On the top 10 list of climate solutions in Project Drawdown, a project that studies the most effective ways to tackle global warming, some are obvious, like wind turbines and solar farms. A new competition highlights four solutions that are more unexpected: educating girls, women’s rights, reducing food waste, and eating less meat.
Four organizations won:
- KadAfrica trains and empowers young women in farming communities in Uganda.
- VoteRunLead has trained more than 33,000 women in the U.S. to run for office.
- The Green Monday Foundation, based in Hong Kong, won for shifting 1.6 million Hong Kong residents to eat a plant-based diet.
- Waste and Resources Action Programme, or WRAP, created a campaign to reduce food waste in the U.K. by 21%.
In part, the foundation wanted to highlight how much climate action is possible now–without waiting for breakthroughs in technology or relying on governments to adopt better policy. And some of the most pivotal actions can be done on an individual scale, like reducing food waste and eating less meat.
“I think one of the challenges in the climate space is that people feel that there’s nothing they can do individually–sure, I can do some recycling and don’t have to buy a Hummer, but what difference will my contributions make?” says Ipp. “And there’s a sense of despair. Part of that is driven by the discourse in the climate space–people have been talking about the climate issue in terms of the apocalyptic end of the world.”
That apocalyptic stance, he says, isn’t conducive to action, especially if people who might otherwise care are convinced that the world is ending no matter what they do. The prize aims to highlight what’s working, and what needs to scale up. “I think what we need is a more positive narrative that there are in fact things that all of us can do, and guess what, they’re really impactful,” says Ipp.