models is not our data. We are transparent about where it comes from. We reflect back to the world what the world actually knows. It’s just that no one had ever put it together so that we could see it.

NASA has long been the leading experimenter in future aircraft design (Drawdown solution #43). They believe new designs could reduce fuel and pollution by 70 percent. Adopting the latest and most fuel-efficient aircraft, retrofitting existing aircraft, and retiring old aircraft early could prevent the release of 5.1 gigatons of CO2-equivalent by 2050. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Green American/Tracy: I’m still stunned by how optimistic the results are—which I think could go a long way toward moving people in a productive direction.

Paul Hawken: People do say it’s optimistic. We think of it as a reality project. What we know and what we are actually doing has been obscured. Ninety-eight percent of the news about climate is bad news; it is about doom, fear, and threat. What do individuals feel like when they’re inundated with bad news? They disengage; they become numb. We’re all the same in that way. 

What we know about how the brain works, from neuroscience and the study of ourselves, is that how global warming is being communicated by the climate establishment defies what we know about how the mind works. We hear over and over again that we must not exceed 2° C of warming, and if we go past that temperature, we enter some kind of wormhole, where something terrible is going to happen. That kind of rhetoric is guaranteed to turn people off. And the fact is, terrible things are already happening, i.e. Puerto Rico.

The truth is, that’s not a science-based number. That number was made up by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber in 1994. He was trying to communicate to German government officials the dangers of climate change, and they were having trouble understanding the science. So he said, “Think of it this way. We can’t go past 2° C.” It was pulled out of the air, and we’ve been using it ever since as if it’s enshrined like the Virgin Mary. 

Even if it was a science-based target, it’s a future existential threat, which human beings don’t relate to. The human brain isn’t wired to respond to future existential threats. The people who did that are not in the gene pool. The people who live here today have ancestors who thought about current existential threats. That’s evolution. 

Basically, the communication that is currently practiced is guaranteed not to work.

People come together around opportunity and possibility, not the probability of disaster. The way to reverse global warming is to address current human needs. 

Going back to Drawdown, 98 of the 100 solutions are regenerative development. If you do them, we’re better off with respect to life in a measurable way, whether it’s water, food, grassland, soil health, marine life, pollinators, etc. In other words, the development, when completed, leaves the world better off than when we started. 

We currently practice degenerative development. We’re stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. 

What global warming is inviting us to do is heal the future and sell that in the present. We can monetize the healing just as we can the stealing of the Earth. 

If you break down the solutions in Drawdown, they create jobs and almost all are profitable. If we tax carbon and stop subsidizing everything that’s harmful, they are virtually all profitable. They create social stability, crop productivity, and better food. They increase soil health, biodiversity, water retention, and clean air. They reverse marine desertification and coral bleaching. The list goes on and on. 

Every one of these solutions—other than two of them—are no-regrets solutions. If we were clueless about extreme weather (“Well, that was a hell of a hurricane!”), we would want to do 98 percent of these solutions regardless, because they have so many benefits and no downside. 

Drawdown is not about trying to fight climate change. That’s an unfortunate phrase. It makes the need to address climate change into a war metaphor. We have enough war metaphors, and wars for that matter.

In any case, we’re not going to “fight” the atmosphere because it is impossible. It would be like fighting wind, sunshine, and ocean currents. The climate is supposed to change—that’s what climates do. 

Bepkaeti of the Kayapo Tribe in Brazil sits on a mountain overlooking Kayapo territory—and also one of world’s largest protected rainforests. Indigenous communities are creating some of the most effective climate solutions through land management (Drawdown solution #39). If the world stops encroaching and allows Indigenous peoples to manage the 909 million acres of land they live on but do not have secure rights to globally, it could reduce greenhouse emissions by 6.1 gigatons (GT) by 2050. Photo by Neil Ever Osborne.

Green American/Tracy: What were some of the most surprising solutions to the climate crisis you've found? 

Paul Hawken: We were just surprised, period. Like anybody, if we had made a list of what we thought were the top solutions, renewable energy would have been at the top. Transportation would have been way up there, too. In the office, we all had our own pets and guesses, and we were pretty much all wrong. 

The very top one, refrigerant management, surprised us. We wished something sexier was number one, but that was how it turned out. 

Number two is onshore wind—not a surprise. But number three was reduced food waste and number four, adopt a plant-rich diet. Those surprised us not as solutions, but as rankings that were so high. Also, food waste doesn’t include the methane impact of landfilled food. Put that in, and food waste could be number one. 

When it comes to a plant-rich diet, it’s really about getting the world to adopt a diet where a significant part is plant-based, and a diet where we are eating proper amounts of protein. We overconsume protein in the west, much to the detriment of our health and the health of the planet. 

Number five is protecting tropical forests. Tropical forests are sitting on more CO2 than is in the atmosphere. Destruction, deforestation and degradation pose a huge threat to us. Number five is about protection, preventing it from being a growing problem. 

Number six was a surprise: educating girls. As was seven, clinics to support family planning and women’s reproductive health—not just in the developing world but here in places like Alabama. 

Both issues are intertwined: If you leave girls in school and support their education, they tend to plan their families very differently. When they’re married off early, which happens all over the world for cultural and religious reasons, their choices are made for them. Educated girls become women who make different family choices: they’ll have an average of two children rather than five or six. It’s the difference between high and median world-population predictions. Put six and seven together, and it becomes the number-one solution. We think it’s a solar panel that’s going to save the world. It’s not a panel—it’s a woman!

I just want to make clear that by measuring impact in terms of carbon, we’re not trying to be reductionist. We should educate girls based on a list as long as your arm. Education has cascading benefits for them, for society, for communities, for the future. Having said that, no one had looked at the impact of doing so in terms of climate. We did.

Green American/Tracy: The two “regrets solutions” you mentioned are nuclear and waste-to-energy, correct? Why include those?

Paul Hawken: Yes, that’s right. They’re there because we set out to measure most substantive solutions. If, in the process of doing that, we started weeding things out because we didn’t support them, our objectivity would have been called into question. The fact is, for many people,  nuclear and waste-to-energy [WTE] are solutions. 

Personally, I think nuclear is the most absurd way humanity has ever invented to boil water. Generating and guarding radioactive waste is dangerous and complex. That’s my opinion, right? But as a research institution, we wanted to make sure everybody thought we had done our homework, which was to be objective. This is science. The fact is that nuclear energy is less carbon intensive than coal and natural gas. So we mapped, measured, and modeled it. 

The problem with WTE is that it doesn’t go upstream, to who made the waste. It stops a better solution, which is zero waste. WTE is done in a very clean way in Europe, but even if it’s just spotless, we shouldn’t be making crap and burning it. We should be making everything in such a way that it can be returned through biological processes. 

[Editor’s note: Green America is against expanding WTE and nuclear power for the reasons Paul Hawken describes above. In addition, when it comes to nuclear, mining and enriching uranium, constructing power plants, and dealing with processing and storing nuclear waste all generate carbon pollution. For more on our position, see our article, “10 Reasons to Oppose Nuclear Energy”]

As cities around the world become denser and city planners invest in making those cities walkable (Drawdown solution #54), five percent of trips currently made by car could be made by foot, resulting in the avoidance of 2.9 GT of CO2-equivalent. Photo by Martin Bond for Alamy.

Green American/Tracy: I want to go back to the idea that some of the Project’s solutions have other benefits. Can you talk a bit more about those?

Paul Hawken: Take number 11, regenerative agriculture, for example. When you restore soil health, you’re increasing water retention. You’re taking carbon out of the air, creating humus and more life in the soil, which gives resiliency to crops in drought years. You reduce runoff/floods. You’re eliminating nitrous oxide. You’re increasing pollinators, because you’re planting cover crops. You’re not tilling soil, so you’re not releasing CO2. 

You’re increasing productivity, so you’re making money. That’s good for farmers. They’re not making much money now; thus, they’re getting more dependent on chemicals to try to squeeze out one last little bit of productivity on their exhausted soil, which is becoming dirt. Big Ag is basically like a drug dealer. 

You’re introducing animals as a way to fertilize. You’re not using mineral fertilizers. You’re not making things out of natural gas to put on soil. The amount of inputs is reduced, if not eliminated. 
These farms exist, and these farmers are not progressive, liberal Democrats. They’re farmers. But they’re focused on one thing: soil health. Which leads to healthy animals, people, air, water. It’s a virtuous circle, and everyone benefits. That’s just one example.

[Editor’s note: Green America has a new programs on regenerative agriculture, called Re(Store) It!]

While the 100 Project Drawdown climate solutions are all technologies available now and scalable, the researchers also included “coming attractions,” or technologies that are currently in development. One of those technologies is smart highways. The Wattway solar road, pictured above and developed in France, is made of solar tiles that adhere to existing roadways to produce electricity. A 10-by-20-foot section can supply the electricity requirements for an average French home. Photo by Vincent Capman/Getty Images.

Green American/Tracy: Can you tell our readers about some of the newer technologies that are part of the solutions list?  

Paul Hawken: 80 of them are well in hand, and we have lots of data. The 20 that we called “coming attractions” are valid scientifically, but there’s not sufficient data to model them. 

With the solutions that are in place, well understood and practiced, we can achieve climate reversal. However, what we’re trying to show is that things aren’t static. There are companies, engineers, designers, bioneers, people all over the world who are innovating, creating, and imagining new solutions and technologies. It’s not all that’s going to happen in the next 20 to 30 years.

But reinforcements are on the way—extraordinary breakthroughs in design and technology and practice that are going to enhance the ones we modeled. We wanted to give people a sense of 
what’s coming. 

Green American/Tracy: America is so politically divided right now. Are the Project’s solutions more things that Democrats embrace, or are they like regenerative agriculture, able to cross current political party lines? 

Paul Hawken: Well, let’s be honest. Washington never did much about climate, whether Democrat or Republican. These solutions aren’t coming from Washington. Could they be greatly accelerated by Washington? Yes. You see it in countries like Germany and even in non-democratic countries like China, who have taken the lead. But just because government doesn’t take the lead doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. The poster boy for wind energy is Georgetown, TX—which has a Republican mayor and is a conservative town. It’s a Trump town. But the whole town is 100 percent renewable!

This is not a liberal or conservative agenda. This is the human agenda. When people stop for a minute and look at the solutions for what they are themselves, they’re not political. They’re actually about energy, food, water, housing, costs, etc. About 
safety, human health. People vote with their dollars for what protects them, their family, their children, for what serves them. 
In this book, we don’t make people wrong. We don’t demonize. It’s about the future. Nobody is right about the future. It’s about having some humility and the capacity to learn and listen. The problem isn’t Congress. It’s our conversations—how we talk to each other.

Because most of the news we get is about the corruption, ignorance, and perfidy of human beings in power, it obscures how extraordinary we are. We wanted to bring a different message—we’re actually  really good people. 

Green American/Tracy: Going back a bit, I loved what you said about global warming being an invitation. It’s a whole new mindset that’s very empowering. 

Paul Hawken: Generally, we think of global warming as happening to us. We screwed up in the past, and we’re still screwing up. There’s an implied guilt of individuals and shaming of companies. 

But we need to ask ourselves this question: Is global warming happening to us or for us? If it’s happening to you, you’re the victim and disempowered. You probably will fight or think that way. Or be angry. Or be resigned. 

Or you can think about it happening for us, for you. This Earth is a system—beautiful, miraculous, intricate, extraordinarily sacred. When the weather changes, there’s feedback. Anytime you ignore feedback from a system, the system perishes. Global warming is feedback. It’s actually a gift. It’s an offering. It’s a gentle nudge. 

Okay, it doesn’t feel very gentle. But if you step back, it’s a slight variation in global temperatures. Addressing it is a pathway to transformation, creating a far better civilization than the one we live in now. Far kinder, more compassionate, more inventive, cleaner, restorative. Once you think of it as for you, you can take 100 percent responsibility. It’s totally liberating to be the person who is going to address and solve something. The point is that it invites creativity, imagination, celebration. It invites you to be an extraordinary human being. It’s also about knowing that you can’t do it alone. 

I’ve had the same editor for 25 years. I adore my editor, and he adores me. And my publisher, Penguin Random House, was hesitant to publish the book because climate books do not sell. The concern was that it’s another book about what global warming is and how fast it’s getting worse, that is was too expensive, a full-color book with 100 percent post-consumer waste paper. The concern was that they were going to get stuck with these books. The reason it’s out now is because the publisher at Penguin, Katherine Court, said to her people, “If we don’t publish this book, why are we here?” 

It became a bestseller its first week. It went into its seventh printing in six months. The last printing was 31,000 copies—we’re printing more copies than when we started.

What it tells us is that people want to do something. We want to know what to do, and we want to do it together. 

Green American/Tracy: So, if I’m wondering what to do to support Drawdown, where do I start?

Paul Hawken: Do whatever is important to you on an individual level. What we’re seeing is people getting together in different ways: They’re coming together to help us research data—we have experts and organizations from universities around the world. 
People want to game-ify it for kids, so they learn how to reverse global warming. There’s been tremendous curriculum development by educators, K-12 and college.  

Cities and local communities are organizing Project Drawdown action plans. There’s Drawdown Marin, Drawdown Nova Scotia. Faith communities are putting together groups. People are doing TV shows, and there’s a documentary film in the works.
We’re working with people who are making solution accelerators, developing platforms and products that are leading us to drawdown and beyond.

Then there are impact investors and family funds who are working together to seek out investments—where should we and shouldn’t we put our money to achieve drawdown.

What lights you up? Where do you go wow? Maybe it’s educating girls or literacy overall. Wherever it is, that’s where you’re understood, respected, where you have friends, and you can start there.

Impact investors and responsible banking institutions across the country have made a big difference this past year, advancing causes ranging from climate change to board diversity to immigration justice. Green America celebrates these 2017 victories and identifies how you can keep the economy moving in a greener direction.  

Shareholders Win Big 

Every year, shareholders have the ability to put forth requests to company management, in the form of shareholder proposals, on which all investors vote either in person at the company’s annual meeting or remotely via a paper or electronic proxy ballot. 
While shareholder proposals don’t need to earn a majority vote to push a company to change, the 2017 proxy season saw a number of high and even majority votes on environmental and social-justice proposals. 

“What was different this year was an increase of support on a few climate proposals,” says Sustainable Investments Institute executive director Heidi Welsh. “The high votes at oil and gas utility companies on climate-related resolutions were very substantial.”

At ExxonMobil and Occidental Petroleum, a majority of investors (62 percent and 67 percent respectively), urged the companies to share more information about how action taken by governments around the world to cut greenhouse-gas emissions will affect the market for fossil-fuel products. Exxon also appointed an atmospheric scientist to its board last year—following several shareholder requests that it do so. 

Investors also successfully pressed several companies to take action for people and the planet. In January, the world’s third largest consumer-goods company, Unilever, announced that it would transition to 100 percent recyclable, reusable, or compostable packaging by 2025. As You Sow, a nonprofit corporate-responsibility organization, had urged the company behind the scenes to incorporate recyclable packaging for several years. Likewise, in response to a proposal filed by As You Sow, KFC agreed to only purchase chicken raised without antibiotics deemed important to human medicine by the end of 2018.

“Proxy season is usually a mirror of public-policy debates in society at large. I think all the resolutions focused on economic inequalities and pay disparities illustrate that point,” says Welsh.

Workplace diversity was also a major focus, as shareholders at Aflac, Dentsply Sirona, EOG Resources, Fifth Third Bancorp, Jones Lang LeSalle, Verisk Analytics, and Visa all successfully withdrew proposals due to companies’ agreement to take action on the issue. Aflac, Fifth Third, Jones Lang LeSalle, and Visa committed to increased workplace-diversity data reporting. Dentsply, EOG, and Verisk agreed to include protections against sexual orientation or gender discrimination in company policy. 

Take Action: If you own company stock, vote your proxy ballot to let executives know your stance on important issues. Look for your proxy ballots to arrive by mail, usually in the spring. 

If you are unsure about how you can become engaged in shareholder activism, consult Green America’s Guide to Social Investing & Better Banking. You can also view our annual Shareholder Resolution Focus List. Look for it to be updated for 2018 in the spring. 

Putting a Dent in DAPL

In spite of fierce opposition, Energy Transfer Partners and its development company Dakota Access, LLC have been given the green light from the US Army Corps of Engineers to continue with the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)—a crude-oil pipeline that threatens to endanger the water supplies of millions, as well as traditional sacred sites of the Standing Rock Sioux. 

Green America and allies have been calling on the 40-plus banks financing the DAPL to pull out—and calling on the banks’ customers to divest from them until they do so. In the last year, two banks helping to finance the DAPL have bowed to this pressure. In November 2016, Norway’s largest bank, DNB, announced that it sold its assets in the DAPL and would start its own fact-based investigation of Indigenous rights’ abuses. In March 2017, the Netherlands’ ING Group also sold its loan to the DAPL.

Take Action: You may have seen hashtags like #DefundDAPL circulating around social media in the last few months. That’s because several major banking corporations like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, Citi Bank, and Goldman Sachs are still funding DAPL. 

Breaking up with your mega-bank is a sure way to make your voice resonate. The best way is to move your money and write them a letter telling them why. Visit defunddapl.org and Green America’s BreakUpWithYourMegaBank.org for further steps on breaking up.

Find out if your bank supports DAPL on our full list. 

Supporting Young Immigrants

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is an immigration policy, formed by the Obama administration via executive order, that guarantees protection to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children. In September, President Trump announced his decision to repeal DACA while giving Congress the green light to come up with a replacement immigration policy before some DACA recipients—the ones whose authorization expires before March 2018—become eligible for deportation. 
Trump’s unsympathetic decision forced DACA recipients into a race against the Department of Homeland Security’s hard October 5th deadline to renew their DACA applications. In response, green credit unions stepped up to ensure that individuals who needed to renew their DACA application were not turned down because of a lack of funds. 

The DACA application fee was $495 dollars, an amount many young people do not have just lying around, and the extremely short notice offered by Trump’s administration created a greater strain for individuals and families. So, Self-Help Credit Union introduced the DACA Loan, which offers undocumented immigrants a way to pay for their DACA application without any interest or fees. 

According to its company website, Self-Help has granted over 1,200 loans to people renewing their DACA applications. In addition, it has made 4,605 loans amounting to over $132 million to immigrant members last year for first-time home buys and other major purchases. The North Carolina-based credit union has become increasingly involved in assisting immigrant borrowers with the educational and financial resources they need to achieve financial wellness and live the American Dream. In addition to providing affordable loans, Self-Help also offers checking accounts and wire services.

“We believe it is critical to provide access to affordable, high-quality banking and credit services to all families, particularly those that are typically left out of the financial mainstream,” says Self Help’s vice president and director of secondary marketing, Deborah Momsen-Hudson, who is also a member of Green America’s board. “Self-Help has spent the last 37 years furthering our mission of creating economic opportunity and especially working to shrink the wealth gap in this country.” 

The NYC DREAMer Loan Fund, 21 Progress, Latino Community Credit Union, and a handful of others have also provided loans for DACA recipients.

Take Action: Trump left the fate of 800,000 DACA recipients to Congress, which only has a few months to pass legislation before young undocumented immigrants become eligible for deportation. Trump has said that he wants the DACA deal he strikes with Congress to include funding for a US/Mexico border wall, which, in addition to promoting hate, will cost an estimated $21.6 billion, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Other sources say it could cost twice that much.

Tell Congress not to back a wall built on anti-immigrant sentiment, and remind them that they can pass the Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which would reinstate DACA protections. Find contact info at Senate.gov and House.gov. 

Green America is ready to call for divestment of any company contracting with the government to build the border wall, should construction begin. Sign up for our e-mail newsletter to keep informed of our efforts. 

On websites from H&M to Gap to Gucci, you’ll find phrases like “innovative materials,” “sustainably sourced,” and “enhancing transparency.” But when it comes to finding out whether companies actually walk their sustainable talk, there may still be problems behind their promises. In short, consumers still need to do research when shopping for ethical fashion.

When you need clothes, first consider buying secondhand (here are some online stores we recommend). If you need to shop new, use the tips below to make your purchases better for workers and the Earth.

Note: While we’ve detailed the strongest third-party certifications that help prove a company has taken significant steps to care for workers and the environment, some but not all companies will display these certification labels on clothing tags. In addition to clothing tags, look for proof of certification on company websites, or call your favorite companies to ask if they hold the certifications.

Tips to Find Ethical Fashions

Consider Laborers

The source of Americans’ clothes has shifted during the past 30 to 40 years, from factories stateside to ones in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other Asian, Pacific Island, and some Central American nations, as companies follow the lowest possible costs for their goods. 

Subcontractors hired by major US and European brands, including luxury brands, must make clothing quickly to meet demand for ever-changing trends. Too often, factory owners disregard safety and fair pay to meet deadlines and turn a profit, as was the case with the Rana Plaza factory collapse that killed 1,100 garment workers in 2013. 

The big brands have the power to improve the lives of the workers across their supply chains. 

Find Better Fabrics

Fortunately, there are textiles that are good for workers and the Earth. Look for clothing made from certified organic fabrics, including organic cotton, hemp, soybean fiber, and linen. They’re grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers and cannot come from genetically modified (GM) seed. 

Organic cotton now makes up an estimated eight percent of all cotton grown. However, it may be hard to spot in some cases. Only 17 percent of organic cotton is marketed as such, according to the nonprofit Solidaridad. 

Another good fabric option is Lyocell/TENCEL® (the same product by conventional and brand name), which is made from wood pulp from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified forests, using a low-waste, closed-loop process. Lyocell made from bamboo, eucalyptus, or algae (called SeaCell) is also a good choice.

Also look for VISCOSE® and MODAL®, but only as trademarked brand names, which means Lenzing, the company that manufactures TENCEL, made them from FSC-certified beech trees using an eco-friendly process. 
Raw wool requires no chemical inputs. To ensure animal welfare, look for ZQ certification on New Zealand wool.   

Avoid These Fabrics

Conventional cotton is often doused with tons of toxic pesticides, poisoning workers and wreaking havoc on the planet. Cotton is grown on 2.5 percent of arable land in the world but uses 6.2 percent of pesticides. 

The worst of the top three pesticides commonly used on cotton is a nerve agent that could kill an adult if applied to the skin. While most pesticides wash out before they get to the consumer, workers in cotton fields are exposed to these chemicals at life-threatening amounts.

The documentary The True Cost found that in the Punjab region of India, where most of the country’s cotton is grown, numbers of children with severe learning disabilities, physical handicaps, and terminal illnesses like cancer have skyrocketed, which experts attribute to an increased use of pesticides. 

Petroleum-based synthetics—like nylon, polyester, rayon, acrylic, and spandex—aren’t great alternatives either. Because they’re essentially made from oil, they’re not biodegradable or renewable. Worse, manufacturing these materials releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas stronger than CO2.

Tree-based fibers are a mixed bag.  Rayon, small-v viscose, and small-m modal may come from trees that weren’t harvested sustainably, combined with toxic chemicals to make the fabric.

Also, avoid fabrics containing nanoparticles. Labels won’t mention nanoparticles directly but will tout the “anti-bacterial” or “anti-odor” properties nano-silver provides, or the sun-blocking capabilities of nano-titanium dioxide. Because of the ways products are regulated in the US, manufacturers aren’t required to test nanoparticles for safety to humans or the Earth, so little is known about their effects. However, nano-silver my contribute to bacterial resistance to silver as an antibiotic, and it’s toxic to aquatic life.   

Proceed with caution: Hemp and linen are often grown without copious amounts of chemicals, but you’ll either need to look for organic certification or contact the manufacturer to be sure.

Animal fabrics like wool, angora, and cashmere, while not requiring chemicals, likely weren’t procured with animal welfare in mind.

Beware of Toxic Dyes and Finishes

The dyes that are used in a majority of clothing are made from harmful synthetic materials. Azo dyes, commonly used in clothing, break down into chemicals called aromatic amines, some of which have been linked to cancer. Other dyes contain heavy metals like the neurotoxicants lead and mercury. 

After they’re dyed, clothing is often treated with water-, stain-, and fire-proofing chemicals. Those affect both workers and wearers, as some can linger even after several washings. These can also persist a long time in the environment and have been linked to hormone disruption and liver and reproductive toxicity. Clothes advertised as wrinkle-free are often coated in formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. 

For more information on finding ethical clothing, see the “Detox Your Closet” issue of the Green American. 

Green America’s Clothing Pocket Guide

Screenshot this guide or bookmark this page and make sure you have this guide with you when you shop for new clothes. Or, download the PDF.

FABRICS

Eco-friendly fabrics: Bamboo lyocell • Certified organic soy, cotton, hemp, and linen • Lyocell, a.k.a. TENCEL® • MODAL® with a trademark symbol • SeaCell • Silk VISCOSE® with a trademark symbol  

Purchase with caution: Angora • Cashmere • Wool • Conventional hemp • Conventional linen 

Avoid these fabrics: Bamboo rayon • Conventional cotton • Small-m modal • Nylon • Polyester • Rayon • Non-organic soybean fiber • Small-v viscose 

CERTIFICATIONS

Some clothing manufacturers don’t put these on their labels, so check websites or contact the manufacturer and ask questions.  

BLUESIGN: Ensures that clothing is not exposed to a list of harmful chemicals throughout the supply chain, from raw materials to finished product. 

CERTIFIED ORGANIC: Ensures that the raw materials used to make the clothing were grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. However, it doesn’t prevent clothing from being coated with toxic finishes. 

FAIR TRADE (Fairtrade America, Fair Trade USA, Fair Trade Federation): These independent certification and membership systems ensure that workers who grow raw materials or make clothing earn a living wage and labor under healthy conditions. 

GREEN BUSINESS NETWORK: Green America screens clothing businesses to ensure a commitment to fair labor, environmental stewardship, use of eco-fabrics, and no toxic dyes or finishes.

GOTS & GOTS ORGANIC: The Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS) requires that clothing bearing its regular label contain 70 percent organic fibers, and those bearing the GOTS Organic label be 95 percent organic. Clothing with either label must have no 
prohibited toxic dyes or finishes, and all suppliers must comply with standards to minimize waste and ensure that workers labor under fair conditions.

OEKO-TEX 100: This independent certification system limits the use of toxins in everything from raw materials to finished clothes.

SA8000: A designation from Social Accountability International (SAI), applied to factories and farms that uphold standards for social responsibility and labor rights.

ZQ Merino Wool: Certifies wool from New Zealand farms that meet its standards of animal welfare and environmental sustainability. 

UNION-MADE PRIVATE LABELS: Indicate that your clothes were made by workers who were allowed to organize and advocate for better wages and working conditions.

Bestselling author Paul Hawken and a team of 200+ experts have created a detailed plan to not only curb but reverse the climate crisis. And yes, they say, it’s possible.

Washington, D.C. – January 9, 2018 – Green America is pleased that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has announced that it is terminating the Department of Energy (DOE) Proposal to provide market-based incentives to coal and nuclear power plant owners. Green America, on behalf of its 250,000 individual and 2,000 business members filed comments in opposition to subsidizing coal and nuclear plants.

“FERC received comments that were overwhelmingly opposed to subsidizing coal and nuclear power,” stated Todd Larsen, executive co-director for consumer and corporate engagement at Green America. “This policy would have been bad for Americans, forcing them to pay higher rates for polluting and dangerous technologies. Rick Perry’s assertions that incentives for coal and nuclear were necessary to preserve grid resilience were contradicted by DOE’s own research, and his proposal was clearly designed to slow the progress of low-cost solar and wind technologies that benefit consumers and the environment.”

“Subsidizing coal and nuclear would be bad for businesses across the United States,” said Fran Teplitz, executive co-director for business and policy at Green America. “At a time when businesses are increasingly looking to purchase power from renewable sources, and when renewables are increasingly cost-competitive and part of a reliable grid, we should be looking at ways to further enhance our use of clean energy, and we encourage FERC to support an electric grid increasingly fed by renewable energy.”

At the same time Green America will monitor FERC's new proceeding to explore resilience issues in Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) and Independent System Operators (ISOs) as this could potentially lead to RTOs, including the PJM Interconnection that services over 65 million customers, to favor coal, nuclear power and/or large scale natural gas generating facilities in their regions.  

ABOUT GREEN AMERICA

Green America is the nation's leading green economy organization. Founded in 1982, Green America provides economic strategies and practical tools for businesses and individuals to solve today's social and environmental problems. www.GreenAmerica.org

Established in 1892, the Sierra Club has been part of many campaigns and legislation to protect wild lands. The nonprofit helped pass the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act. One of the its major initiatives is retiring America’s coal plants and moving the country toward clean energy sources. The Sierra Club also offers outings that give people the chance to experience environment-friendly travel. Currently, it’s collecting money for community-led efforts to help hurricane recovery.

Wildlife Conservation Society

Protecting wildlife and its habitats is the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) mission. The organization funds scientists who study ecosystems in the environment. These scientists find out what threats they face and what we can do to preserve them. WCS has four zoos and one aquarium in New York. These operate with the goal of saving endangered species and learning more about wildlife. The nonprofit works with governments, communities, businesses, and indigenous people to protect wildlife all over the world. It also fights to pass and protect legislation that conserves animal habitats.

Environmental Defense Fund

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) focuses on environmental issues that affect people. These issues include climate change, pollution, and the need for sustainable food production and ocean conservation. The EDF helps shape economic markets, partners with businesses, creates government policies, and uses scientific research to work on solutions to our current problems. For example, the EDF worked with politicians from both parties to create the Lautenberg Act, which President Obama signed in 2016. The act reforms old chemical safety law. This helps make sure products we buy are safer for us and the environment.

Defenders of Wildlife

The Defenders of Wildlife is a voice for wild animals against big oil and other corporations with agendas. Defenders keeps a close eye on government policies that may cause harm to environments these animals depend on to survive. Right now, the nonprofit is watching the HELP for Wildlife Act. This act takes wolves in the Great Lakes region and Wyoming off the endangered wildlife list. It also attempts to weaken the Endangered Species Act. The Defenders of Wildlife also help promote coexistence strategies for humans and wildlife. The nonprofit looks for ways to fight climate change, too.

World Wildlife Fund

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) works in about 100 countries to conserve forests, fresh water, oceans, wildlife, food, and climate for both animals and humans. One of the WWF’s main goals is to educate people about the impact we have on our environment and what we can do to conserve it. The WWF also offers a fellowship to students getting graduate degrees in conservation-related fields. There are chapters in local communities and in the global marketplace.

Rainforest Alliance

Each day, 123,000 acres of forest get destroyed. The Rainforest Alliance aims to preserve forests and their ecosystems and help people find sustainable ways to use land and produce food. The nonprofit recognizes that people rely on land and forests to grow food and make a living. But it also believes we can do that without causing harm to the environment. Rainforest Alliance works with the agriculture, forestry, and tourism industries to change their practices. The nonprofit also offers sustainability training around the world.

World Resources Institute

We all depend on the planet’s natural resources to survive, but humans have been draining them at a rate that’s not sustainable. The World Resources Institute (WRI) conducts its own research to collect data to help us move toward sustainability. The nonprofit then uses this information to educate and influence governments, businesses, and the community. The WRI has projects all over the world. These projects help countries use clean energy sources, conserve forests and water, reduce waste, and lessen our impact on climate change.

Conservation International

Conservation International (CI) works to protect nature for wildlife and humans. CI believes that nature doesn’t need people — but we need its ecosystems for food, jobs, fresh water and air, and our health. If we want to have a future, we need to learn to be sustainable. The organization thinks long term and proposes solutions across government and private sectors. Some issues CI focuses on include making coffee production more sustainable and keeping an eye on sharks in the oceans.

International Institute for Sustainable Development

Often, calls for economic development can conflict with sustainability goals. The goal of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) is to bring the two together without sacrificing one in favor of the other. The organization uses its research to work with policymakers and private businesses to reform policies and build sustainable solutions. IISD also works on international trade. One example is North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) renegotiations.

Rocky Mountain Institute

Our collection and burning of fossil fuels is one of the main contributors to the climate change we’re seeing today. The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) works to move the world away from fossil fuel demand and toward sustainable, low-carbon energy sources instead. The RMI provides information and resources that help businesses and other institutions around the world save energy and reduce pollution. For example, its programs in China and on islands with small economies guide both toward clean energy.

Green America

Green America believes sustainable solutions can be put into action by using economies as a driving force behind them. The nonprofit encourages consumers to spend on green products and services. It also encourages businesses to adopt eco-friendly practices. Some of Green America’s successful initiatives include ending True Value and Walmart’s use of bee-killing pesticides, getting a handful of food companies to end the use of GMOs in products, and helping magazines switch to recycled paper.

Healthline

Neat Lemon is a woman-owned and fully-insured environmentally friendly cleaning provider in Massachusetts.

Tired of making the same generic New Year’s resolutions every year that, let’s be honest, you never stick to anyway? Roughly half (45%) of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, with the most common being vows to lose weight, get organized, and save more. (Sound familiar?) Unfortunately, only 8% of people are actually successful in attaining their goals.

So, how can we avoid seemingly inevitable failure? Evidence suggests that setting realistic, specific goals and being mindful can do wonders for sticking to New Year’s resolutions. What better way to be mindful than to focus your resolution on regenerative agricultural? Regenerative agriculture* is an approach to agriculture focused on building and revitalizing soil health to combat climate change. In order to get up to speed on the subject, get the rundown on regenerative agriculture here.

By joining the regenerative agriculture movement this year, you can improve your health in tandem with the earth! Here are some specific, attainable regenerative agriculture-focused goals for the new year. Choose one and take the first step to a healthier, more sustainable 2018!

Composting

Composting is an amazing way to convert your food waste into nutrient-rich soil. This soil can be used for gardening or simply to create a healthier ecosystem while adding less garbage to landfills! Composting is a very simple way to live a greener lifestyle and there are a multitude of online resources that give easy-to-follow instructions as well as multiple methods of composting so you can choose the best fit for you.

If you live in an apartment and don’t have a yard to compost in, there are also services that will pick up your food scraps for you and compost them. Do a quick internet search and see if services like Compost Cab are currently operating in your community.

Planting   

If you’ve never had a garden before, starting one can seem daunting. Start small by planting a few vegetable or herb plants in your yard. You will be rewarded for your work by the freshest and best tasting produce ever, for free! Better yet, you will be reducing your carbon footprint by cutting down on food transportation costs and ensuring a portion of the food you eat is grown sustainably with no harsh chemical pesticides and fertilizers. 

There are many beginner guides to growing organically, like this online guide. Articles like this can guide you on how to use your garden to improve soil health. Limiting tillage (or disturbance of soil), planting perennial plants (these don’t need to be replanted each year!), and using compost are some of the best ways to ensure your garden regenerates soil health. You might be in need of some gardening gear before getting started. If so, look no further than these 9 must-haves from our certified green businesses.

If you live in an apartment and do not have access to growing space, planting in pots by a window that takes in sunlight can provide a surprisingly bountiful amount of food. Another fantastic option is looking for community gardens in your area, or even starting your own!

Cover Cropping 

As long as you’re thinking about planting, why not plant crops that can help mitigate climate change? Cover cropping is an incredibly simple process that can allow you to use your yard for carbon sequestration, helping to slow global climate change. Cover crops also improve soil quality, suppress weeds, and prevent erosion.

Cover crops like rye and buckwheat require little upkeep and maintenance. You simply sow the seeds thickly, wait for them to grow, and then cut or mow them before incorporating them into the soil. Handy guides like this one can help you figure out the right varieties of cover crops to grow and give further details on their benefits and growing process.

Volunteering at farms or farmers‘ markets

Want to resolve to get involved in regenerative agriculture, but don’t have the space for it? Volunteering at a local farm or farmers market is a great way to contribute to the movement, do something active and rewarding, and probably get some fresh produce along the way!

Many small, ecological farms (including urban farms if you live in a metropolitan area) have programs where volunteers can sign up to assist in farm work or help sell at farmer’s markets. The WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) network is one resource which gives you access to organic farms across the country currently looking for volunteers. With options ranging from a one day visit to months of volunteering with housing provided, there are possibilities for multiple levels of commitment. This site is also a great guide to finding small, sustainable farms in your area.

Buying local

If you want to contribute to the health of the food system but don’t have much time to give, changing your buying practices is a wonderful way to make an impact. Most food bought in the supermarket has been transported from afar; meaning produce has often been picked four to seven days before it gets to you and shipped an average of 1500 miles in the process. Why not cut out those carbon emissions and eat fruits and vegetables picked yesterday? Find a farmers’ market in your community today and resolve to do your shopping there instead of the local grocery chain. If market days and times conflict with your schedule, natural food stores and co-ops often sell produce from local farms.

Reducing meat consumption

It has been well established that meat production is one of the leading contributors to climate change and environmental pollution. The meat industryrequires huge amounts of pesticides, fertilizers, and fuel. In addition, meat production and distribution creates ample green house gases, manure, and toxic chemicals which are released into the environment. This year, one of the most effective ways you can decrease your impact on the environment is to reduce the amount of meat and animal products in your diet.

Maybe going vegetarian or vegan isn’t feasible for you this year, but any decrease in the amount of meat you buy makes a difference. Maybe that means Meatless Mondays, or only eating meat on the weekends. Maybe it just means buying higher-quality meat which is raised organically, humanely, and locally. Just resolve to start at whatever level you feel you could
realistically achieve.

Organizations like PETA have resources for transitioning to a vegan or vegetarian diet in a budget friendly, nutritious, and enjoyable way. Eating a plant-based diet has never been easier, with a plethora of companies catering to meat-free diets coming out with new, delicious products all the time. There is also a wide array of appealing vegetarian and vegan recipes you can try out this year to share with friends and family. Eating less meat can be a fun way to break out of a culinary rut and get creative in the kitchen. Resolve to eat less meat and get ready for a delicious, healthy 2017.

Improving bee habitats

Pollinators are integral to plant health and diversity and, by extension, the survival of human beings. Troublingly, colony collapse       continues to occur at high rates. This is happening in part due to the use of neonicotinoid pesticides in conventional agriculture. A noble resolution for 2017 would be committing to reduce the plight of the bees by creating a better bee habitat in your community.

You can improve your yard and/or community green spaces for bees by installing a bee garden, planting native wildflowers, and creating nesting and egg-laying habitat. The Humane Society of the United States provides information on how to do this here. The Xerces Society also has more information on the subject. By simply planting some bee-friendly flowers or building a bee block, you can resolve to make your community a safer, happier habitat for bees in 2017.

A new year is a time for change, growth, and restoration. Why shouldn’t these positive attributes extend to our earth and its soils? By picking one of these regenerative resolutions you can spend this next year sticking to a rewarding goal and feeling great about the strides you’re making for our planet’s future. Thank you and happy New Year from everyone at Green America! 

*This is an exciting time in the worlds of sustainable agriculture and climate change mitigation, when these two fields have the opportunity to collaborate and reinforce one another. This partnership is in its early stages, and terminology is constantly evolving. Regenerative agriculture is a new term that is still being defined and debated. Green America is proud to be a part of this discussion and stands behind agriculture that builds healthy farmlands, supports farmers and farmworkers, protects local environments, benefits consumers, and contributes to the fight against climate change—regardless of the term used to describe it. The organization recognizes that implementation of these agriculture methods will always be site specific and depend on soil characters, crops grown, and local climates. Green America's long-term goal is agriculture production that is regenerative and meets the USDA organic standard, the best way to achieve this is through the Regenerative Organic Certification. Green America supports all farms reducing chemical inputs and enhancing soil preservation techniques to move closer to those twin goals.   

Taking place in San Francisco on 30-31st January, the eighth North American edition of the Sustainable Foods Summit will showcase health impacts, sustainable ingredients, and eco-labels. For the first time, the executive summit will discuss the future of health foods and eco-labelled products in a high-level forum.

Although organic & eco-labelled products now comprise over 5 percent of food sales in North America, there are concerns about the future outlook. Will the ‘mainstreaming’ of the organic food market continue? What other eco-labels are emerging? Is more label fragmentation or some degree of harmonization on the horizon? What disruption is being created by Amazon and other new entrants?

Sustainable Foods Summit North America 2018 Agenda Announced

Following the success of the previous seven editions, Ecovia Intelligence (formerly known as Organic Monitor) is announcing the agenda of the North American edition of the Sustainable Foods Summit (http://www.sustainablefoodssummit.com/namerica). Taking place in San Francisco on 30-31st January, the executive summit will feature health impacts, food ingredients, and organic & eco-labels.

The two-day summit will bring together leading organizations involved in eco-labels and sustainability in the regional food industry. There are four distinct sessions that will cover the following topics....

Session 1: Sustainability Developments

- Conscious capitalism for sustainable development
- Measuring impacts of food and beverages
- Disrupting the sustainable food market by technology - Novel approaches to urban farming
- Developments in packaging materials

Session 2: Food Ingredients for Sustainability

- Advances in sustainable seafood - Innovating with seaweeds
- Ancient grains in modern foods - Creating slave-free chocolate

- Outlook for clean label ingredients

Session 3: Health Impacts

- Healthy food and beverage trends
- GM labeling & certification update - Advances in meat analogs
- Consumer insights into health foods - Encouraging healthy consumption

Session 4: Organic & Eco-Labels Outlook

- US in global market for organic foods
- Fairtrade in food industry
- Developing a sustainability certification scheme - Eco-labels: brands’ perspectives
- Retailing organic & sustainable foods - Targeting the millennials

Confirmed speakers include Doug Rauch (co-CEO of Conscious Capitalism), Amarjit Sahota (Founder and President, Ecovia Intelligence), Chef Mareya Ibrahim (The Fit Foodie), Ahmed Rahim (CEO of Numi Tea), Amit Hooda (CEO of Heavenly Organics), Shauna Sadowski (Sustainability & Industry Relations VP, Annie’s), Cathy Calfo (Executive Director of California Certified Organic Farmers), Christopher Mitchell (Commercial VP of Americas, Futamura), Courtney Pineau (Associate Director, Non- GMO Project), Monica Hadarits (Programs and Verification Director, Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef), and many more.

Registration is now open for this eighth North American edition. A limited number of sponsorship and speaking opportunities remain.

About the Sustainable Foods Summit

The aim of the Sustainable Foods Summit is to explore new horizons for eco-labels and sustainability in the food industry by discussing key industry issues in a high-level forum. The North American edition will be hosted at the Nikko Hotel San Francisco on 30-31st January 2018. More information is available from http://www.sustainablefoodssummit.com/namerica/

About Ecovia Intelligence

Ecovia Intelligence (formerly known as Organic Monitor) is a specialist research, consulting & training company that focuses on global ethical product industries. Since 2001, we have been encouraging sustainable development via our services portfolio: market research publications, business & sustainability consulting, technical research, seminars & workshops, and sustainability summits. Visit us at www.ecoviaint.com
 

More info on: http://www.sustainablefoodssummit.com/namerica/
Email: info@sustainablefoodssummit.com
Tel: (44) 20 8567 0788

For further information, please contact:

Ms. Katie Giorgadze
PR & Marketing Events Assistant Ecovia Intelligence
Tel: (44) 20 8567 0788
Email: press@ecoviaint.com 

Katherine Martinko (@feistyredhair)
Living / Green Home
December 22, 2017

phone book anymore?

In the process, you'll save trees and limit exposure to toxic chemicals.

If your house looks anything like mine, there is probably paper clutter all over the place. Whether it's school notifications, kids' crafts, magazines, catalogs, or receipts, the 'paper plague' often feels inescapable. And when you do take a moment to sort through everything, it just keeps coming.

The Environmental Paper Network (EPN) has put together a list of ways to opt out of at least some of the paper that comes into a typical household. Taking these steps does more than just declutter your home; it reduces demand for paper, slowing deforestation, and limits exposure to toxic chemicals, such as bisphenol A, found in thermal paper receipts.

Here's what you can do:

1) Stop catalogs. Sign up for Catalog Choice, which "has nearly 10,000 titles in the database, from clothing brands to credit card companies to charities." So far this effort has saved an estimated half-million trees.

2) Forgo the phonebook. When's the last time you cracked open a phonebook to find a number? These days most of us store numbers in our phones or we Google it. Despite this, a whopping 4.7 million trees are used each year to print U.S. phonebooks. Opt out by signing up here.

3) Don't take paper receipts. Reaching for a receipt after making a payment is an ingrained habit, but now's the time to break it. EPN writes:

"The Skip the Slip project from Green America is an effort to end the use of over 250 million gallons of oil, nearly 10 million trees, and 1 billion gallons of water each year to make thermal paper receipts, which are not even recyclable and contribute 1.5 billion pounds of waste per year."

You can sign up for Skip the Slip's campaign and pledge. Many businesses will now email receipts for your records, which is a much greener, more clutter-free option.

That is the extent of EPN's suggestions, but I'd add (4) opting out of junk mail at the post office (mine puts a red sticker on the mailbox, which means they won't give me any flyers, etc.) and (5) speaking to your kid's teacher about how much superfluous paper gets sent home. When you do get unwanted paper, use the backs for kids' activities and scribbling notes. You could even purchase a handy Paper Saver notebookin which to use discarded printouts from your home office.

These efforts may seem small, but small actions add up over time.

TreeHugger is the leading media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream. Partial to a modern aesthetic, we strive to be a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information. We publish an up to the minute blog, weekly and daily newsletters, and regularly updated Twitter and Facebook pages. TreeHugger is part of Narrative Content Group.

Green America recently launched the Re(store) It campaign to educate the public and U.S. corporations about the benefits of regenerative agriculture, an approach to farming which uses methods that rejuvenate the soil and trap greenhouse gases. The campaign will educate consumers about the importance of regenerative agriculture and offer ways to support it.

“We are in a farming crisis and we can no longer continue with our current industrialized, chemical-intensive system of agriculture,” said Anna Meyer, the food campaigns director at Green America. “If we want to sustain farming for future generations and reverse climate change, we must save the soil by adopting regenerative practices.”

“We have already seen the power of consumer voice to push for more organic and non-GMO products,” said Jes Walton, food campaigns specialist at Green America. “Now it is time for consumers to demand a major shift in our food system and push for the mass adoption of regenerative agriculture, which has the potential for even more widespread benefits.”

Regenerative agriculture harnesses the relationships between plants and soil microbes to pull excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in plants and soils where it is a useful nutrient for farmers. These farming methods of storing carbon and re(storing) agricultural soils include the following:

Crop rotation and cover cropping;

Composting;

Zero to low tillage and mulching; and

Planting perennials and diverse crops.

The Re(store) It campaign will release a series of blogs on topics ranging from carbon farming to Christmas Trees, all available at https://www.greenamerica.org/restore-it. The campaign will help individuals to promote regenerative agriculture in their communities, support farmers who are leaders in restoring soil health and encourage food companies to support regenerative agriculture through their supply chains.

The Re(store) It campaign builds on Green America’s prior food work, including its GMO Inside campaign, which over the past four years has successfully persuaded a dozen companies—including General Mills, Mars, Pepsi/Sabra —to remove GMOs from their products and move away from toxins in agriculture.

Each week High Plains Journal and Midwest Ag Journal cover 12 states with five editions in the core of production agriculture, reaching over 50,000 subscribers that include elite and influential producers managing diversified operations.

The Journal's five editions have 96 percent readership, which proves our dedication to excellence in agriculture reporting, advertising, and publishing as successful. Five full-time employees used to keep the publication running, and now 85 employees are proud to work for an industry leader. Many employees of High Plains Journal and Midwest Ag Journal are leading figures in the rural communities they serve and call home.

Cat & Dogma is a 100% organic and comfortably stylish brand for babies. We think babies deserve to look and feel good. We have created a clothing line that is happy and mindful, from the way that it’s sourced, to the way it is designed. Because being parents is our most important title, we do our best to live by example.

• Creating a sustainable lifestyle and low impact product line with a mission to give back, is the example we share with our families.
• We do our part by shopping at farmers’ markets and buying organic and local.
• We cook dinner as much as we can, walk our dogs and spend time with our children.
• We plant vegetable gardens, raise chickens and bike wherever we can.

Cat & Dogma is inspired by our lifestyle. We give back by donating proceeds from our online sales to the Children’s Home Orphanage in Umbergaon, Gujarat, India, near to where our factory is located. Our monthly donation helps provide 35 children with proper nutrition, clean water and shelter.

Here at beyondGREEN, our sole mission is to reduce plastic pollution by offering our next generation technology of dog waste bags and cat litter bags as an eco-friendly alternative to the trillions of plastic pet waste bags used every year. Pet waste provides an environmental hazard towards water pollution and the spread of harmful bacteria that may lead to disease, yet, using a plastic bag to dispose of waste is not the ecological choice our environment needs. Made with natural, renewable material and packaged in recycled material, bioDOGradable's patented vegetable blend promotes minimized pollution and supports sustainable development goals. This allows their organic material to naturally break down in the environment and serves as food to be consumed by micro-organisms, supporting a circular life cycle to work in harmony with the environment. With a market flooded with green-washed plastics, bioDOGradable is the trusted alternative by offering certifications with USDA Biobased, Vincotte EN13432 for Compostability and Home Compostability. BioDOGradable Bags is more than just a product, they are a movement educating consumers on the effects their choices have on our environment, in hopes of leading them towards a future without plastics.

by Kimberly B. Johnson 

Indulgent sweet treats are somewhat apart of American culture, like all the bite-sized chocolates we see around Christmas time or Valentine's Day. Would the gesture of a milk chocolate gift be as warm or romantic, however, if you knew it was produced using child slave labor?

Probably not. And this is the exact conundrum many chocolate producers have found themselves in over the years through inhumane means of production. 

(Photo: Unsplash / Michał Grosicki)

The cocoa bean is primarily found in Latin America and Western Africa, coming mostly from Ghana and the Ivory Coast where 70% of the world’s cocoa is reaped.

But back in 2010, Ivorian government authorities detained three newspaper journalists after they published an article exposing government corruption in the cocoa bean industry. The report found that at that time, farms in West Africa which supply cocoa to chocolate industry giants such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé were among some of the worst farms in terms of of child labor, human trafficking and slavery.

Somehow, the problem continues to go unseen on a large scale, although its consistently researched and reported on like in the 2010 documentary The Dark Side Of Chocolate and in major publications time and time again.

Some companies have made strides to rectify the issue of child slave labor in chocolate production, however. Hershey's reports a commitment towards sourcing 100 percent certified and sustainable cocoa for all of their products by 2020. Currently, the company is sourcing 75 percent of its chocolate from certified and sustainable growers.

Last year, Green America created this “Big Chocolate Scorecard” illustrating which companies are doing the best and worst to address sustainability and take on the child labor problem. Nestlé earned the highest score awarded (3.5 chocolate bars out of 5) among the big companies, reportedly for its high level of engagement with farmers through its Cocoa Plan program.

(Photo: Getty Images / The Washington Post)

The issue of child slave labor in the chocolate industry is still real, however. In some cases, families are in such dire means of desperation for the money companies contracted by the chocolate industry promise, that they sell their own children into the illegal and inhumane child labor industry. 

Abby Mills, Campaign Director of the International Labor Rights Forum, explains, “Every research study ever conducted in [Western Africa] shows that there is human trafficking going on, particularly in the Ivory Coast.”

Taken into context, the term “slavery” is used to represent some form of human rights violations, such as cases of physical violence like being whipped for working slowly or workers being locked in cages all night to prevent them from escaping. 

While major chocolate corporations have just begun to remedy the harm done by unregulated labor mills used to produce their products, the issue, however, isn't even with the companies directly, it's a lack of visibility or concern for the workers at the perceived lowest end of the totem pole. 

This is the exact reason practices like sourcing from "fair trade" food producers is so important. "Fair Trade is a partnership among food buyers and producers based on dialogue, transparency and respect.

The goal is to use humane and fair practices while achieving greater equity in international trade, contributing to sustainable development by offering better trading conditions and securing the rights for the marginalized producers and workers who are the backbone of these products. 

If we continue to accept and purchase products from companies who bypass and downplay a need for ethical means of production, we're only adding to the suffering of others for a moment of indulgent bliss. It's as we'd say, food for thought.

Konbini is an exciting, groundbreaking and fast growing digital media company. We live and breathe pop culture and are expert at crafting highly engaging and socially shareable stories. Whether it's the written word, imagery or video, we have developed a unique approach to content publication that resonates powerfully with our audience across the world. Our audience is defined by their pioneering attitudes and behaviours, and their ability to influence consumers across the globe.

PlushBeds is a leading online luxury mattress retailer and manufacturer, specializing in natural and organic latex mattresses. All of PlushBeds mattresses are hand crafted in the US with the best quality natural and organic materials - no chemicals, no pesticides, no adhesives, no dyes, no fillers, no synthetic blends. All of PlushBeds mattresses are GreenGuard Gold certified and come with a 100 night free trial. It is PlushBeds’ commitment to excellence in craftsmanship, sustainability, social responsibility and superior customer service, that has driven them to become America’s largest online distributor of natural and organic latex mattresses that are as affordable as they are indulgent.

Climate change is not a purely environmental issue, and neither is the fight for a sustainable food system. Regenerative agriculture, environmental justice, and diversity play a major role in navigating the future of these intertwined issues.

Climate change is having immense direct and indirect effects on individual human health and the stability of our societies and systems at large. It is a complex issue with drivers across industries, policies, and around the globe. Because of this diversity of sources and vast impacts, we need a multidisciplinary approach towards positive change, but this is largely hindered by existing boundaries—geographical and ideological—and organizational silos around how we talk about and approach the issue.

This term—organizational silos—is rooted in business-speak, referring to when parts of a company or industry don’t want to share information or work together for fear of undercutting their own priorities. Silos may form due to a lack of common language or organizational structure that does not allow for collaboration. With enormous cross-cutting issues like climate change and our broken food system, these silos dramatically reduce progress. We are entering the new territory of a climate-altered world without clear direction, in the face of limited resources and strained political relationships, and we need a multifaceted strategy and collaboration amongst diverse stakeholders for approaching these complex challenges.

Looking at these staggering tasks—climate change adaptation and mitigation—through the lens of the food system is helpful. Similar to climate change, issues within the industrial food system are complex and deeply intertwined with other social, environmental, and economic systems and stakeholders across the globe.

Agriculture is a major driver of climate change, but it also has the potential to be a solution. We’re here to advocate for regenerative agriculture and explore how it can guide our approach to the larger fight to “unsilo” efforts and join forces against climate change. For certain, a diversity of management techniques and knowledge systems are needed to address the twin issues of climate change and a degenerative, chemical-intensive food system. And, without a doubt, environmental justice is central to addressing both cases. A truly regenerative agricultural* system can restore soil health, sequester carbon, protect local communities, improve labor conditions, and provide healthier foods.

Using the Transition to Regenerative Agriculture as a Roadmap

The goal of regenerative agriculture is to restore rich soils that sequester and store carbon that would otherwise act as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. But, proponents of this approach recognize that this does not happen in isolation. Regeneration’s climate benefits can only be realized when healthy farmlands combine with supported farmers and farmworkers, protected local environments, and informed and empowered consumers. These issues, from the local to global, are all intimately related.

As activist Vandana Shiva said: “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy."

Sure, but how?

We’re already seeing strong partnerships and support for this multi-faceted approach to a complex challenge. Civil society is creating strong alliances across race, gender, social, political, and economic issues—It Takes Roots and The Climate Justice Alliance, are two examples of this approach that joins advocacy, education, and empowerment. The efforts of nonprofit research centers like the Rodale Institute and state-level initiatives like the California Healthy Soils Initiative are supporting this transition with research, testing, and promotion of successful methods. Farmers pioneering regenerative agriculture are engaged and thriving, just look at Singing Frogs Farm. Businesses like Dr. Bronner’s and Patagonia are propelling the movement forward in the marketplace, and consumers will soon look for products that are Regenerative Organic Certified.

These stakeholders come from different silos—individuals, nonprofits, large businesses, and government—but all have the same goal of promoting regenerative agriculture and reducing climate change (along with many other benefits). While the regenerative agriculture movement is still in its early stages, this collaborative approach and systems-level thinking is right on. These groups chip away at the problem from many angles. With such a diversity of drivers and impacts in both climate change and the food system, we need equally unique and innovative solutions. This approach includes the voices of those who are traditionally marginalized to ensure the impacts are not just shifted to them.

Diversity’s Role in Smashing Silos

According to the 2012 USDA Agricultural Census, women were the primary operators (those managing the day-to-day) of 14 percent of farms in the United States, and minorities—including Spanish, Hispanic, Latino, American Indian, Alaskan Native, Asian, Black, African American, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander—accounted for 9 percent.

This isn’t insignificant. Women and minorities were responsible for approximately $40 billion of the agricultural market that year. And, with this year’s census, we expect this to increase, as statistics show that beginning farmers are more likely to be female and more likely to be minorities. That’s not to mention the immense labor force of migratory and seasonal farmworkers, with population estimates around three million, 80 percent alone who are Hispanic.

Our world is diverse. Our food system is vast. The overarching lesson to be learned from this is the need for inclusivity and a justice-oriented approach to transition, whether we’re talking about the food system or global climate change.

Unlike chemical-intensive industrial farming, regenerative agriculture is knowledge-intensive and has much to gain from nonmainstream approaches and stakeholders. These farmers often have a strong interest in moving towards more sustainable and less chemical-intensive farming practices. Or, some beginning farmers are starting with these methods rather than having to transition to them. In many cases, farmers are pursuing regenerative agriculture because they have a passion for environmental regeneration and the wellbeing of farmers and farmworkers, but also because there is very real potential for greater revenues using these methods. A great example of this is Casitas Valley Farms, where they produce healthy food with methods that build soil, support pollinators, and care for those working on the farm.

From foodies to feminists, Standing Rock to Salinas, if we are going to break out of the silos and transition to more people- and place-based systems, we have much to learn from diversity. Indigenous, minority, and low-income communities are disproportionately exposed to pollutants and are hit hardest by environmental tragedies; they have much to contribute if we broaden our perspective to accept that these issues affect us all.

Regenerative agriculture will have major impacts in the realm of environmental justice, showing the potential and need for similar approaches in climate change. It has the potential for widespread social and economic benefits, not to mention environmental. These methods reduce water and air pollution, while increasing food access. They reduce pesticide use and, therefore, exposure of farmers and farmworkers to harmful chemicals. There’s the potential for green job creation and an increased bottom line for farmers making management decisions that protect their soils. In a regenerative system, immigrant’s rights and women’s rights stand alongside farmer and consumer advocacy.

It is our responsibility to ensure that all these voices are heard, especially those disproportionally affected by the many impacts of a broken food system and global climate change.

Regenerative agriculture thrives on diversity below ground and it cannot succeed in the fight against climate change and industrial agriculture without a diversity of people and efforts above ground. While the silos may seem unsurmountable at times, our diversity and breadth of experience and knowledge are our biggest assets. As more stakeholders join this agricultural movement and transition towards regeneration, the silos matter less and the ultimate goal becomes clearer.

*This is an exciting time in the worlds of sustainable agriculture and climate change mitigation, when these two fields have the opportunity to collaborate and reinforce one another. This partnership is in its early stages, and terminology is constantly evolving. Regenerative agriculture is a new term that is still being defined and debated. Green America is proud to be a part of this discussion and stands behind agriculture that builds healthy farmlands, supports farmers and farmworkers, protects local environments, benefits consumers, and contributes to the fight against climate change—regardless of the term used to describe it. The organization recognizes that implementation of these agriculture methods will always be site specific and depend on soil characters, crops grown, and local climates. Green America's long-term goal is agriculture production that is regenerative and meets the USDA organic standard, the best way to achieve this is through the Regenerative Organic Certification. Green America supports all farms reducing chemical inputs and enhancing soil preservation techniques to move closer to those twin goals.   

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Senior Bookkeeper/Accountant

Hours: 32 hours/week, Monday through Thursday

Salary: $44,000 - $48,000, contingent on experience

Benefits: Excellent benefits package, including health insurance, dental & vision coverage, sick days, holidays, and vacation                                                                                    

Supervisor: Director of Finance

Organizational Background

Green America is a national non-profit organization that mobilizes consumers, investors, and businesses to use their economic power to create an environmentally sustainable and socially just economy. We create change in the world with three strategic hubs: 1) Our Consumer Education & Action campaigns create consumer demand that sends signals to the market calling for change, 2) Our Green Business Network is proving that green innovation is not only good for people and our planet, it is also profitable and sustainable, and 3). Our Center for Sustainability Solutions brings together diverse stakeholders along entire supply chains to solve complex sustainability problems that no single business, organization, or leader can solve alone. 

We organize our national network of 250,000+ consumer activists, 2,000 Green Business Network members, and our growing list of corporate and supply chain partners around four core issue areas: 1) Safe Food & Sustainable Agriculture, 2) Clean Energy & Climate Action, 3) Fair Labor & Social Justice, and 4) Responsible Finance & Better Banking. 
 

Duties and Responsibilities:

Accounts Payable

• Process vendor invoices, employee travel reimbursements and other check requests and make payments via check and ACH.
• Insure that there are funds in the appropriate bank account to cover all required vendor payments
• Maintain the vendor file in Intacct including the Tax ID information (W9 or W8) and 1099 status for all vendors.
• Prepare and issue Form 1099 to all appropriate vendors.
• Reconcile the General Ledger Accounts Payable balance with the Accounts Payable sub ledger and Vendor Aging report.
• Maintain AP related forms and update as needed due to changes in the chart of accounts or department codes. 
• Review monthly bank reconciliations, verify that checks clear in a reasonable time frame and perform research as needed.

Payroll

• Enter employee information into the payroll system and process payroll on the scheduled dates.
• Review payroll reports and pay checks/stubs to verify that the payroll was processed accurately.
• Prepare journal entries to record all payroll related activity.
• Setup, process and monitor all payments to payroll related vendors (Metro, retirement, etc.) and tax agencies in a timely and accurate manner.
• Insure that there are funds in the appropriate bank account to cover all required payroll and related payments.
• Reconcile all relevant GL account balances with payroll and related reports.  Insure that all balance sheet and expense accounts match the payroll reports and create subsidiary Excel schedules when needed.

Revenue Journal Entries

• Obtain the necessary transaction source for all revenue related entries (cash based) and make the required journal entries into the accounting system.

Cash Management

• Monitor cash accounts and request transfers between accounts as needed so that payroll, accounts payable and other payments, including checks, ACH and wire transfers are fully funded.
• Prepare any intra-GA cash transfer entries and record in Intacct.
• Assist in the preparation of the monthly bank reconciliations, as needed.

Miscellaneous

• Work with Green America’s external auditors on the annual audit and tax return.
• Ability to work with and maintain confidential and sensitive information.

List of software this position will utilize:

• Intacct Accounting Software
• Paychex
• Microsoft Office Suite
• Online banking
• PayPal
• ACH via vendor sites
• Metro
• Retirement plan vendor

You will be a good fit for this position if:

• You’re well versed in financial concepts.
• You are meticulous as it relates to accuracy, detail and organization, and can work independently as needed in a high-volume environment.
• You recognize that an accounting and finance function in any organization has a responsibility to support other departments so that they can get their work done more efficiently.
• You have a solid understanding of accounting software, online banking, payroll software, and the Microsoft Office suite of software, and how to best use those tools to get the job done.

Qualified Candidates should have:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting, or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Minimum of 3-5 years work experience in each of the job duties listed
• Outstanding references

Hours of Work:

• 9:00 to 5:00, Monday through Thursday, and some evenings and weekends as needed.  No telecommuting.

How to Apply:

Send cover letter and resume to hract@greenamerica.org.

No phone calls, please.

Green America is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination regarding: age, class and economic circumstance, ability/disability, physical appearance and body size, race, ethnicity, country of origin or nationality, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation and identity.

Green America values diversity within our staff, fellows, and interns. We believe the diversity of experiences, ideas, individuals, and organizations in our community and the sector makes us stronger. To create a more just and engaged world, we must embrace and celebrate diversity, practice inclusion, and exercise our role as a champion of equity.

View a larger version of the infographic here. 

This is an exciting time in the worlds of sustainable agriculture and climate change mitigation, when these two fields have the opportunity to collaborate and reinforce one another. This partnership is in its early stages, and terminology is constantly evolving. Regenerative agriculture is a new term that is still being defined and debated. Green America is proud to be a part of this discussion and stands behind agriculture that builds healthy farmlands, supports farmers and farmworkers, protects local environments, benefits consumers, and contributes to the fight against climate change—regardless of the term used to describe it. The organization recognizes that implementation of these agriculture methods will always be site specific and depend on soil characters, crops grown, and local climates. Green America's long-term goal is agriculture production that is regenerative and meets the USDA organic standard, the best way to achieve this is through the Regenerative Organic Certification. Green America supports all farms reducing chemical inputs and enhancing soil preservation techniques to move closer to those twin goals.   

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—DECEMBER 5, 2017 —Green America today launched the Re(store) It campaign to educate the public and U.S. corporations about the benefits of regenerative agriculture, an approach to farming which uses methods that rejuvenate the soil and trap greenhouse gases. The campaign will educate consumers about the importance of regenerative agriculture and offer ways to support it.

"We are in a farming crisis and we can no longer continue with our current industrialized, chemical-intensive system of agriculture,” said Anna Meyer, the food campaigns director at Green America. “If we want to sustain farming for future generations and reverse climate change, we must save the soil by adopting regenerative practices."

“We have already seen the power of consumer voice to push for more organic and non-GMO products,” said Jes Walton, food campaigns specialist at Green America. “Now it is time for consumers to demand a major shift in our food system and push for the mass adoption of regenerative agriculture, which has the potential for even more widespread benefits."

Regenerative agriculture harnesses the relationships between plants and soil microbes to pull excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in plants and soils where it is a useful nutrient for farmers. These farming methods of storing carbon and re(storing) agricultural soils include: 

• Crop Rotation and Cover Cropping 
• Composting
• Zero to Low Tillage and Mulching
• Planting Perennials and Diverse Crops 

The Re(store) It campaign will release a series of blogs on topics ranging from carbon farming to Christmas Trees, all available at https://www.greenamerica.org/restore-it.  The campaign will help individuals to promote regenerative agriculture in their communities, support farmers who are leaders in restoring soil health, and encourage food companies to support regenerative agriculture through their supply chains.

The Re(store) It campaign builds on Green America’s prior food work, including its GMO Inside campaign, which over the past four years has successfully persuaded a dozen companies – including General Mills, Mars, Pepsi/Sabra – to remove GMOs from their products and move away from toxins in agriculture.

###

ABOUT GREEN AMERICA

Green America is the nation’s leading green economy organization. Founded in 1982, Green America provides the economic strategies, organizing power and practical tools for businesses and individuals to solve today’s social and environmental problems. http://www.GreenAmerica.org

INFOGRAPHIC: Available at https://greenamerica.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/RestoreIt_Infographic.pdf

MEDIA CONTACT: Max Karlin for Green America, (703) 276-3255, or mkarlin@hastingsgroup.com

Local and organic foods have some climate benefits, but choose local, organic, AND regenerative for the greatest impact!

Our food choices are important. They affect our personal health, the wellbeing of farmers and rural communities, and the state of the environment. Increasingly, we’re coming to understand the major impacts food and agriculture have on the most pressing and comprehensive issue of our time—climate change.

As conscious consumers, it can be difficult to navigate and understand the many labels and claims that come with our food. Organic. Regenerative. Local. You may have come across these words in the grocery store, at farmers’ markets, or in restaurants. And—while local and organic are great all-around choices—if you care about solutions to climate change, regenerative organic agriculture* and healthy soils deserve some extra attention.

When talking about the food system, the climate changing greenhouse gases we’re most concerned about are carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O). Human activities have increased the concentrations of these gases in our atmosphere, where they trap the sun’s heat and change the climate. Agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, but this could be lessened and even reversed with the adoption of organic, regenerative, and local practices.

Organic Agriculture: Great, But We Can Do Better

Organic is an easy place to start, because it has a legal definition with strict requirements. It prohibits the use of synthetic, nitrogen-based fertilizers that require a great deal of energy to produce (with associated carbon dioxide released) and turn into nitrous oxide if not managed correctly.

Organic agriculture diverts methane-producing waste from landfills, converting the waste to rich organic matter through composting. Organic methods may also reduce carbon dioxide emissions that come from transporting chemical inputs to farms, because these methods naturally enrich the soil with on-farm resources and eliminate the need for chemical inputs. The many benefits of organic agriculture have long been recognized, but of particular importance in this era of climate change is the fact that these richer soils are also better at sequestering carbon from the atmosphere.

New research shows that organic soils have the potential to store 26 percent more carbon than soils on conventional farms, resulting in less harmful carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Additional research from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization found that 40-65 percent of agricultural greenhouse gases could be offset if the world’s farmers switched to organic agriculture.

So, organic clearly has an important role in the fight against climate change, but why isn’t it the end-all, be-all?

It’s a great start, and any conventional agriculture that’s converted to organic agriculture is a step in the right direction. Organic methods help reduce emissions. But, they don’t explicitly focus on climate benefits—that is, the building and protecting of soils and their ability to sequester carbon and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere—which is where the major potential for reversal of climate change lies. Slowing emissions is important, but we’ve reached a point where removing the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere is a priority.

Regenerative Organic Agriculture: Restoring Soils to Reverse Climate Change

In September 2017, several organizations joined together to create certification criteria for regenerative organic agriculture. The criteria use USDA organic requirements as a baseline, meaning they include all the benefits in the organic section above with, an additional focus on animal welfare, treatment of farmworkers, and restoring and protecting soils that act as sinks for carbon dioxide.

Green America’s Center for Sustainability Solutions is convening a carbon farming network that will focus on increasing the acreage under regenerative agricultural production by creating pathways for farmers to move along the spectrum of regenerative practices. The Center is also working throughout the supply chain to develop market support for regenerative agriculture production.

Important soil building practices in regenerative organic agriculture include composting, cover cropping, conservation tilling, planting perennial crops, and intensively managed grazing. Research from the Rodale Institute suggests that a switch to these regenerative methods has the potential to sequester 100 percent of current carbon dioxide emissions with numerous other social, environmental, and climate benefits.

You read that right. 100 percent!

Much of the research focuses on carbon, but the benefits of regenerative organic agriculture extend to other greenhouse gases. Conservation tillage reduces the release of nitrous oxide and methane into the air. Livestock produce less methane when grazed with regenerative methods on high quality pastures. Similarly, less methane and nitrogen dioxide are released from the excessive manure build up that is seen in CAFOs or other confined animal situations, because it is evenly distributed over pastureland in regenerative land management practices.

Local, Regenerative Organic Agriculture: The Best of All Worlds

While it might seem like regenerative organic agriculture is the answer, we have to consider the fact that all these climate benefits are negated if responsibly-grown food is shipped around the world to consumers. Of course, there are many complex elements to consider from field to fork, but local foods generally have a lower carbon footprint and higher nutritional value. So, we’re here to advocate for local, regenerative organic agriculture.

The majority of climate benefits associated with local food come from less transportation and, therefore, less carbon dioxide emitted. So, buying locally grown food limits the shipping distance, but it also reduces the energy and associated emissions that come with refrigeration, storage, and packaging that come with long distances. Local foods are often less processed, which is energy intensive, and the emphasis on seasonal eating has a ripple effect of reducing demand for foods shipped from far away.

It’s imperative to consider climate benefits when making food choices. Let’s make the ultimate goal to buy food that’s grown locally and produced using regenerative organic methods. Not sure how to do that? We encourage you to talk to vendors at farmers’ markets. If you find producers with methods you love, spread the word through your networks on social media or word of mouth. Fill out comment cards at grocery stores and speak directly to managers at food retailers.

Let them know the climate matters to you. 

*This is an exciting time in the worlds of sustainable agriculture and climate change mitigation, when these two fields have the opportunity to collaborate and reinforce one another. This partnership is in its early stages, and terminology is constantly evolving. Regenerative agriculture is a new term that is still being defined and debated. Green America is proud to be a part of this discussion and stands behind agriculture that builds healthy farmlands, supports farmers and farmworkers, protects local environments, benefits consumers, and contributes to the fight against climate change—regardless of the term used to describe it. The organization recognizes that implementation of these agriculture methods will always be site specific and depend on soil characters, crops grown, and local climates. Green America's long-term goal is agriculture production that is regenerative and meets the USDA organic standard, the best way to achieve this is through the Regenerative Organic Certification. Green America supports all farms reducing chemical inputs and enhancing soil preservation techniques to move closer to those twin goals.   

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Christmas trees in the United States are a big deal. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, 25-30 million are sold every year. Many environmentalists cringe at this thought, but there are lots of options for making this once-a-year practice more sustainable.

Rent a Tree!

Yes, you read that right. Find a local business that grows live potted trees, delivers them to your doorstep, and then picks them up after Christmas. These trees are less of a fire hazard, help your indoor air quality, and drop less of those annoying pine needles everywhere.

Feeling attached to your tree? Don’t worry. Hug away. And, you can rent the same one year after year.

Start a Personal Forest?

Okay, so you’re ready to commit? Then this option might be right for you: you can purchase a live tree with root ball intact. After Christmas, remove the decorations and give the tree a new life outside in your yard or in a nearby forest. You might also consider a non-traditional option, like a fruit tree or other plant that might better compliment your space.

Here’s some guidance around tree planting.

No, I Like the Tradition of a Cut Tree.

That’s okay! As these trees grow on the farm, they release oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide. You can opt to cut one yourself on National Forest land. The US Forest Service guidelines help ensure that you remove trees in a responsible manner that may even benefit the forest.

Or, visit your local tree farm! Christmas tree farms provide around 100,000 jobs, which is something you can feel good about. Choose organic where you can, so you’re not exposing the environment or your home to toxic chemicals.

After Christmas, make sure to recycle your cut tree at one of 4,000 recycling centers across the country, where it can be turned into mulch or otherwise used in conservation and restoration efforts. Many towns have local pick up service as well.

The Great Christmas Tree Debate: Fake or Real, which is Best?

You might notice that we didn’t include artificial trees in our list of sustainable options.

There are many reasons for this. Artificial trees are made from petroleum-based products and many contain chemicals that are harmful during production, in your home, and after they’re discarded. 85 percent of these trees are imported from China, so their carbon footprint is quite large. And, while many point to the long-life of these trees, consumers only keep them for an average of 6 years before they are sent to spend eternity in a landfill, where they have many negative impacts. If you’re interested in an artificial tree, see if you can rescue a used one!

Why do we support real Christmas trees as a more environmental option? Well, their climate impact is one major reason. Like all plants, Christmas trees grow by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air; this carbon makes up around half of the tree’s dry weight. So, these trees spend their average lifespan of 7 years providing this service, and they are ultimately biodegradable. When you buy a real Christmas tree from a farm, it’s a crop grown specifically for this purpose, oftentimes on soil that can’t support other agriculture. And, while it’s growing, it may be preserving green space and habitats.

Research shows that the amount of carbon dioxide released from an artificial tree’s life cycle is around 18 pounds per year (based on its average 6 years of use), whereas a real tree releases around 7 pounds (if the tree is incinerated after use).

Note that when a tree is burned or otherwise allowed to decompose, the tree’s carbon is released back into the air—a major reason why we advocate for real trees that live past the holiday season.

Bonus, there IS a Regenerative Option!

Check out this Christmas tree farm that uses regenerative methods. These farmers are coppicing trees to produce a new Christmas tree every decade on rootstocks that have been around since the 1950s! Less disturbance of the soils means more carbon sequestered or drawn out of the atmosphere, so you can feel great about the climate benefits of this option. This is our #1 recommendation for the greenest possible Christmas trees, but only those near the Massachusetts farm may really be able to benefit.

Agriculture and crop production rely on photosynthesis to combine sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide for plant growth. This carbon dioxide is pulled from the air—a process known as sequestration—and used to build plant matter, roots, and soil.  

Regenerative agriculture* focuses on keeping this carbon out of the air, where it acts as a greenhouse-warming gas, and using it as a fertilizer in the soil. It also aims to keep carbon that originated from the soil in place. The practices that help keep carbon underground include: zero to low tillage, mulching, cover cropping, crop rotation, composting, planting perennials and diverse crops, and managed grazing.  

These methods limit or reduce the disturbance of fields and pastures, so soil carbon isn’t exposed to the air and oxidized into carbon dioxide. The methods also focus on keeping the delicate soil communities healthy and protected by covering the soil, feeding it rich organic matter at many depths, and avoiding the use of harmful chemicals like pesticides and herbicides.  

Download the PDF of the infographic here. Want more details? View the infographic sources here. 

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