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What are the solutions to climate change?

Climate change is already an urgent threat to millions of lives – but there are solutions. From changing how we get our energy to limiting deforestation, here are some of the key solutions to climate change.

Climate change is happening now, and it’s the most serious threat to life on our planet. Luckily, there are plenty of solutions to climate change and they are well-understood.

In 2015, world leaders signed a major treaty called the Paris agreement  to put these solutions into practice.

Core to all climate change solutions is reducing greenhouse gas emissions , which must get to zero as soon as possible.

Because both forests and oceans play vitally important roles in regulating our climate, increasing the natural ability of forests and oceans to absorb carbon dioxide can also help stop global warming.

The main ways to stop climate change are to pressure government and business to:

• Keep fossil fuels in the ground . Fossil fuels include coal, oil and gas – and the more that are extracted and burned, the worse climate change will get. All countries need to move their economies away from fossil fuels as soon as possible.
• Invest in renewable energy . Changing our main energy sources to clean and renewable energy is the best way to stop using fossil fuels. These include technologies like solar, wind, wave, tidal and geothermal power.
• Switch to sustainable transport . Petrol and diesel vehicles, planes and ships use fossil fuels. Reducing car use, switching to electric vehicles and minimising plane travel will not only help stop climate change, it will reduce air pollution too.
• Help us keep our homes cosy . Homes shouldn’t be draughty and cold – it’s a waste of money, and miserable in the winter. The government can help households heat our homes in a green way – such as by insulating walls and roofs and switching away from oil or gas boilers to heat pumps .
• Improve farming and encourage vegan diets . One of the best ways for individuals to help stop climate change is by reducing their meat and dairy consumption, or by going fully vegan. Businesses and food retailers can improve farming practices and provide more plant-based products to help people make the shift.
• Restore nature to absorb more carbon . The natural world is very good at cleaning up our emissions, but we need to look after it. Planting trees in the right places or giving land back to nature through ‘rewilding’ schemes is a good place to start. This is because photosynthesising plants draw down carbon dioxide as they grow, locking it away in soils.
• Protect forests like the Amazon . Forests are crucial in the fight against climate change, and protecting them is an important climate solution. Cutting down forests on an industrial scale destroys giant trees which could be sucking up huge amounts of carbon. Yet companies destroy forests to make way for animal farming, soya or palm oil plantations. Governments can stop them by making better laws.
• Protect the oceans . Oceans also absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which helps to keep our climate stable. But many are overfished , used for oil and gas drilling or threatened by deep sea mining. Protecting oceans and the life in them is ultimately a way to protect ourselves from climate change.
• Reduce how much people consume . Our transport, fashion, food and other lifestyle choices all have different impacts on the climate. This is often by design – fashion and technology companies, for example, will release far more products than are realistically needed. But while reducing consumption of these products might be hard, it’s most certainly worth it. Reducing overall consumption in more wealthy countries can help put less strain on the planet.
• Reduce plastic . Plastic is made from oil, and the process of extracting, refining and turning oil into plastic (or even polyester, for clothing) is surprisingly carbon-intense . It doesn’t break down quickly in nature so a lot of plastic is burned, which contributes to emissions. Demand for plastic is rising so quickly that creating and disposing of plastics will account for 17% of the global carbon budget by 2050 (this is the emissions count we need to stay within according to the Paris agreement ).

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, and to feel that climate change is too big to solve. But we already have the answers, now it’s a question of making them happen. To work, all of these solutions need strong international cooperation between governments and businesses, including the most polluting sectors.

Individuals can also play a part by making better choices about where they get their energy, how they travel, and what food they eat. But the best way for anyone to help stop climate change is to take collective action. This means pressuring governments and corporations to change their policies and business practices.

Governments want to be re-elected. And businesses can’t survive without customers. Demanding action from them is a powerful way to make change happen.

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The fossil fuel industry is blocking climate change action

Major oil and gas companies including BP, Exxon and Shell have spent hundreds of millions of pounds trying to delay or stop government policies that would have helped tackle the climate crisis.

Despite the effects of climate change becoming more and more obvious, big polluting corporations – the ones responsible for the majority of carbon emissions – continue to carry on drilling for and burning fossil fuels.

Industries including banks, car and energy companies also make profits from fossil fuels. These industries are knowingly putting money over the future of our planet and the safety of its people.

What are world leaders doing to stop climate change?

With such a huge crisis facing the entire planet, the international response should be swift and decisive. Yet progress by world governments has been achingly slow. Many commitments to reduce carbon emissions have been set, but few are binding and targets are often missed.

In Paris in 2015, world leaders from 197 countries pledged to put people first and reduce their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions. The Paris agreement has the aim of limiting global warming to well below 2ºC and ideally to 1.5°C.

If governments act swiftly on the promises they made in the Paris climate agreement, and implement the solutions now, there’s still hope of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change .

World leaders and climate negotiators meet at annual COPs – which stands for Conference of the Parties (the countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC).

At COPs and other climate talks, nations take stock of their ability to meet their commitments to reduce emissions.

Recently, talks have focused on climate finance – money to help poorer countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions. Rich countries have pledged $100 billion in annual funding to help developing countries reduce emissions and manage the impacts of climate change. This is yet to materialise, and much more money is needed.

As the impacts of climate change are increasing, important talks have also started on “loss and damage” funding. This is money needed by worst-impacted countries to deal with extreme weather and other climate change impacts.

Global climate change activism

Around the world, millions of us are taking steps to defend our climate. People of all ages and from all walks of life are desperately demanding solutions to the climate emergency.

Over the years, Greenpeace has challenged oil companies chasing new fossil fuels to extract and burn. We’ve also called out the governments for their failure to act fast enough on the climate emergency. Greenpeace activists are ordinary people taking extraordinary action, to push the solutions to climate change.

Indigenous Peoples are most severely affected by both the causes and effects of climate change . They are often on the front lines, facing down deforestation or kicking out fossil fuel industries polluting their water supplies.

Communities in the Pacific Islands are facing sea level rises and more extreme weather. But they are using their strength and resilience to demand world leaders take quicker climate action.

For many of these communities, the fight against climate change is a fight for life itself.

Even in the UK, climate change is impacting people more severely. As a country with the wealth and power to really tackle climate change, it’s never been more important to demand action.

Keep exploring

What can I do to stop climate change?

Individuals can make changes to their lives to reduce their personal carbon footprint. But it’s more important to persuade decision-makers in governments and businesses to drive emissions reductions on a much larger scale. This is the best way to stop climate change getting worse.

What is the UK doing about climate change?

All countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. So how’s the UK doing?

Renewable energy: a beginner's guide

Clean renewable energy is a vital tool for tackling climate change. Discover how it works and understand the advantages of wind, solar and water power.

Environmental justice, explained

The environmental crisis doesn't affect everyone equally. Often the worst impacts fall on those who are already most exploited by people in power. The fight for environmental justice is about addressing this unfairness, and making sure green solutions don't add to the problem.

Go Digital!

10 Solutions for Climate Change

Ten possibilities for staving off catastrophic climate change

• By David Biello  on  November 26, 2007

The enormity of global warming can be daunting and dispiriting. What can one person, or even one nation, do on their own to slow and reverse climate change ? But just as ecologist Stephen Pacala and physicist Robert Socolow, both at Princeton University, came up with 15 so-called " wedges " for nations to utilize toward this goal—each of which is challenging but feasible and, in some combination, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions to safer levels —there are personal lifestyle changes that you can make too that, in some combination, can help reduce your carbon impact. Not all are right for everybody. Some you may already be doing or absolutely abhor. But implementing just a few of them could make a difference.

Forego Fossil Fuels —The first challenge is eliminating the burning of coal , oil and, eventually, natural gas. This is perhaps the most daunting challenge as denizens of richer nations literally eat, wear, work, play and even sleep on the products made from such fossilized sunshine. And citizens of developing nations want and arguably deserve the same comforts, which are largely thanks to the energy stored in such fuels.

Oil is the lubricant of the global economy, hidden inside such ubiquitous items as plastic and corn, and fundamental to the transportation of both consumers and goods. Coal is the substrate, supplying roughly half of the electricity used in the U.S. and nearly that much worldwide—a percentage that is likely to grow, according to the International Energy Agency. There are no perfect solutions for reducing dependence on fossil fuels (for example, carbon neutral biofuels can drive up the price of food and lead to forest destruction, and while nuclear power does not emit greenhouse gases, it does produce radioactive waste), but every bit counts.

So try to employ alternatives when possible—plant-derived plastics, biodiesel, wind power—and to invest in the change, be it by divesting from oil stocks or investing in companies practicing carbon capture and storage.

Infrastructure Upgrade —Buildings worldwide contribute around one third of all greenhouse gas emissions (43 percent in the U.S. alone), even though investing in thicker insulation and other cost-effective, temperature-regulating steps can save money in the long run. Electric grids are at capacity or overloaded, but power demands continue to rise. And bad roads can lower the fuel economy of even the most efficient vehicle. Investing in new infrastructure, or radically upgrading existing highways and transmission lines, would help cut greenhouse gas emissions and drive economic growth in developing countries.

Of course, it takes a lot of cement, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, to construct new buildings and roads. The U.S. alone contributed 50.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2005 from cement production, which requires heating limestone and other ingredients to 1,450 degrees Celsius (2,642 degrees Fahrenheit). Mining copper and other elements needed for electrical wiring and transmission also causes globe-warming pollution.

But energy-efficient buildings and improved cement-making processes (such as using alternative fuels to fire up the kiln) could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the developed world and prevent them in the developing world.

Move Closer to Work —Transportation is the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. (burning a single gallon of gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO 2 ). But it doesn't have to be that way.

One way to dramatically curtail transportation fuel needs is to move closer to work, use mass transit, or switch to walking, cycling or some other mode of transport that does not require anything other than human energy. There is also the option of working from home and telecommuting several days a week.

Cutting down on long-distance travel would also help, most notably airplane flights, which are one of the fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions and a source that arguably releases such emissions in the worst possible spot (higher in the atmosphere). Flights are also one of the few sources of globe-warming pollution for which there isn't already a viable alternative: jets rely on kerosene, because it packs the most energy per pound, allowing them to travel far and fast, yet it takes roughly 10 gallons of oil to make one gallon of JetA fuel. Restricting flying to only critical, long-distance trips—in many parts of the world, trains can replace planes for short- to medium-distance trips—would help curb airplane emissions.

Consume Less —The easiest way to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions is simply to buy less stuff. Whether by forgoing an automobile or employing a reusable grocery sack, cutting back on consumption results in fewer fossil fuels being burned to extract, produce and ship products around the globe.

Think green when making purchases. For instance, if you are in the market for a new car, buy one that will last the longest and have the least impact on the environment. Thus, a used vehicle with a hybrid engine offers superior fuel efficiency over the long haul while saving the environmental impact of new car manufacture.

Paradoxically, when purchasing essentials, such as groceries, buying in bulk can reduce the amount of packaging—plastic wrapping, cardboard boxes and other unnecessary materials. Sometimes buying more means consuming less.

Be Efficient —A potentially simpler and even bigger impact can be made by doing more with less. Citizens of many developed countries are profligate wasters of energy, whether by speeding in a gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle or leaving the lights on when not in a room.

Good driving—and good car maintenance, such as making sure tires are properly inflated—can limit the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from a vehicle and, perhaps more importantly, lower the frequency of payment at the pump.

Similarly, employing more efficient refrigerators, air conditioners and other appliances, such as those rated highly under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program, can cut electric bills while something as simple as weatherproofing the windows of a home can reduce heating and cooling bills. Such efforts can also be usefully employed at work, whether that means installing more efficient turbines at the power plant or turning the lights off when you leave the office .

Eat Smart, Go Vegetarian? —Corn grown in the U.S. requires barrels of oil for the fertilizer to grow it and the diesel fuel to harvest and transport it. Some grocery stores stock organic produce that do not require such fertilizers, but it is often shipped from halfway across the globe. And meat, whether beef, chicken or pork, requires pounds of feed to produce a pound of protein.

Choosing food items that balance nutrition, taste and ecological impact is no easy task. Foodstuffs often bear some nutritional information, but there is little to reveal how far a head of lettuce, for example, has traveled.

University of Chicago researchers estimate that each meat-eating American produces 1.5 tons more greenhouse gases through their food choice than do their vegetarian peers. It would also take far less land to grow the crops necessary to feed humans than livestock, allowing more room for planting trees.

Stop Cutting Down Trees —Every year, 33 million acres of forests are cut down . Timber harvesting in the tropics alone contributes 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. That represents 20 percent of human-made greenhouse gas emissions and a source that could be avoided relatively easily.

Improved agricultural practices along with paper recycling and forest management—balancing the amount of wood taken out with the amount of new trees growing—could quickly eliminate this significant chunk of emissions.

And when purchasing wood products, such as furniture or flooring, buy used goods or, failing that, wood certified to have been sustainably harvested. The Amazon and other forests are not just the lungs of the earth, they may also be humanity's best short-term hope for limiting climate change.

Unplug —Believe it or not, U.S. citizens spend more money on electricity to power devices when off than when on. Televisions, stereo equipment, computers, battery chargers and a host of other gadgets and appliances consume more energy when seemingly switched off, so unplug them instead.

Purchasing energy-efficient gadgets can also save both energy and money—and thus prevent more greenhouse gas emissions. To take but one example, efficient battery chargers could save more than one billion kilowatt-hours of electricity—$100 million at today's electricity prices—and thus prevent the release of more than one million metric tons of greenhouse gases.

Swapping old incandescent lightbulbs for more efficient replacements, such as compact fluorescents (warning: these lightbulbs contain mercury and must be properly disposed of at the end of their long life), would save billions of kilowatt-hours. In fact, according to the EPA, replacing just one incandescent lightbulb in every American home would save enough energy to provide electricity to three million American homes.

One Child —There are at least 6.6 billion people living today, a number that is predicted by the United Nations to grow to at least nine billion by mid-century. The U.N. Environmental Program estimates that it requires 54 acres to sustain an average human being today—food, clothing and other resources extracted from the planet. Continuing such population growth seems unsustainable.

Falling birth rates in some developed and developing countries (a significant portion of which are due to government-imposed limits on the number of children a couple can have) have begun to reduce or reverse the population explosion. It remains unclear how many people the planet can comfortably sustain, but it is clear that per capita energy consumption must go down if climate change is to be controlled.

Ultimately, a one child per couple rule is not sustainable either and there is no perfect number for human population. But it is clear that more humans means more greenhouse gas emissions.

Future Fuels —Replacing fossil fuels may prove the great challenge of the 21st century. Many contenders exist, ranging from ethanol derived from crops to hydrogen electrolyzed out of water, but all of them have some drawbacks, too, and none are immediately available at the scale needed.

Biofuels can have a host of negative impacts, from driving up food prices to sucking up more energy than they produce. Hydrogen must be created, requiring either reforming natural gas or electricity to crack water molecules. Biodiesel hybrid electric vehicles (that can plug into the grid overnight) may offer the best transportation solution in the short term, given the energy density of diesel and the carbon neutral ramifications of fuel from plants as well as the emissions of electric engines. A recent study found that the present amount of electricity generation in the U.S. could provide enough energy for the country's entire fleet of automobiles to switch to plug-in hybrids , reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

But plug-in hybrids would still rely on electricity, now predominantly generated by burning dirty coal. Massive investment in low-emission energy generation, whether solar-thermal power or nuclear fission , would be required to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And even more speculative energy sources—hyperefficient photovoltaic cells, solar energy stations in orbit or even fusion—may ultimately be required.

The solutions above offer the outline of a plan to personally avoid contributing to global warming. But should such individual and national efforts fail, there is another, potentially desperate solution:

Experiment Earth —Climate change represents humanity's first planetwide experiment. But, if all else fails, it may not be the last. So-called geoengineering , radical interventions to either block sunlight or reduce greenhouse gases, is a potential last resort for addressing the challenge of climate change.

Among the ideas: releasing sulfate particles in the air to mimic the cooling effects of a massive volcanic eruption; placing millions of small mirrors or lenses in space to deflect sunlight; covering portions of the planet with reflective films to bounce sunlight back into space; fertilizing the oceans with iron or other nutrients to enable plankton to absorb more carbon; and increasing cloud cover or the reflectivity of clouds that already form.

All may have unintended consequences, making the solution worse than the original problem. But it is clear that at least some form of geoengineering will likely be required: capturing carbon dioxide before it is released and storing it in some fashion, either deep beneath the earth, at the bottom of the ocean or in carbonate minerals. Such carbon capture and storage is critical to any serious effort to combat climate change.

Additional reporting by Larry Greenemeier and Nikhil Swaminathan .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

David Biello is a contributing editor at Scientific American .  Follow David Biello on Twitter

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Ten solutions to climate change that will actually make a difference

Jun 20, 2022

At this point we need solutions bigger than any one person. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.

There are a lot of differing opinions on whether it's too late to climate change — and, if it's not the best way of going about it. Some say recycling is useless and that individual action means nothing against the larger policy reforms that need to happen. This is, in part, true — although you should absolutely still be recycling. But it doesn’t tell the whole story, and it doesn’t help those who are currently on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Here, we break down 10 solutions to climate change that will actually make a difference — and how you can help make them all a reality.

Stand with the people most affected by climate change

1. shift to renewable energy sources in all key sectors.

The United Nations identified a six-sector solution to climate change, focusing on actions that can be taken by the energy, industry, agriculture, transportation, nature-based solutions, and urban planning. If all of these actions are completed, the UN Environment Programme estimates we could reduce global carbon emissions by 29 to 32 gigatonnes, thereby limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5º C.

One key element of this plan is shifting to renewable energy sources, both at home and at work. “We have the necessary technology to make this reduction by shifting to renewable energy and using less energy,” the UNEP writes of our personal energy consumption (generally, fossil fuels power our homes, keeping the lights on, our rooms warm, and Netflix streaming). But the energy usage of the industrial sector also plays a key role: Addressing issues like methane leaks and switching at large scale to passive or renewable energy-based heating and cooling systems could reduce industrial carbon emissions by 7.3 gigatonnes every year.

2. Reduce food loss and waste and shift to more sustainable diets

There are a few different ways that climate change and hunger go hand-in-hand. Whether it’s kale or Kobe beef, producing food accounts for some measure of greenhouse gasses. In 2021, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated we consumed more meat than ever before . By 2050 this will, by some estimates, increase greenhouse gas emissions from food production by 60%. Likewise, many farmers use nitrous-based fertilizers to grow more crops, more quickly to meet demand.

It’s important to reduce food waste at every step of the food system . For us as consumers, we can commit to eating what we buy and composting what we don’t get to in time. We can also switch our focus to plant-based and other sustainable diets, supporting farms that use organic fertilizers and making beef and other meat products the exception rather than the rule at the dinner table.

3. Halt deforestation and commit to rebuilding damaged ecosystems

The rapid deforestation of the Earth, especially over the last 60 years, has contributed to climate change, creating “heat islands” out of land that would normally be protected by trees and other flora from overheating. Simply put, this has to stop. There are actions each of us can take as individuals to help halt this—going paperless and buying recycled paper products, planting trees or supporting organizations that do this (like Concern ), and recycling.

But change has to happen at a larger scale here. Illegal logging happens both in the United States and abroad. Last year, world leaders committed to halting this and other harmful practices by 2030 as part of COP26. You can help by holding your own elected leaders to account.

4. Embrace electric vehicles, public transport, and other non-motorized options for getting around

The carbon savings on junking your current car in favor of an electric model are basically nullified if you aren’t seriously in the market for a new vehicle. However, mass adoption of electric vehicles and public transport — along with walking, biking, skating, and scooting — is key to cutting the greenhouse gas emissions from fuel-based motor vehicles.

This is another issue you can raise with elected officials. Earlier this year, for example, you may remember hearing that President Biden had been encouraging the US Postal System to adopt electric vans as part of its new fleet. This didn’t come to pass , but it’s changes like these — changes beyond any one person’s transportation method — that need to happen. You can call on your representatives to support these switchovers for delivery vehicles, cab and taxi fleets, ambulances, and other auto-centric services. Or, if your city or town lacks decent public transportation or enough bike lanes or sidewalks to make those alternatives to driving, lobby for those.

5. Subsidize low-carbon alternatives for urban planning

In tandem with low-carbon alternatives for public transportation, governments need to commit to similar measures with our growing cities. New buildings mean a new opportunity to reward green design methods that help to decrease the strain on urban resources, whether they’re apartments or entertainment venues. (Fun fact: The Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center in Athens runs almost entirely off of solar panels during the bright and sunny summer months. ) In cities like New York, we’ve seen the toll that excessive power use can take through rolling blackouts and brown-outs, especially in the summer months. Changes to public infrastructure that reduce our reliance on the power grid will help to keep the system from becoming untenably overloaded.

6. Strengthen resilience and climate adaptation methods in MAPA communities

So far, we’ve looked at solutions to climate change that can take place within our own homes and communities. However, these only go so far to mitigate the damage that the climate crisis has already inflicted on a large portion of the world. The most affected people and areas (MAPAs) are largely in the Global South. Many are located in low-income countries without the resources or infrastructure to respond and adapt to climate disasters, even as they become more frequent and destructive.

Countries like the United States and organizations responding to the climate crisis must support MAPA communities, particularly the most vulnerable, in developing and carrying out strategies specific to context and designed to bolster resilience where it’s needed most. Often these communities know what needs to be done to mitigate the effects of climate change, and they simply need to be supported with access to additional research and meteorological data, new technologies, and funding.

What we talk about when we talk about resilience

The word “resilience” has taken on new meanings and contexts in recent years, but at Concern it still has a specific definition relating to our emergency and climate response. Here’s what we mean when we use it.

7. Address poverty and other inequalities that increase vulnerability

The tem MAPA can also apply to individuals within a community. Women, disabled people, children, the elderly, people living in poverty, indigenous peoples, and LGBTQIA+ people are among those who are most likely to be hit harder by climate change because of preexisting societal marginalization. This is why it’s critical that they also have a seat at the decision-making table when it comes to solutions to climate change within their own communities. Ending poverty and the other systemic inequalities that give some people greater access to resources than others will help to offset some of the greatest threats posed by the climate crisis.

8. Invest in disaster risk reduction (DRR)

Disaster Risk Reduction (otherwise known as DRR) protects the lives and livelihoods of communities and individuals who are most vulnerable to disasters or emergencies. Whether the crisis is caused by nature or humans (or a combination of both), DRR limits its negative impact on those who stand to lose the most.

We can’t undo much of climate change’s impact so far, but we can help the communities who are hit hardest by these impacts to prepare for and respond to these emergencies once they strike.

9. Commit to fair financing and climate justice

Of course, DRR strategies and other resilience, adaptation, and mitigation practices cost money. Money that the countries most affected by climate change often lack. As part of a global commitment to climate justice , countries with the highest carbon footprints should be making restitution to those countries with lower footprints, countries that tend to be more vulnerable to global warming.

Countries like the United States must increase investments in disaster prevention and DRR strategies, such as early warning and response systems, forecast-based financing mechanisms, and adapted infrastructure. What’s more, these funds need to be made rapidly dispersible and flexible so that when emergency strikes, they can be accessed more quickly. Additional investment to prevent conflicts over the use of natural resources will also help countries facing both fragile political systems and a high risk for climate-related disasters.

Project Profile

Responding to Pakistan's Internally Displaced (RAPID)

RAPID is a funding program that allows Concern to quickly and efficiently deliver aid to people displaced by conflict or natural disaster.

10. Guarantee these changes in the long-term via policy reform

Few of the solutions listed above are not sustainable without policy reform. You can help by encouraging your elected officials to consider the above points, and to support bills that incorporate one or more of these solutions to climate change, many of which are currently being written and shared at the local and national levels.

Smart climate policy will prioritize people over corporations, consider the framework of climate justice — including land and water rights of indigenous peoples and rural communities, address the intersectional effects of climate change on hunger, poverty, and gender equality, and enforce regulatory frameworks and standards that commit people and institutions to honoring these new standards. Bold and aggressive action must be taken if we’re to reach the goal of not exceeding 1.5º C and mitigating the current effects of climate change by 2030. But it’s not a lost cause yet. It’s on all of us to now support those actions that are needed most.

Support Concern's climate response

Solutions to Climate Change in Action

Ten countries with water stress and scarcity — and how we're helping

Climate Smart Agriculture: Back to the basics to fight climate change and hunger

Ten of the countries most affected by climate change

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What Are the Solutions to Climate Change?

Some solutions are big and will require billions in investment. Some are small and free. All are achievable.

Bundei Hidreka (left), a member of the Orissa Tribal Women's Barefoot Solar Engineers Association, holds up a solar lantern in Tinginaput, India.

Abbie Trayler-Smith/DFID, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Thinking about climate change can be overwhelming. We’ve been aware of its causes for decades now, and all around us, we bear witness to its devastating effects on our communities and ecosystems.

But the good news is that we now know exactly what it will take to win the fight against climate change, and we’re making measurable, meaningful progress. Game-changing developments in clean energy, electric vehicle technology, and energy efficiency are emerging every single day. And countries—including Canada , China , India , and the United States —are coordinating and cooperating at levels never seen before in order to tackle the most pressing issue of our time.

The bottom line: If the causes and effects of our climate crisis are clearer than ever, so are the solutions.

Ending Our Reliance on Fossil Fuels

Greater energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable transportation, sustainable buildings, better forestry management and sustainable agriculture, conservation-based solutions, industrial solutions, technological solutions, our choices.

The single-most important thing that we can do to combat climate change is to drastically reduce our consumption of fossil fuels . The burning of coal, oil, and natural gas in our buildings, industrial processes, and transportation is responsible for the vast majority of emissions that are warming the planet —more than 75 percent . In addition to altering the climate , dirty energy also comes with unacceptable ecological and human health impacts.

We must replace coal, oil, and gas with renewable and efficient energy sources. Thankfully, with each passing year, clean energy is making gains as technology improves and production costs go down. But in order to meet the goal of reducing global carbon emissions by at least 45 percent below 2010 levels before 2030—which scientists tell us we must do if we’re to avoid the worst, deadliest impacts of climate change—we must act faster.

There are promising signs. Wind and solar continue to account for ever-larger shares of electricity generation. In 2021, wind and solar generated a record 10 percent of electricity worldwide. And modeling by NRDC has found that wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear could account for as much as 80 percent of U.S. electricity by the end of this decade . (We can also fully realize our clean energy potential if we invest in repairing our aging grid infrastructure and installing new transmission lines.) While this transformation is taking place, automakers—as well as governments—are preparing for a future when the majority of vehicles on the road will produce zero emissions.

Technicians from Solaris Energy carry out the first-annual servicing and cleaning on a heat pump that was installed into a house originally built in the 1930s, in Folkestone, United Kingdom.

Andrew Aitchison / In pictures via Getty Images

Energy efficiency has been referred to as “the first fuel”; after all, the more energy efficient our systems are, the less actual fuel we have to consume, whether rooftop solar energy or gas power. Considered this way, efficiency is our largest energy resource. As the technology harnessing it has advanced over the past 40 years, efficiency has contributed more to the United States’s energy needs than oil, coal, gas, or nuclear power.

What’s more, energy efficiency strategies can be applied across multiple sectors: in our power plants, electrical grids, factories, vehicles, buildings, home appliances, and more. Some of these climate-friendly strategies can be enormously complex, such as helping utility companies adopt performance-based regulation systems , in which they no longer make more money simply by selling more energy but rather by improving the services they provide. Other strategies are extraordinarily simple. For example, weatherproofing buildings, installing cool roofs , replacing boilers and air conditioners with super-efficient heat pumps , and yes, switching out light bulbs from incandescent to LED can all make a big dent in our energy consumption.

Transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy is the key to winning the fight against climate change. Here are the most common sources of renewable energy —and one source of decidedly nonrenewable energy that often gets included (falsely) in the list.

Engineer Steve Marchi and his team perform a final review of rooftop solar panels as part of the solar expansion project at the Wayne National Forest Welcome Center, in Ohio.

Alex Snyder/Wayne National Forest

Solar energy

Solar energy is produced when light from the sun is absorbed by photovoltaic cells and turned directly into electricity. The solar panels that you may have seen on rooftops or at ground level are made up of many of these cells working together. By 2030, at least one in seven U.S. homes is projected to have rooftop solar panels, which emit no greenhouse gases or other pollutants, and which generate electricity year-round ( in hot or cold weather ) so long as the sun is shining. Solar energy currently accounts for just under 3 percent of the electricity generated in the United States—enough to power 18 million homes —but is growing at a faster rate than any other source. By 2035, it could account for as much as 40 percent of electricity generation. From 2020 through 2026, solar will account for more than half of new electricity generation worldwide.

What to do when the sun doesn’t shine, you might ask. Alongside the boom in solar has been a surge in companion battery storage: More than 93 percent of U.S. battery capacity added in 2021 was paired with solar power plants. Battery storage is key to the clean energy revolution—and adapting to a warming world. Not only are batteries important at night when the sun isn’t out, but on hot days when homes draw a lot of electricity to power air conditioners, battery storage can help manage the energy demand and control the threat of power failures.

Turbines on Block Island Wind Farm, located 3.8 miles from Block Island, Rhode Island, in the Atlantic Ocean

Dennis Schroeder/NREL, 40481

Wind energy

Unlike solar panels, which convert the sun’s energy directly into electricity, wind turbines produce electricity more conventionally: wind turns the blades of a turbine, which spin a generator. Currently, wind accounts for just above 9 percent of U.S. electricity generation, but it, like solar, is growing fast as more states and utilities come to recognize its ability to produce 100 percent clean energy at a remarkably low cost. Unsurprisingly, states with plenty of wide-open space—including Kansas , Oklahoma , and Texas —have huge capacity when it comes to wind power, but many analysts believe that some of the greatest potential for wind energy exists just off our coasts. Offshore wind even tends to ramp up in the evenings when home electricity use jumps, and it can produce energy during the rainy and cloudy times when solar energy is less available. Smart planning and protective measures , meanwhile, can ensure we harness the massive promise of offshore wind while limiting or eliminating potential impacts on wildlife.

Svartsengi geothermal power plant in Iceland

Daniel Snaer Ragnarsson/iStock

Geothermal and hydroelectric energy

Along with sunlight and wind, water—under certain conditions—can also be a source of renewable energy. For instance, geothermal energy works by drilling deep underground and pumping extremely hot water up to the earth’s surface, where it is then converted to steam that, once pressurized, spins a generator to create electricity. Hydroelectric energy uses gravity to “pull” water downward through a pipe at high speeds and pressures; the force of this moving water is used to spin a generator’s rotor.

Humans have been harnessing heat energy from below the earth’s surface for eons—just think of the hot springs that provided warmth for the people of ancient Rome. Today’s geothermal plants are considered clean and renewable so long as the water and steam they bring up to the surface is redeposited underground after use. Proper siting of geothermal projects is also important, as recent science has linked some innovative approaches to geothermal to an increased risk of earthquakes .

Hydroelectric plants, when small-scale and carefully managed, represent a safe and renewable source of energy. Larger plants known as mega-dams, however, are highly problematic . Their massive footprint can disrupt the rivers on which people and wildlife depend .

Biomass energy

With very few exceptions, generating electricity through the burning of organic material like wood (sourced largely from pine and hardwood forests in the United States), agricultural products, or animal waste—collectively referred to as biomass —does little to reduce carbon emissions, and in fact, does far more environmental harm than good. Unfortunately, despite numerous studies that have revealed the true toll of this form of bioenergy , some countries continue to buy the biomass industry’s false narrative and subsidize these projects. Attitudes are changing but, given the recent wood pellet boom, there is a lot more work to be done.

A new electric bus on King Street in Honolulu, on June 16, 2021

Marco Garcia for NRDC

Transportation is a top source of greenhouse gases (GHG), so eliminating pollution from the billions of vehicles driving across the planet is essential to achieving net-zero global emissions by 2050, a goal laid out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement .

In 2021, electric vehicles (EVs) accounted for less than 8 percent of vehicle sales globally; by 2035 , however, it’s estimated that they’ll account for more than half of all new sales. Governments around the world aren’t just anticipating an all-electric future; they’re bringing it into fruition by setting goals and binding requirements to phase out the sale of gas-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. That year, 2035, is expected to mark a turning point in the adoption of EVs and in the fight against climate change as countries around the world—as well as numerous automakers—have announced goals to phase out gas-powered cars and light trucks . This shift will also benefit our grid: EVs are like a “ battery on wheels ” and have the potential to supply electricity back to the network when demand peaks, helping to prevent blackouts.

It’s also critical that we consider all of the different ways we get around and build sustainability into each of them. By increasing access to public transportation—such as buses, ride-sharing services, subways, and streetcars—as well as embracing congestion pricing , we can cut down on car trips and keep millions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year. And by encouraging zero-emission forms of transportation, such as walking and biking, we can reduce emissions even more. Boosting these alternate forms of transportation will require more than just talk. They require funding , planning, and the building out of supportive infrastructure by leaders across the local, state, and national levels.

To address the full set of impacts of the transportation sector, we need holistic and community-led solutions around things like land-use policies and the way we move consumer goods. Communities closest to ports , truck corridors, rail yards, and warehouses are exposed to toxic diesel emissions and face a high risk of developing acute and chronic public health diseases. Like all climate solutions, long-lasting change in the transportation sector requires building the power of historically marginalized communities.

An Association for Energy Affordability (AEA) worker installs a new energy-efficient window at an apartment in the South Bronx, New York City.

Natalie Keyssar for NRDC

The energy used in our buildings—to keep the lights on and appliances running; to warm them and cool them; to cook and to heat water—makes them the single-largest source of carbon pollution in most cities across the United States. Making buildings more energy efficient, by upgrading windows and adding insulation to attics and walls, for example, will bring these numbers down. That’s why it’s all the more important that we raise public awareness of cost- and carbon-saving changes that individuals can make in their homes and workplaces, and make it easier for people to purchase and install energy-efficient technology, such as heat pumps (which can both heat and cool spaces) and certified appliances through programs like Energy Star in the United States or EnerGuide in Canada.

Beyond the measures that can be taken by individuals, we need to see a dedication from private businesses and governments to further building decarbonization , which simply means making buildings more efficient and replacing fossil fuel–burning systems and appliances with clean-powered ones. Policy tools can help get us there, including city and state mandates that all newly constructed homes, offices, and other buildings be outfitted with efficient all-electric systems for heating, cooling, and hot water; requirements that municipalities and states meet the latest and most stringent energy conservation standards when adopting or updating their building codes would also be impactful. Indeed, many places around the world are implementing building performance standards , which require existing buildings to reduce their energy use or carbon emissions over time. Most important, if these changes are going to reach the scale needed, we must invest in the affordable housing sector so that efficient and decarbonized homes are accessible to homeowners and renters of all incomes .

Nicolas Mainville joins a canoe trip with youth from the Cree First Nation of Waswanipi on a river in Waswanipi Quebec, Canada, which is part of the boreal forest.

Nicolas Mainville/Greenpeace

Some of our strongest allies in the fight against climate change are the trees, plants, and soil that store massive amounts of carbon at ground level or underground. Without the aid of these carbon sinks , life on earth would be impossible, as atmospheric temperatures would rise to levels more like those found on Venus .

But whenever we clearcut forests for timber or rip out wetlands for development, we release that climate-warming carbon into the air. Similarly, the widespread overuse of nitrogen-based fertilizers (a fossil fuel product) on cropland and generations of industrial-scale livestock farming practices have led to the release of unprecedented amounts of nitrous oxide and methane, powerful greenhouse gases, into our atmosphere.

We can’t plant new trees fast enough to replace the ones we clearcut in carbon-storing forests like the Canadian boreal or the Amazon rainforest —nor can rows of spindly young pines serve the same function as old-growth trees. We need a combination of responsible forestry policies, international pressure, and changes in consumer behavior to put an end to deforestation practices that not only accelerate climate change but also destroy wildlife habitat and threaten the health and culture of Indigenous communities that live sustainably in these verdant spaces. At the same time, we need to treat our managed landscapes with as much care as we treat wild ones. For instance, adopting practices associated with organic and regenerative agriculture —cover crops, pesticide use reduction, rotational grazing, and compost instead of synthetic fertilizers—will help nurture the soil, yield healthier foods, and pay a climate dividend too.

A school of fish swimming through a mangrove forest in the Caribbean Sea, off Belize

Intact ecosystems suck up and store vast amounts of carbon: Coastal ecosystems like wetlands and mangroves accumulate and store carbon in their roots; our forests soak up about a third of annual fossil fuel emissions; and freshwater wetlands hold between 20 and 30 percent of all the carbon found in the world’s soil. It’s clear we’re not going to be able to address climate change if we don’t preserve nature.

This is one reason why, along with preserving biodiversity, climate experts are calling on global leaders to fully protect and restore at least 30 percent of land, inland waters, and oceans by 2030 , a strategy endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. To help us reach that goal, we must limit industrial impacts on our public lands and waters, continue to protect natural landscapes, support the creation of marine protected areas, uphold bedrock environmental laws, and follow the lead of Indigenous Peoples, many of whom have been faithfully and sustainably stewarding lands and waters for millennia .

Emissions rise from the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, a steel mill in the Braddock and North Braddock communities near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Getty Images

Heavy industry—the factories and facilities that produce our goods—is responsible for a quarter of GHG emissions in the United States and 40 percent globally. Most industrial emissions come from making a small set of carbon-intensive products: basic chemicals, iron and steel, cement, aluminum, glass, and paper. (Industrial plants are also often major sources of air and water pollutants that directly affect human health.)

Complicating matters is the fact that many industrial plants will stay in operation for decades, so emissions goals for 2050 are really just one investment cycle away. Given these long horizons for building and retrofitting industrial sites, starting investments and plans now is critical. What would successfully decarbonized industrial processes look like? They should sharply reduce heavy industry’s climate emissions , as well as local pollution. They should be scalable and widely available in the next decade, especially so that less developed nations can adopt these cleaner processes and grow without increasing emissions. And they should bolster manufacturing in a way that creates good jobs.

Technology alone won’t save us from climate change (especially not some of these risky geoengineering proposals ). But at the same time, we won’t be able to solve the climate crisis without researching and developing things like longer-lasting EV batteries , nonpolluting hydrogen-based solutions , and reliable, safe, and equitable methods for capturing and sequestering carbon . Because, while these tools hold promise, we have to make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. For instance, we can take actions to reduce local harms from mining lithium (a critical component of electric vehicle batteries), improve recycling opportunities for solar cells, and not use carbon capture as an excuse to pollute. To accelerate research and development, funding is the critical third leg of the stool: Governments must make investing in clean energy technologies a priority and spur innovation through grants, subsidies, tax incentives, and other rewards.

A protester rings a bell in front of P&G’s headquarters in Cincinnati; the company’s toilet paper brand, Charmin, uses wood pulp from virgin trees in Canada's boreal forest.

Finally, it should go without saying that we, as individuals, are key to solving the climate crisis—not just by continuing to lobby our legislators and speak up in our communities but also by taking climate actions in our daily lives . By switching off fossil fuels in our homes and being more mindful of the climate footprint of the food we eat, our shopping habits, how we get around, our use of plastics and fossil fuels, and what businesses we choose to support (or not to support), we can move the needle.

But it’s when we act collectively that real change happens—and we can do even more than cut down on carbon pollution. Communities banding together have fought back fracking , pipelines , and oil drilling in people’s backyards . These local wins aren’t just good news for our global climate but they also protect the right to clean air and clean water for everyone. After all, climate change may be a global crisis but climate action starts in your own hometown .

We have a responsibility to consider the implications of our choices—and to make sure that these choices are actually helping to reduce the burdens of climate change, not merely shifting them somewhere else. It’s important to remember that the impacts of climate change —which intersect with and intensify so many other environmental, economic, and social issues—fall disproportionately on certain communities, namely low-income communities and communities of color. That’s why our leaders have a responsibility to prioritize the needs of these communities when crafting climate policies. If those on the frontlines aren’t a part of conversations around climate solutions, or do not feel the benefits of things like cleaner air and better job opportunities, then we are not addressing the roots of the climate crisis.

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What can we do to slow or stop global warming?

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to stopping or slowing global warming, and each individual, business, municipal, state, tribal, and federal entity must weigh their options in light of their own unique set of circumstances.  Experts say  it is likely many strategies working together will be needed. Generally speaking, here are some examples of mitigation strategies we can use to slow or stop the human-caused global warming ( learn more ):

• Where possible, we can switch to renewable sources of energy (such as solar and wind energy) to power our homes and buildings, thus emitting far less heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
• Where feasible, we can drive electric vehicles instead of those that burn fossil fuels; or we can use mass transit instead of driving our own cars.
• Where affordable, we can conserve energy by better insulating our homes and buildings, and by replacing old, failing appliances with more energy-efficient models.
• Where practicable, we can counterbalance our annual carbon dioxide emissions by investing in commercial services that draw down an equal amount of carbon out of the atmosphere, such as through planting trees or  carbon capture and storage  techniques.
• Where practical, we can support more local businesses that use and promote sustainable, climate-smart practices such as those listed above.
• We can consider placing an upper limit on the amount of carbon dioxide we will allow ourselves to emit into the atmosphere within a given timeframe.

Note that NOAA doesn’t advocate for or against particular climate policies. Instead, NOAA’s role is to provide data and scientific information about climate, including how it has changed and is likely to change in the future depending on different climate policies or actions society may or may not take. More guidance on courses of action can be found in the National Academy of Sciences' 2010 report, titled  Informing an Effective Response to Climate Change . Also learn more  here,   here,  and  here .

Thanks to low friction between train wheels and tracks, and level train tracks with gradual turns, trains have high energy efficiency. Photo from National Park Service Amtrak Trails and Rails .

Stabilizing global temperature near its current level requires eliminating all emissions of heat-trapping gases or, equivalently, achieving a carbon-neutral society in which people remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as they emit. Achieving this goal will require substantial societal changes in energy technologies and infrastructure that go beyond the collective actions of individuals and households to reduce emissions.

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Lesson of the Day

Explore 7 Climate Change Solutions

In this lesson, students will use a jigsaw activity to learn about some of the most effective strategies and technologies that can help head off the worst effects of global warming.

By Natalie Proulx

Lesson Overview

Earlier this summer, a report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , a body of scientists convened by the United Nations, found that some devastating impacts of global warming were unavoidable. But there is still a short window to stop things from getting even worse.

This report will be central at COP26 , the international climate summit where about 20,000 heads of state, diplomats and activists are meeting in person this week to set new targets for cutting emissions from coal, oil and gas that are heating the planet.

In this lesson, you will learn about seven ways we can slow down climate change and head off some of its most catastrophic consequences while we still have time. Using a jigsaw activity , you’ll become an expert in one of these strategies or technologies and share what you learn with your classmates. Then, you will develop your own climate plan and consider ways you can make a difference based on your new knowledge.

What do you know about the ways the world can slow climate change? Start by making a list of strategies, technologies or policies that could help solve the climate crisis.

Which of your ideas do you think could have the biggest impact on climate change? Circle what you think might be the top three.

Now, test your knowledge by taking this 2017 interactive quiz:

How Much Do You Know About Solving Global Warming?

A new book presents 100 potential solutions. Can you figure out which ones are top ranked?

After you’ve finished, reflect on your own in writing or in discussion with a partner:

What solutions to climate change did you learn about that you didn’t know before?

Were you surprised by any of the answers in the quiz? If so, which ones and why?

What questions do you still have about solving climate change?

Jigsaw Activity

As you learned in the warm-up, there are many possible ways to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Below we’ve rounded up seven of the most effective solutions, many of which you may have been introduced to in the quiz above.

In this jigsaw activity, you’ll become an expert in one of the climate solutions listed below and then present what you learned to your classmates. Teachers may assign a student or small group to each topic, or allow them to choose. Students, read at least one of the linked articles on your topic; you can also use that article as a jumping-off point for more research.

Climate Change Solutions

Renewable energy: Scientists agree that to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, countries must immediately move away from dirty energy sources like coal, oil and gas, and instead turn to renewable energy sources like wind, solar or nuclear power. Read about the potent possibilities of one of these producers, offshore wind farms , and see how they operate .

Refrigerants: It’s not the most exciting solution to climate change, but it is one of the most effective. Read about how making refrigerants, like air-conditioners, more efficient could eliminate a full degree Celsius of warming by 2100.

Transportation: Across the globe, governments are focused on limiting one of the world’s biggest sources of pollution: gasoline-powered cars. Read about the promises and challenges of electric vehicles or about how countries are rethinking their transit systems .

Methane emissions: You hear a lot about the need to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what about its dangerous cousin, methane? Read about ideas to halt methane emissions and why doing so could be powerful in the short-term fight against climate change.

Agriculture: Efforts to limit global warming often target fossil fuels, but cutting greenhouse gases from food production is urgent, too, research says. Read about four fixes to earth’s food supply that could go a long way.

Nature conservation: Scientists agree that reversing biodiversity loss is a crucial way to slow climate change. Read about how protecting and restoring nature can help cool the planet or about how Indigenous communities could lead the way .

Carbon capture: Eliminating emissions alone may not be enough to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, so some companies are investing in technology that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air. Learn more about so-called engineered carbon removal .

Questions to Consider

As you read about your climate solution, respond to the questions below. You can record your answers in this graphic organizer (PDF).

1. What is the solution? How does it work?

2. What problem related to climate change does this strategy address?

3. What effect could it have on global warming?

4. Compared with other ways to mitigate climate change, how effective is this one? Why?

5. What are the limitations of this solution?

6. What are some of the challenges or risks (political, social, economic or technical) of this idea?

7. What further questions do you have about this strategy?

When you’ve finished, you’ll meet in “teaching groups” with at least one expert in each of the other climate solutions. Share what you know about your topic with your classmates and record what you learn from them in your graphic organizer .

Going Further

Option 1: Develop a climate plan.

Scientists say that in order to prevent the average global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold beyond which the dangers of global warming grow immensely, we will need to enact all of the solutions you learned about — and more. However, the reality is that countries won’t be able to right away. They will have to consider which can have the biggest or fastest impact on climate change, which are the most cost-effective and which are the most politically and socially feasible.

Imagine you have been asked to come up with a plan to address climate change. If you were in charge, which of these seven solutions would you prioritize and why? You might start by ranking the solutions you learned about from the most effective or urgent to the least.

Then, write a proposal for your plan that responds to the following questions:

What top three solutions are priorities? That is, which do you think are the most urgent to tackle right away and the most effective at slowing global warming?

Explain your decisions. According to your research — the articles you read and the quiz you took in the beginning of the lesson — why should these solutions take precedence?

How might you incentivize companies and citizens to embrace these changes? For some ideas, you might read more about the climate policies countries around the world have adopted to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Option 2: Take action.

Thinking about climate change solutions on such a big scale can be overwhelming, but there are things you can do in your own life and in your community to make a difference. Choose one of the activities below to take action on, or come up with one of your own:

Share climate solutions via media. Often, the news media focuses more on climate change problems than solutions. Counteract this narrative by creating something for publication related to one or more of the solutions you learned about. For example, you could submit a letter to the editor , write an article for your school newspaper, enter a piece in one of our upcoming student contests or create an infographic to share on social media .

Make changes in your own life. How can you make good climate choices related to one or more of the topics you learned about? For example, you could eat less meat, take public transportation or turn off your air-conditioner. Write a plan, explaining what you will do (or what you are already doing) and how it could help mitigate climate change, according to the research.

Join a movement. This guest essay urges people to focus on systems, not themselves. What groups could you get involved with that are working toward some of the solutions you learned about? Identify at least one group, either local, national or international, and one way you could support it. Or, if you’re old enough to vote, consider a local, state or federal politician you would like to support based on his or her climate policies.

Want more Lessons of the Day? You can find them all here .

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

Solving Climate Change

We caused the problem but also have the ability to make the tough but necessary changes. Find out how.

We caused the problem by increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but we have the ability to keep the amount of warming low enough that it is survivable. Communities and nations around the world are taking action to solve climate change.

How Do We Reduce Greenhouse Gases?

There are two main ways to stop the amount of greenhouse gases from increasing: we can stop adding them to the air, and we can increase the Earth’s ability to pull them out of the air. Doing both will help reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Adapting‌ ‌to‌ ‌Climate‌ ‌Change‌

As climate change and its impacts have increased risks to people and communities, taking steps to adapt have become essential. The ability to adapt can help keep us safe while we also take action to stop climate change.

Can We Limit the Amount of Sunlight to Stop Climate Change?

Blocking some solar radiation from getting to Earth could involve sending gases or particles into the atmosphere. It could also include methods like making clouds or the Earth’s surface brighter so that they reflect sunlight back out to space. Methods like these could help slow climate change, but there could be risks.

Can We Pull Carbon Dioxide Out‌ ‌Of‌ ‌the‌ ‌Atmosphere?‌ ‌

What if we could pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in order to stop climate change? Learn how researchers are developing ways to do this.

Carbon Capture and Storage

How do we catch carbon? The possibility of capturing carbon dioxide greenhouse gas (CO2) has become an increasingly attractive idea, especially as people realize that it is unlikely we will stop using fossil fuels entirely in the next hundred years.

What's Your Carbon Footprint?

How much carbon dioxide do you send into the atmosphere? Anytime you do something that requires fossil fuels - like riding in a car, flying in a plane, buying something, eating something, or even just watching TV - you emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Future Climate: Explore the Possibilities

Use a simple climate model to peek into the future. You suggest the rate that you think humans will release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the future and the model calculates how that would affect temperature.

Solving Climate Change Activities

Solving Climate Change Images

Solving Climate Change Games and Simulations

• Environment

Are there real ways to fight climate change? Yes.

Humans have the solutions to fight a global environmental crisis. Do we have the will?

The evidence that humans are causing climate change, with drastic consequences for life on the planet, is overwhelming .

Experts began raising the alarm about global warming in 1979 , a change now referred to under the broader term climate change , preferred by scientists to describe the complex shifts now affecting our planet’s weather and climate systems. Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas , and a range of other impacts. 

Over 200 countries—193 countries plus the 27 members of the European Union—have signed the Paris Climate Agreement , a treaty created in 2015 to fight climate change on a global scale. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which synthesizes the scientific consensus on the issue, has set a goal of keeping warming under 2°C (3.6°F) and pursuing an even lower warming cap of 1.5 °C (2.7° F).

But no country has created policies that will keep the world below 1.5 °C, according to the Climate Action Tracker . Current emissions have the world on track to warm 2.8°C by the end of this century. 

Addressing climate change will require many solutions —there's no magic bullet. Yet nearly all of these solutions exist today. They range from worldwide changes to where we source our electricity to protecting forests from deforestation. 

The promise of new technology

Better technology will help reduce emissions from activities like manufacturing and driving. 

Scientists are working on ways to sustainably produce hydrogen, most of which is currently derived from natural gas, to feed zero-emission fuel cells for transportation and electricity. 

Renewable energy is growing, and in the U.S., a combination of wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable sources provide 20 percen t of the nation’s electricity. 

New technological developments promise to build better batteries to store that renewable energy, engineer a smarter electric grid, and capture carbon dioxide from power plants and store it underground or turn it into valuable products such as gasoline . Some argue that nuclear power—despite concerns over safety, water use, and toxic waste—should also be part of the solution, because nuclear plants don't contribute any direct air pollution while operating.

Should we turn to geoengineering?

While halting new greenhouse gas emissions is critical, scientists say we need to extract existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, effectively sucking it out of the sky. 

Pulling carbon out of the atmosphere is a type of geoengineering , a science that interferes with the Earth’s natural systems, and it’s a controversial approach to fighting climate change.

Other types of geoengineering involve spraying sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the air or blocking the sun with a giant space mirror. Studies suggest we don’t know enough about the potential dangers of geoengineering to deploy it.

An iceberg melts in the waters off Antarctica. Climate change has accelerated the rate of ice loss across the continent.

Restoring nature to protect the planet 

Planting trees, restoring seagrasses, and boosting the use of agricultural cover crops could help clean up significant amounts of carbon dioxide . 

The Amazon rainforest is an important reservoir of the Earth’s carbon, but a study published in 2021, showed deforestation was transforming this reservoir into a source of pollution. 

Restoring and protecting nature may provide as much as  37 percent of the climate mitigation needed to reach the Paris Agreement’s 203o targets. Protecting these ecosystems can also benefit biodiversity, providing a win-win for nature .

Adapt—or else

Communities around the world are already recognizing that adaptation must also be part of the response to climate change . From flood-prone coastal towns to regions facing increased droughts and fires, a new wave of initiatives focuses on boosting resilience . Those include managing or preventing land erosion, building microgrids and other energy systems built to withstand disruptions, and designing buildings with rising sea levels in mind.

Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law and was a historic investment in fighting and adapting to climate change.

( Read more about how the bill will dramatically reduce emissions. )

Recent books such as Drawdown and Designing Climate Solutions have proposed bold yet simple plans for reversing our current course. The ideas vary, but the message is consistent: We already have many of the tools needed to address climate change. Some of the concepts are broad ones that governments and businesses must implement, but many other ideas involve changes that anyone can make— eating less  meat , for example, or rethinking your modes of transport .

"We have the technology today to rapidly move to a clean energy system," write the authors of Designing Climate Solutions . "And the price of that future, without counting environmental benefits, is about the same as that of a carbon-intensive future."

Sarah Gibbens contributed reporting to this article.

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Climate change: science and solutions

19 May 2021

A net zero climate-resilient future: science, technology and the solutions for change

PDF, 52.6KB

Contributors and peer reviewers

PDF, 81.5KB

Science-led solutions play a critical role in delivering rapid decarbonisation and helping communities to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Drawing on the expertise of over 120 scientists from more than 20 countries ( see the full list of contributors and peer reviewers PDF ), the Royal Society has produced a series of briefings for policymakers on 12 science and technology areas that are key for accelerating progress towards ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions and increased resilience to climate change. 

The briefings are introduced by the President of the Royal Society (PDF) , together with a statement issued by some of the world’s leading scientific academies (PDF) , setting out the need to accelerate action on climate change.

Policy briefings

Ahead of the UN Climate Summit COP26 in Glasgow last year, the Royal Society sought wide-ranging input from the global scientific community to produce the Climate change: science and solutions briefings. These briefings highlight the significant potential that research, development and deployment in 12 critical areas hold for climate action.

Watch Peter Bruce FRS, Physical Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society, introduce the briefings.

Climate science, adaptation and resilience

Even if warming is limited to 1.5°C, livelihoods and infrastructure will be increasingly affected by climate change and extreme weather. The following briefings highlight the key research priorities for advancing our understanding of future climate change and developing mitigation and adaptation measures compatible with the twin goals of achieving net zero and enhancing global climate resilience.

Next generation climate models (PDF)

The carbon cycle (PDF)

Weathering the storm: climate resilience and adaptation (PDF)

Land, food and health

Investing in land-based mitigation options and a sustainable global food system reduces greenhouse gas emissions while offering co-benefits to human health. These briefings explore the relationship between society and the natural world, and how they can together tackle and adapt to climate change. 

Climate change and land (PDF)

Nourishing ten billion sustainably (PDF)

Healthy planet, healthy people (PDF)

Energy transitions

We can reach much of the 50% – or greater – cut that is needed in carbon emissions required by 2030 with existing technologies; but to go beyond and reach net zero by 2050 requires research, development and deployment of novel technologies. The following briefings outline priorities for research, development and deployment of technologies that will be critical to achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

Next generation batteries (PDF)

The role of hydrogen and ammonia in meeting the net zero challenge (PDF)

Carbon dioxide capture and storage (PDF)

Low-carbon heating and cooling (PDF)

Transforming economic systems

Coordination of action between all involved, from governments and businesses to communities and individuals, will be critical to achieve the rapid and transformational change required in economic systems. Computing can play an important role, creating ‘digital twins’ of industries, cities – and ultimately the planet – that support a systems approach and help understand and reduce emissions. Meanwhile, economics research shows how policy levers can be used to secure ‘win-win’ outcomes and minimise emissions at national and global levels. These briefings discuss some of the available solutions to accompany such transformational change in economic systems.

Computing for net zero (PDF)

Policy options and economic perspectives (PDF)

#2050challenge

To help highlight the range of solutions and ideas that scientists are creating and researching, the Royal Society has launched a campaign, the #2050challenge, for people to share stories of their work, research and actions to help countries of the world tackle climate change, biodiversity loss and achieve ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2050. Find out how to get involved .

Find out more

Climate change: evidence and causes

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NPR's Climate Week: A Search For Solutions

Climate solutions are necessary. so we're dedicating a week to highlight them.

Julia Simon

Wind turbines are seen in Big Spring, Texas. Humans are driving global warming; that means humans can find solutions to change our trajectory. Brandon Bell/Getty Images hide caption

Climate change is here. And this week, NPR is doing something new. We're dedicating an entire week to focus on the search for climate solutions, with stories across our network.

Why we're focusing on climate solutions

We've just emerged from a brutal summer. Heat waves across the U.S. and the world. Fires across Canada . In Maui, the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in a century. Hurricanes. Melting polar ice. Ocean heat waves killing coral . When I talk with people about climate change, I often hear hopelessness. Like we've already lost. People just throw up their hands. What do you say to that?

I'm Julia Simon, NPR's climate solutions reporter. I know that things are bad right now. But what if we reframe the conversation? With climate change, it's not like this is a meteor hurtling toward Earth and there's nothing we can do about it.

Climate solutions do exist. These 6 experts detail what they look like

Humans are driving global warming. And that means we humans can find solutions to change our trajectory. We already have many solutions.

Now is not the time to back away from the challenge. Robert Bullard, professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, equates this moment to when the U.S. faced past injustices, like slavery.

"I push back against any individuals or organizations that will say, 'Well, we can't do anything about this challenge.' We can do something about it. But it would mean that we have to make up our minds that this is a challenge that we must address on a societal basis and on a global basis," he says. "We should not and cannot accept climate change as the norm."

How we define climate solutions

Broadly speaking, climate solutions are things that reduce greenhouse gases — like solar and wind energy combined with batteries. Energy efficiency. Land use is key too, like reducing deforestation. Individuals can play a role also — for example, eating less meat.

But we have to remind folks that solutions are not all on individuals. A lot of solutions come down to companies and governments.

For example, last year President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act — the most significant piece of climate policy in U.S. history .

Governments can set the agenda for climate policy. We saw this in Brazil; the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is cracking down on deforestation in the Amazon . Under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's deforestation was surging. So some advocates see voting as a powerful climate solution.

Trees and other plants help keep cities cooler. In New York City, scientists are working to understand how to maximize the benefits of urban green spaces. Here, residents gather in Brooklyn Bridge Park on a hot summer night. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

Adapting to our warming planet is also a climate solution

We will need to rebuild infrastructure for rising sea levels and new rainfall patterns. Adapting to climate change doesn't mean we're giving up — adaptation is a necessary part of reducing the harms of climate change. Also, planting trees in warming cities provides shade and cools us down. And trees store planet-heating carbon dioxide.

There's a word — "co-benefits." Ways that curbing greenhouse gases might make life better too. If we replace coal- and gas-fired power plants with renewables, we reduce greenhouse gases that warm our planet. But we also end up reducing other kinds of air pollution and make cities better for our lungs. Disadvantaged communities bear the brunt of pollution, so reducing fossil fuels would help communities of color.

Seaweed is mucking up beaches. This robot could stop it — and fight climate change

There's an equity component to climate solutions.

Climate solutions should not be repeating inequities and injustices of the past. As we make more batteries and electric vehicles, for example, how do we ensure that mining for the key metals in those technologies is done ethically? How do we avoid mining that pollutes water or grabbing land from Indigenous communities?

And we have to remember that some individuals and companies are more responsible for climate change than others. So how do we hold them accountable? This summer in Montana, 16 young plaintiffs won a climate lawsuit arguing against the state's development of fossil fuels. Last month, California filed suit against several of the world's biggest oil companies. These cases could have major implications across the United States. Accountability can be a climate solution too.

• climate solutions
• climate change

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By the end of the century, 30% to 50% of all species on Earth could go extinct. The planet could face catastrophic water shortages . And hundreds of millions of people will be displaced from their homes .

The reason for all this doom is simple — climate change. The way to avoid this doom is not.

Hundreds of fundamental changes have to be made to human society for global emissions to be reined in enough to avert the calamities of climate change.

Some ways of cutting emissions are so obscure and go after such entrenched habits that it’s hard to see how they can be carried out on a global scale.

Nonetheless, the best minds in the world are trying to figure out what needs to be changed and how these changes can be realized.

That’s essentially the purpose of the Paris climate agreement. All the countries in the world except Syria, Nicaragua, and now the US , have pledged to reduce emissions through this framework and are working towards individual goals.

Read More: 5 Consequences of Trump Dumping the Paris Climate Agreement

The architects of the arrangement are in a continuous process of determining the best tactics for countries to reach their goals.

Drawdown is a nonprofit coalition of scientists, advocates, politicians, and more, dedicated to doing just that.

Recently they determined the 100 best solutions for combating climate change and reducing emissions by assessing the costs of each action and calculating the amount of amount of carbon dioxide that would be averted.

Here are the top 10: (As a helpful guide, a gigaton is more than 6 million blue whales in weight .)

10/ Rooftop Solar — 24.6 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

Advances in technology, drops in manufacturing costs, and economies of scale have made solar panels available to nearly the entire world. The widespread adoption of panels by households can enable communities in low-income countries to “leapfrog” fossil fuels, similar to how many developing countries leapfrogged landline technology because of mobile phones.

Read More: Tesla’s Solar Roofs Are Officially For Sale – And They Look So Good

9/ Silvopasture — 31.19 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

This ancient technique for raising livestock integrates trees into pastures, which dramatically curbs emissions from animals. It also regenerates ecosystems, creates new sources of food and income, and improves the health of wildlife. This method also allows farmers to better cope with the effects of climate change like drought.

8/ Solar Farms — 36.9 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

Solar energy cost $1,900 per watt in 1954. Today, it costs less than 65 cents and the price keeps going down as advances are made in technology. Solar farms have more potential than solar rooftops because they cover large swaths of space and capture more energy from the sun.  

Read More: The World’s Largest Floating Solar Panel Farm Is Now in China

7/ Family Planning — 59.6 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

This isn’t about mandating limits on children. Instead, it’s about providing women with birth control and reproductive health options, which 225 million women in low-income countries say they want. By empowering women with education and health options, birth rates come down and the population strain on the planet falls.  

Read More: How Trump's Global Gag Rule Is Hurting African Women the Most

6/ Educating Girls — 59.6 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

Global Citizen has said it before and we’ll say it again: educating girls is at the root of eradicating poverty. It also happens to be at the root of fighting climate change. When girls receive a full education, they have fewer and healthier kids, contribute more to economic growth, and are better stewards of the environment, among other benefits.  

Read More: Educating Girls Is the Key to Ending Poverty

5/ Tropical Forests — 61.23 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

Tropical forests once covered 12% of the Earth’s land mass. Now they’re present on just 5%. Restoring tropical forests can sequester huge amounts of carbon, safeguard and replenish ecosystems, and provide sustainable incomes and sources of food.

Read More: Deforestation in Malawi Is So Severe the Army Needed to Step in to Stop It

4/ Plant-Rich Diets — 66.11 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

“If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases,” Drawdown writes in their assessment. Shifting away from the Western meat-centric diet to one revolving around plants can drastically reduce emissions, while also promoting health and helping ecosystems flourish.

Read More: 11 Famous Chefs Who Are Trying to Save the World With Food

3/ Reduced Food Waste — 70.53 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

Food waste accounts for 8% of global emissions and happens all along the food supply chain — from cultivation to storage to consumption. Creating better systems for processing and consuming food is a sensible and easy way to make a huge dent in global emissions.

Read More: 13 of the Best Ugly Fruits & Vegetables That Are Still Perfectly Good

2/ Onshore Wind Turbines — 84.6 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

Wind farms are easy to build, use little land, and generate significant amounts of energy at rates that rival fossil fuels. Today, nearly 4% of all electricity is generated by wind farms and this rate will continue to rise as investments continue to break records — 2016 saw the biggest increase of wind power generation in history.

Read More: A Chinese Firm Is Training Coal Workers in Wyoming to Run a Wind Farm

1/ Refrigerant Management — 89.74 Gigatons of CO2 Averted

Air conditioners cool down rooms and cars and fridges cool down food and beverages, but they both heat up the planet more than anything else in the world.

The Montreal Protocol phased out ozone-eating HCFCs and CFCs from these devices, but ushered in the era of HFCs. While this compound doesn’t cause the ozone to disintegrate, it heats the atmosphere at a rate 900 to 1,000 times more than CO2. More than 90% of such emissions happen at the end of a product’s life cycle, according to Drawdown, and better management systems can greatly reduce their impact.

Read More: 170 Countries Agree to Ban HFCs in Landmark Climate Change Agreement

The 2016 Kigali accord goes after HFCs and, alone, shaves 1 degree Fahrenheit off projected temperatures rises.

Defend the Planet

The 10 Best Ways to Combat Climate Change, According to Experts

June 13, 2017

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Climate Change

The 5 greatest challenges to fighting climate change

Kara Baskin

Dec 27, 2019

Climate change: Most of the world agrees it’s a danger, but how do we conquer it? What’s holding us back? Christopher Knittel, professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, laid out five of the biggest challenges in a recent interview.

CO2 is a global pollutant that can’t be locally contained

“The first key feature of climate change that puts it at odds with past environmental issues is that it’s a global pollutant, rather than a local pollutant. [Whether] I release a ton of CO2 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in London, it does the same damage to the globe,” Knittel said. “Contrast that with local pollutants, where if I release a ton of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxide in Cambridge, the majority of the damage stays near Cambridge.”

Thus, CO2 is far harder to manage and regulate.

For now, climate change is still hypothetical

The damage caused by most climate change pollutants will happen in the future. Which means most of us won’t truly be affected by climate change — it’s a hypothetical scenario conveyed in charts and graphs. While we’d like politicians and voters to be moved by altruism, this isn’t always the case. In general, policymakers have little incentive to act.

“People [who stand to be] most harmed by climate change aren’t even born yet. Going back to the policymaker’s perspective, she has much less of an incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because those reductions are going to benefit voters in the future and not her current voters,” Knittel said.

There’s no direct link to a smoking gun

Despite the global threat from climate-altering pollutants, it’s hard for scientists to link them to a specific environmental disaster, Knittel said. Without a definitive culprit, it’s easier for skeptics to ignore or explain away climate change effects.

Developing countries contribute to a large share of pollution

Simply put, this isn’t their top priority.

“We’re asking very poor countries that are worried about where their next meal is coming from, or whether they can send their kids to school, to incur costs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to benefit the world. And that’s a tough ask for a policymaker inside of a developing country,” he said.

Modern living is part of the problem

It’s a tough pill to swallow, but modern conveniences like electricity, transportation, and air conditioning contribute to climate change, and remedies potentially involve significant sacrifice and lifestyle change.

“Although we’ve seen great strides in reductions in solar costs and batteries for electric vehicles, these are still expensive alternatives. There is no free lunch when it comes to overcoming climate change,” Knittel warned.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times  recently, Knittel said, “If an evil genius had set out to design the perfect environmental crisis … those five factors would have made climate change a brilliant choice. But we didn’t need an evil genius. We stumbled into it on our own.”

Read next — Climate experts: Clean tech is here, now we need people power

Related Articles

Feature | June 6, 2018

The scientific method and climate change: how scientists know.

Starting in 1958, Charles Keeling used the scientific method to take meticulous measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) at Mauna Loa Observatory in Waimea, Hawaii. This graph, known as the Keeling Curve, shows how atmospheric CO 2 has continued rising since then.

By Holly Shaftel, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The scientific method is the gold standard for exploring our natural world. You might have learned about it in grade school, but here’s a quick reminder: It’s the process that scientists use to understand everything from animal behavior to the forces that shape our planet—including climate change.

“The way science works is that I go out and study something, and maybe I collect data or write equations, or I run a big computer program,” said Josh Willis, principal investigator of NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And I use it to learn something about how the world works.”

Using the scientific method, scientists have shown that humans are extremely likely the dominant cause of today’s climate change. The story goes back to the late 1800s, but in 1958, for example, Charles Keeling of the Mauna Loa Observatory in Waimea, Hawaii, started taking meticulous measurements of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere, showing the first significant evidence of rapidly rising CO 2 levels and producing the Keeling Curve climate scientists know today.

“The way science works is that I go out and study something, and maybe I collect data or write equations, or I run a big computer program, and I use it to learn something about how the world works.” - Josh Willis, NASA oceanographer and Oceans Melting Greenland principal investigator

Since then, thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers have come to the same conclusion about climate change, telling us that human activities emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising Earth’s average temperature and bringing a range of consequences to our ecosystems.

“The weight of all of this information taken together points to the single consistent fact that humans and our activity are warming the planet,” Willis said.

The scientific method’s steps

The exact steps of the scientific method can vary by discipline, but since we have only one Earth (and no “test” Earth), climate scientists follow a few general guidelines to better understand carbon dioxide levels, sea level rise, global temperature and more.

• Form a hypothesis (a statement that an experiment can test)
• Make observations (conduct experiments and gather data)
• Analyze and interpret the data
• Draw conclusions
• Publish results that can be validated with further experiments (rinse and repeat)

As you can see, the scientific method is iterative (repetitive), meaning that climate scientists are constantly making new discoveries about the world based on the building blocks of scientific knowledge.

“The weight of all of this information taken together points to the single consistent fact that humans and our activity are warming the planet." - Josh Willis, NASA oceanographer and Oceans Melting Greenland principal investigator

The scientific method at work

How does the scientific method work in the real world of climate science? Let’s take NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign, a multi-year survey of Greenland’s ice melt that’s paving the way for improved sea level rise estimates, as an example.

• Form a hypothesis OMG hypothesizes that the oceans are playing a major role in Greenland ice loss.
• Make observations Over a five-year period, OMG will survey Greenland by air and ship to collect ocean temperature and salinity (saltiness) data and take ice thinning measurements to help climate scientists better understand how the ice and warming ocean interact with each other. OMG will also collect data on the sea floor’s shape and depth, which determines how much warm water can reach any given glacier.
• Analyze and interpret data As the OMG crew and scientists collect data around 27,000 miles (over 43,000 kilometers) of Greenland coastline over that five-year period, each year scientists will analyze the data to see how much the oceans warmed or cooled and how the ice changed in response.
• Draw conclusions In one OMG study , scientists discovered that many Greenland glaciers extend deeper (some around 1,000 feet, or about 300 meters) beneath the ocean’s surface than once thought, making them quite vulnerable to the warming ocean. They also discovered that Greenland’s west coast is generally more vulnerable than its east coast.
• Publish results Scientists like Willis write up the results, send in the paper for peer review (a process in which other experts in the field anonymously critique the submission), and then those peers determine whether the information is correct and valuable enough to be published in an academic journal, such as Nature or Earth and Planetary Science Letters . Then it becomes another contribution to the well-substantiated body of climate change knowledge, which evolves and grows stronger as scientists gather and confirm more evidence. Other scientists can take that information further by conducting their own studies to better understand sea level rise.

All in all, the scientific method is “a way of going from observations to answers,” NASA terrestrial ecosystem scientist Erika Podest, based at JPL, said. It adds clarity to our way of thinking and shows that scientific knowledge is always evolving.

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Independent Expert Group on Climate Finance. Delivering on the $100 Billion Climate Finance Commitment and Transforming Climate Finance (Independent Expert Group on Climate Finance, 2020).

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Carty, T., Kowalzig J. & Zagema, B. Climate Finance Shadow Report 2020 (Oxfam, 2020).

Bos, J. & Thwaites, J. A Breakdown of Developed Countries’ Public Climate Finance Contributions Towards the $100 Billion Goal (World Resources Institute, 2021).

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Climate action: ‘Take steps to close the adaptation gap, now’

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Instead of accelerating to meet the challenge of rising emissions, progress on climate adaptation is slowing across the board, a new report published on Thursday by the UN’s environment agency finds.

The Adaptation Gap Report 2023 issued by the UN Environment Programme ( UNEP ), says the world is underprepared, under invested and lacking the necessary planning, leaving us all exposed. It warns that instead of speeding up, progress on adapting to climate change is stalling.

The slowdown extends to finance, planning and implementation, says UNEP, with massive implications for loss and damage, particularly for the most vulnerable. 

Financial lag

“Today’s report shows the gap in adaptation funding is the highest ever. The world must take action to close the adaptation gap and deliver climate justice,” said the UN Secretary-General António Guterres , commenting on the report’s findings.

The updated adaptation costs for developing countries are estimated at $215 billion to $387 billion annually this decade, reflecting higher estimates than previous studies which are bound to increase significantly by 2050. 

And the needs of developing countries are 10-18 times higher than the flow of public financing – over 50 per cent higher than the previous estimated range. 

Pledges peter out

Despite pledges made at COP26 in Glasgow to double adaptation finance support to around $40 billion per year by 2025, public multilateral and bilateral adaptation finance flows to developing countries declined by 15 per cent to around $21 billion in 2021.

Concurrently, the adaptation finance gap is now estimated to be $194-366 billion per year. 

Costs will only rise

The report cites a recent study that indicates the 55 most climate-vulnerable economies alone have already experienced loss and damage valued at more than $500 billion in the last two decades.

Costs are likely to rise steeply in the coming decades, particularly in the absence of forceful mitigation and adaptation.

The new loss and damage fund will be an important instrument to mobilize resources, but issues remain, as the fund will need to move towards more innovative financing mechanisms to reach the necessary scale of investment. 

The UN chief thinks one source could come in tax revenue from the big emitters and polluters.

“Fossil fuel barons and their enablers have helped create this mess; they must support those suffering as a result,” he said in his message , calling on governments to tax the “windfall profits of the fossil fuel industry”, and to devote some of those funds to countries suffering loss and damage. 

Mitigate now to minimize future costs 

Authors of the report advocate for an ambitious adaptation: it can enhance resilience, which is particularly important for low-income countries and disadvantaged groups, including women.

For example, every $1 billion invested in adaptation against coastal flooding leads to a US $14 billion reduction in economic damages, while $16 billion per year invested in agriculture could help an astonishing 78 million people avoid starvation or chronic hunger due to climate impacts. 

Finding innovative ways 

The UNEP report identifies ways to increase financing, including through domestic expenditure and international and private sector finance.

Additional avenues include remittances, increasing and tailoring finance to Small and Medium Enterprises, shifting finance flows towards low-carbon and climate resilient development pathways, and a reform of the global financial architecture.

“Multilateral Development Banks should also allocate at least fifty percent of climate finance to adaptation and change their business models to mobilize far more private finance to protect communities from climate extremes,” expanded this point the UN chief.

COP28 must address ‘adaptation emergency’ 

“We need bold action to respond to escalating loss and damage that results from climate extremes”, said the UN chief.

“All parties must operationalize the Loss and Damage Fund at COP28 this year. And we need new and early pledges to get the fund started on a strong footing”.

“ We are in an adaptation emergency. We must act like it . And take steps to close the adaptation gap, now ,” the UN Secretary-General said.

How not to solve the climate change problem

Distinguished Scholar, NCAR; Affiliated Faculty, University of Auckland

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When politicians talk about reaching “net zero” emissions, they’re often counting on trees or technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air. What they don’t mention is just how much these proposals or geoengineering would cost to allow the world to continue burning fossil fuels.

There are many proposals for removing carbon dioxide, but most make differences only at the edges, and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have continued to increase relentlessly, even through the pandemic.

I’ve been working on climate change for over four decades. Let’s take a minute to come to grips with some of the rhetoric around climate change and clear the air, so to speak.

What’s causing climate change?

As has been well established now for several decades , the global climate is changing, and that change is caused by human activities .

When fossil fuels are burned for energy or used in transportation, they release carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas that is the main cause of global heating . Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries. As more carbon dioxide is added, its increasing concentration acts like a blanket, trapping energy near Earth’s surface that would otherwise escape into space.

When the amount of energy arriving from the Sun exceeds the amount of energy radiating back into space, the climate heats up. Some of that energy increases temperatures, and some increases evaporation and fuels storms and rains.

Because of these changes in atmospheric composition, the planet has warmed by an estimated 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 F) since about 1880 and is well on the way to 1.5 C (2.7 F), which was highlighted as a goal not to be crossed if possible by the Paris Agreement . With the global heating and gradual increases in temperature have come increases in all kinds of weather and climate extremes , from flooding to drought and heat waves, that cause huge damage, disruption and loss of life.

Studies shows that global carbon dioxide emissions will need to reach net-zero carbon emissions by midcentury to have a chance of limiting warming to even 2 C (3.6 F).

Currently, the main source of carbon dioxide is China. But accumulated emissions matter most, and the United States leads, closely followed by Europe, China and others.

What works to slow climate change?

Modern society needs energy, but it does not have to be from fossil fuels.

Studies show that the most effective way to address the climate change problem is to decarbonize the economies of the world’s nations. This means sharply increasing use of renewable energy – solar and wind cost less than new fossil fuel plants in much of the world today – and the use of electric vehicles.

Unfortunately, this changeover to renewables has been slow, due in large part to the the huge and expensive infrastructure related to fossil fuels, along with the vast amount of dollars that can buy influence with politicians .

What doesn’t work?

Instead of drastically cutting emissions, companies and politicians have grasped at alternatives. These include geoengineering ; carbon capture and storage , including “direct air capture”; and planting trees .

Here’s the issue:

Geoengineering often means “solar radiation management,” which aims to emulate a volcano and add particulates to the stratosphere to reflect incoming solar radiation back to space and produce a cooling. It might partially work, but it could have concerning side effects .

The global warming problem is not sunshine, but rather that infrared radiation emitted from Earth is being trapped by greenhouse gases. Between the incoming solar and outgoing radiation is the whole weather and climate system and the hydrological cycle. Sudden changes in these particles or poor distribution could have dramatic effects .

The last major volcanic eruption, of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, sent enough sulfur dioxide and particulates into the stratosphere that it produced modest cooling, but it also caused a loss of precipitation over land . It cooled the land more than the ocean so that monsoon rains moved offshore, and longer term it slowed the water cycle.

Carbon capture and storage has been researched and tried for well over a decade but has sizable costs . Only about a dozen industrial plants in the U.S. currently capture their carbon emissions, and most of it is used to enhance drilling for oil.

Direct air capture – technology that can pull carbon dioxide out of the air – is being developed in several places. It uses a lot of energy, though, and while that could potentially be dealt with by using renewable energy , it’s still energy intensive.

Planting trees is often embraced as a solution for offsetting corporate greenhouse gas emissions. Trees and vegetation take up carbon dioxide though photosynthesis and produce wood and other plant material. It’s relatively cheap.

But trees aren’t permanent. Leaves, twigs and dead trees decay. Forests burn. Recent studies show that the risks to trees from stress, wildfires, drought and insects as temperatures rise will also be larger than expected.

How much does all this cost?

Scientists have been measuring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa , Hawaii, since 1958 and elsewhere. The average annual increase in carbon dioxide concentration has accelerated, from about 1 part per million by volume per year in the 1960s to 1.5 in the 1990s, to 2.5 in recent years since 2010.

This relentless increase, through the pandemic and in spite of efforts in many countries to cut emissions, shows how enormous the problem is.

Usually carbon removal is discussed in terms of mass, measured in megatons – millions of metric tons – of carbon dioxide per year, not in parts per million of volume. The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.5x10¹⁵ metric tons, but as carbon dioxide (molecular weight 42) is heavier than air (molecular weight about 29), 1 part per million by volume of carbon dioxide is about 7.8 billion metric tons .

According to the World Resources Institute, the range of costs for direct air capture vary between US$250 and $600 per metric ton of carbon dioxide removed today, depending on the technology, energy source and scale of deployment. Even if costs fell to $100 per metric ton, the cost of reducing the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by 1 part per million is around $780 billion.

Keep in mind that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has risen from about 280 parts per million before the industrial era to around 420 today, and it is currently rising at more than 2 parts per million per year .

Tree restoration on one-third to two-thirds of suitable acres is estimated to be able to remove about 7.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050 without displacing agricultural land, by WRI’s calculations. That would be more than any other pathway. This might sound like a lot, but 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide is 7 billion metric tons, and so this is less than 1 part per million by volume. The cost is estimated to be up to $50 per metric ton . So even with trees, the cost to remove 1 part per million by volume could be as much as $390 billion.

Geoengineering is also expensive .

So for hundreds of billions of dollars, the best prospect with these strategies is a tiny dent of 1 part per million by volume in the carbon dioxide concentration.

This arithmetic highlights the tremendous need to cut emissions. There is no viable workaround.

• Fossil fuels
• Climate change
• Renewable energy
• Carbon dioxide (CO2)
• Solar power
• Geoengineering
• Carbon capture and storage
• Solar energy
• Wind energy
• Carbon capture
• Carbon dioxide removal
• Direct air capture
• Greenhouse gas emissions (GHG)

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• Need to solve an intractable problem? Collaboration is hard but worth it.

In This Section

• How to keep ‘TLDR’ syndrome from killing your policy proposal
• Making and communicating public health policy under fire
• AI can be democracy’s ally, but not if it works for Big Tech 
• The more indigenous nations self govern, the more they succeed
• If you don’t have multiracial democracy, you don’t have democracy at all
• Why smart infrastructure is a smart investment—even for Republicans—in an era of historic public works spending
• Transitioning to clean power without workers absorbing the shock

Complex problems facing cities like homelessness and climate change can only be solved by multiple organizations collaborating across boundaries, say Harvard Kennedy School faculty member Jorrit de Jong and Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson. 

Featuring jorrit de jong and amy edmondson, november 9, 2023 42 minutes and 21 seconds.

Harvard Kennedy School faculty member Jorrit de Jong and Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson say the big, intractable challenges facing city leaders today are too complex to be addressed by any one agency or government department. Complex challenges like the shortage of economic opportunity and affordable housing, homelessness, the effects of the climate crisis, crime—and can only be solved by multiple organizations working together. But that’s easier said than done. Bringing together government agencies, nonprofits, private businesses, academia, and the public into successful collaborations can be a huge challenge. Different people bring different agendas and goals. They don’t necessarily trust each other. Sometimes they can’t even agree on what the problem actually is, and they fail before even getting started. In a recent study, de Jong and Edmondson found that the most successful problem-solving collaborations have a number of things in common, including building a culture of safety and trust and being empowered to try, fail, and learn from mistakes. Sometimes, they say, the key can be just finding a place to start. 

Episode Notes:

Jorrit de Jong is the Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management at Harvard Kennedy School. He is director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on the challenges of making the public sector more effective, efficient, equitable, and responsive to social needs. A specialist in experiential learning, he has taught strategic management and public problem-solving in degree and executive education programs at HKS and around the world. He is also faculty co-chair of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a joint program of Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, the world’s most comprehensive effort to advance effective problem-solving and innovation through executive education, research, curriculum development, and fieldwork in cities. 

He is also Academic Director of the Innovations in Government Program at the Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. In that capacity, he launched the  Innovation Field Lab , an experiential learning, executive education, and action-oriented research project working with 15 cities in Massachusetts and New York to help them leverage data, community engagement and innovation to revitalize distressed and underinvested neighborhoods. He holds a PhD in Public Policy and Management from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, as well as a master's in philosophy and a master's in public administration from Leiden University. He has written extensively, including the books “The State of Access: Success and Failure of Democracies to Create Equal Opportunities;” “Agents of Change: Strategy and Tactics for Social Innovation;” and “Dealing with Dysfunction: Innovative Problem Solving in the Public Sector.”  

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society. Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked No. 1 in 2021. She also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017.   

She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organizational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets. Her 2019 book, “The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth,” has been translated into 15 languages. Her prior books: “Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy;” “Teaming to Innovate;” and “Extreme Teaming” explore teamwork in dynamic organizational environments.  Edmondson’s latest book, “Right Kind of Wrong,” builds on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming to provide a framework for thinking about, discussing, and practicing the science of failing well. Edmondson received her PhD in organizational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.  

Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of  Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an AB in Political Science from UCLA and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. 

The co-producer of PolicyCast is Susan Hughes . Design and graphics support is provided by Lydia Rosenberg , Delane Meadows , and the OCPA Design Team. Social media promotion and support is provided by Natalie Montaner and the OCPA Digital Team.  

For more information please visit our webpage or contact us at [email protected] .

This episode is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Preroll: (Ralph Ranalli): PolicyCast explores evidence-based policy solutions to the big problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. 

Jorrit de Jong (Intro): Let me give you one example, homelessness. You can think of that as one big problem, but if you break it down into smaller subsets of problems, you see that some people experiencing homelessness are dealing with mental illness and others are the victims of domestic violence, and yet others are experiencing substance abuse issues and others may have lost their house and are living below the poverty line. When you disaggregate a problem, you see a variety of different causes and consequences, but also it becomes very clear that, for some parts of the problem, you need the social services department, for another part of the problem, you need affordable housing, and for another part of the problem, you may need law enforcement or addiction help.  

Amy Edmondson (Intro): The problems can be roughly referred to as wicked problems, which are the kinds of problems that have incomplete, contradictory, and shifting requirements. They do not have easy answers and they impact different groups in different ways. They're just by their very nature hard to solve, and so you need the different perspectives both for the innovation and the creative problem solving that that allows, but also for the acceptability of the solution. If people aren't participating, then they're unlikely to appreciate and effectively use or implement solutions that just came in from outside and, "Here, we think this is going to fix your problem for you." 

Ralph Ranalli (Intro): Cities, like our world, are complex and interconnected places. So it’s hardly a surprise that our most intractable problems—lack of economic opportunity and affordable housing, homelessness, the effects of the climate crisis, crime—are that way too, complicated and seemingly hopelessly tangled, like that box of extensions cords you’re too afraid to bring up from the basement. Harvard Kennedy School faculty member Jorrit de Jong and Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson say the big challenges facing city leaders today have another thing in common: they’re too tough to be addressed by any one agency or government department and can only be solved by multiple organizations working together. But that’s easier said than done. Bringing together city departments, nonprofits, private business, academia, and the public into successful collaborations can be a huge challenge. Different people bring different agendas and goals. They don’t necessarily trust each other. Sometimes they can’t even agree on what the problem actually is and they fail before even getting started. In a recent study, de Jong and Edmondson found that the most successful problem-solving collaborations have a number of things in common, including building a culture of safety and trust and being willing to try, fail, and learn from mistakes. Sometimes it's even just finding a place to start. Jorrit de Jong is the director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University and academic director of the Innovations in Government Program at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, whose books and writings on teamwork in successful organizations have been translated into 15 languages. They’re here with me today. 

Ralph Ranalli: Amy, Jorrit, welcome to PolicyCast. 

Jorrit de Jong: Thanks for having us. 

Amy Edmondson: Great to be here. 

Ralph Ranalli: We're talking today about cross-boundary collaboration, which I think is a term that a lot of people aren’t familiar with. Well maybe they're more familiar with the general concept, but can we start with a little bit about its origins in the context of solving intractable problems in cities and why it's important? Jorrit do you want to start us off? 

Jorrit de Jong: Sure. Well, the main thing about cross-boundary collaboration is that it is something that is necessary because the problems that we face in society today are multifaceted, they're complex, they're volatile and no single organization, unfortunately, is able to tackle them. When we talk about homelessness or climate change or poverty or crime, we need multiple organizations to work together to come up with a good diagnosis of what the problem is and then to generate ideas for action and then to implement those ideas. 

Ralph Ranalli: Amy? 

Amy Edmondson: Let me just even say something more basic, which is what's a boundary? I mean, a boundary is a line between groups. The kinds of groups that Jorrit and I studied include expertise groups, different sectors, different employers, different organizations, even different levels on a hierarchy. Having people come across those boundaries to do something together is what we studied. 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. The stakeholders are usually government, nonprofits and NGOs, the business community, and academia. Is there anything else on that list? 

Amy Edmondson: Well, I think, occasionally, citizens, community. 

Ralph Ranalli: Amy, you've written four books on the subject of teamwork including one where you said: "The work done in the modern organization is less and less about looking inward and creating strong teams inside a company and more about teaming across boundaries that are often in flux. What’s causing that shift to companies and organizations needing to look outwards? 

Amy Edmondson: Organizations are more and more dependent on the cooperation of and the contributions of people from other organizations. That can be as simple as suppliers and customer organizations where the degree to which you can collaborate effectively across those boundaries matters for the effective delivery of services and goods in supply chains of all kinds. That's just one ordinary way of doing business that involves that. Beyond that, there's a real interest for companies and government organizations and others to be working together to solve some of the more thorny problems that society faces. These are the kinds of problems that cannot be solved by one organization alone or even one sector working alone, so there's just more need for that kind of reaching out, reaching across, and collaborating. 

Ralph Ranalli: Jorrit, you're a leading scholar on collective governance to address multi-stakeholder problems. What are some examples of the problems that either can only be solved by or addressed or best addressed with cross-boundary collaboration? 

Jorrit de Jong: Yeah. I would say that there's almost no significant problem facing cities today that can be solved by a single organization. Local government obviously offers a variety of basic services and is responsible for law enforcement in a variety of different areas, but most of the problems— whether it's crime or economic development or homelessness—require multiple types of expertise, multiple skill sets, resources that cannot be offered by one organization alone and, therefore, if you really want to make progress on these issues, you can't go it alone. 

It makes sense that we have silos within government agencies. Division of labor is, of course, a very basic principle of organizational design. You can't do everything all at once, and therefore we've created departments, a department for buildings, a department for parks and recreation, a department of police, fire department and so forth, human services, but those departments are focused on the types of activities, types of services that they're responsible for. What we increasingly find is that the way problems manifest themselves in the real world requires interventions, actions and resources from multiple departments. Even within governments, you need cross-boundary collaboration where the boundaries are the departmental boundaries. 

Let me give you one example, homelessness. You can think of that as one big problem, but if you break it down into smaller subsets of problems, you see that some people experiencing homelessness are dealing with mental illness and others are the victims of domestic violence, and yet others are experiencing substance abuse issues and others may have lost their house and are living below the poverty line. When you disaggregate a problem, you see a variety of different causes and consequences, but also it becomes very clear that, for some parts of the problem, you need the social services department, for another part of the problem, you need affordable housing, and for another part of the problem, you may need law enforcement or addiction help.  

The way problems manifest themselves in cities, it's very varied. It varies from city to city. It varies from time to time. And it definitely depends on how you look at it. The way you look at it can inform the way you try to solve it. What we're claiming in this study is that the nature of these problems requires a more comprehensive, a broader, more holistic look and, therefore, it requires multiple organizations to look at it together and then to solve it together. 

Amy Edmondson: Right, and I'll just double down on that idea, the nature of the problems. I mean, the nature of the problems can be roughly referred to as wicked problems, which are the kinds of problems that have incomplete, contradictory, and shifting requirements. They do not have easy answers and they impact different groups in different ways. They're just by their very nature hard to solve, and so you need the different perspectives both for the innovation and the creative problem solving that that allows, but also for the acceptability of the solution. If people aren't participating, then they're unlikely to appreciate and effectively use or implement solutions that just came in from outside and, "Here, we think this is going to fix your problem for you." 

Ralph Ranalli: Right. I think we all have this lovely ideal of what collaboration looks like, right? But one of the things that struck me when I was reading your study is how difficult it is and how significant the barriers are that need to be broken down. On the one hand, we have a nice picture in your mind of people holding hands and singing kumbaya and everyone bringing their own expertise to bear on a problem in this lovely holistic way, but on the other you identified the process of just getting started as something that's difficult to the point where you used the term "disorientation" to talk about early phase of trying different groups together. Can you talk a bit about that notion of disorientation and why it's so difficult to get traction with cross-boundary collaborations? 

Jorrit de Jong: Absolutely. You may know the expression, "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." If you are the Department of, let's say, Parks and Recreation, you look at a problem from that perspective and you think, "Oh, the problem to solve is to get this park clean and safe, and you may look at the people experiencing homelessness in that park as people that need to be removed, but if you are from the Department of Social Services, you look at the people in the park and you think, "Hey, we need to help these individuals," get them into housing, stabilize their condition and so forth, and you don't care as much about the park. Both are very legitimate perspectives, but very often—and this is what we found in a number of different studies that we conducted over the past 10 years—is that there are, in almost every cross-boundary collaboration phases, three major barriers.  

The very first one is how to define the problem. How do we define the problem in a way that generates sufficient consensus, not full consensus, but sufficient consensus to actually start working on it, because, if you don't see yourself in that problem definition, you're like, "What am I doing here?" It needs to be sufficiently inclusive to get the right parties on board and to get started. The second barrier is actually team building. Amy is, of course, an expert on this. It requires a certain kind of psychological safety—and maybe Amy you can say a little bit more about that—to actually engage in work where you don't know the problem yet and where you don't know the solution yet and where you don't maybe trust each other or understand each other enough yet to work together. 

The final barrier that we always find is multiple accountability challenges. You're committed to solving the problem and to working together, yet you're also on the payroll of your organization and, at the end of the day, your boss or your constituents will hold you accountable for the siloed organizational task and not the work that you did with other parties, and so there's this natural tension that occurs. 

Amy Edmondson: Yes. I mean, I'll build on that by saying, you mentioned psychological safety, and that's something that research, including my own, has shown is a really important factor in teamwork in general. And it's because it's not easy to be candid, it's not easy to speak up with a wild idea that people might laugh at, and it's not easy to ask for help if you don't understand something. Nobody likes to admit their ignorance or advertise their incompetence. I use those terms almost tongue in cheek, but we can naturally think, "Oh, someone will think I'm an idiot because I don't know something." It's much easier to hold back, wait and see. And so there's that challenge of speaking up. 

Roughly speaking, there's psychological, I mean, there's many psychological barriers, and you alluded to several, but just, "I don't maybe trust you because you come from a different department or a different background. I don't feel safe speaking up, honestly, candidly." There are so many things that get in the way of the innovation we're talking about, so it's much, much easier to fail than to succeed in this domain, and then layered on top of that are what I would call technological or logistical hurdles related to the jargon, different expertise areas, and different sectors have different jargon. The alphabet soup is a really big deal in the public sector and private sector, and so you can have people talking right by each other and really just struggling to have the effortless collaboration that you envision in this kumbaya moment that you recalled. You can't underestimate both the logistical, technological challenges and the psychological, sociological challenges. 

Ralph Ranalli: Sure. If you just think about the groups that you're talking about who are trying to collaborate with each other. One example is you've got nonprofits who are probably distrustful of for-profits. A lot of the time, that's a common nonprofit worldview. Then you've got for-profit businesses who are often distrustful of government, and … 

Amy Edmondson: ... and vice versa. 

Ralph Ranalli: Exactly, and vice versa. You talked about in the study about finding an entry point. Can you talk about that, Amy, maybe starting out with what is an entry point and how does one help you break through those initial difficulties and get a collaborative process moving? 

Amy Edmondson: Yeah. I guess what I will have to admit is that this is more descriptive, and I think it makes good sense theoretically and practically, but I'll tell you what we found. What we found was, as I alluded to earlier, that most, all the teams struggle, but the ones that end up making traction in their wicked problems and their challenging problems are the ones, now this will sound almost tautological, but they're the ones who found an entry point. There's a point at which, if you find an entry point, you get enough momentum to keep going through the hard work of teaming up across boundaries and making progress in new territory, and it's easy not to find one. 

What is an entry point? It took different forms in different projects, but we created this acronym, M-A-A-P. It means they found some way to get started that was meaningful. People could agree that this was connected to our broader goal even though it isn't a solution to our broader goal. It was meaningful. It was acceptable, meaning, different constituents would find it an okay thing to be working on. It was actionable, right? Again, not a magic wand or big solution to everything, but it was something you could go try, and it was provisional. I mean, it was almost deliberately seen by all as a starting point that, as we learn more together, we will get more clear, we will get better at making progress. 

Ralph Ranalli: At this point, I'd really like to if we can get into some concrete examples. In your study, you used the example of Manchester, New Hampshire. There were 10 other groups that were a big part of your study. Can you talk about how the group in Manchester, New Hampshire, found its entry point and what problem they were tackling? 

Jorrit de Jong: Absolutely. It's a great story, and I have to say it's not a story that is finished. It's a work in progress. I think it's fair to say that most of these problems are not solved. You can make progress. You can mitigate the problem, but there's only one way, as Amy suggested, to get started, which is to get started, but then you have to figure out and agree with this whole group, "Where do we start and how do we start?" There's often a theme that we see around the ideal is the enemy of good, right? We think we know enough about the problem to say that any tiny step in the right direction is not sufficient, because it will not solve the problem or it will not make progress fast enough, but what we've found in this study is that, if you start and focus on something small but meaningful, and if you make sure that you learn from that first step, you will see the next step and the next step and the next step. 

In Manchester, New Hampshire, they were facing multiple crises, homelessness on one the hand and opioid abuse on the other. There was overlap, but the city did not have data on how exactly these problems were intertwined, who was experiencing what problem or what condition and how to intervene as a city. Now, the parties in Manchester included social service providers, caregiving organizations, the police, fire departments, the Department of Public Works, but also the business community, especially downtown where business owners were complaining about people sleeping on the streets and panhandling. 

The mayor, Joyce Craig, really was worried about the situation and did not have necessarily enough resources for affordable housing or for the help, but she did know that just banning panhandling wasn't going to solve the problem. It's like fighting a symptom and not addressing the underlying problems. However, the business community was primarily interested in addressing that part of the problem because it mattered most to them and to their customers. What they agreed to do is to say, "Okay, we are going to think of panhandling as an entry point, but under one condition, that if we discourage panhandling, then we will make sure that the individuals that are being removed from the downtown area will be directed to treatment, to shelter, to social workers and so forth, and we will learn from what they're experiencing, what their needs are, and then we will use that to generate new funding and additional services so that we can make progress on the larger issue and the underlying problems."

Even though it looks like fighting a symptom to some and solving a problem to others, it allowed the group to start to work together, to look at the problem together, to learn from what works and what doesn't work together. And because they formed a coalition as such, they had a much better case to make to the state and to other funders. A few years later, they changed the structure in their governments. They have much more cross-silo collaboration in their government because they did find out that about 50% of the people who were homeless also were struggling with addiction problems. They changed their approach to helping the individuals, but they also helped create better conditions in downtown at the same time. 

Now, has it been solved? Absolutely not, but is the city in a better place to tackle the problem? Absolutely, and that is basically what we're seeing in all of those teams that are making progress. How they're getting traction is they start somewhere that is imperfect, but they learn, and as they learn they get to a better place. 

Amy Edmondson: One thing to just underline strongly here is that we've talked about, in a sense, to get started, you have to get started. And that might sound at first glance like a willpower problem where we just have to take the first step. I don't want to underplay how creative the first step was. 

This isn't a matter of: "It's obvious what the first step is. Let's just do it." This is truly a matter of: "We don't have a clue what the first step is because it's a wicked problem with multi-dimensional, multifaceted challenges." It's actually a team creative project to figure out an entry point, something that we can do that's meaningfully connected to our broader, ambitious goal that again is acceptable and something fundamentally we can learn from together. 

Jorrit de Jong: One other example that I really love, and not just because it's from my home country, the Netherlands, is the problem that they had in the City of Breda with illegal grow houses. They were growing marijuana. 

The idea was, or the suspicion was, that organized crime was exploiting or coercing low-income residents to use their attics and basements for this illegal activity. The police and the prosecutor's office had been trying the traditional law enforcement approach, but the community wouldn't want to work with them because they were afraid or didn't trust law enforcement.  

Then they started working within a utility company that had been experiencing electricity theft because grow houses take a lot of electricity. They also worked with the City of Breda, which was interested in community engagement, and they worked with a tax office who was interested in money laundering related to organized crime. They came up with a very different approach, and they found their entry points were focused on fire safety, because everybody cares about fire safety because your family needs to be safe, and so- 

Amy Edmondson: Neighbor could be- 

Jorrit de Jong: Your neighbors could be having a grow house and create that risk for you because they're using the electricity and the wiring catches fire because of the overuse, the overload. They started knocking on doors and said , "Hey, here's what you need to know about fire safety. If you smell this smell," and they had a sample with them, "then you might be at risk, and so you need to report that." That was a way to build trust with the community. Well, did it solve organized crime? Did it end illegal grow houses? No, but at least they found a way, literally, into the houses, an entry point, but also into the problem and, from there, they learned and adjusted their approach. I think that's another example of not giving up on the goal, the ultimate goal, but just structuring the process of learning. 

Ralph Ranalli: It's wonderful when these things succeed, but they don't all succeed. What have you found about when they fail, why they fail? 

Amy Edmondson: In a way, I mean, this is a bit tautological, but they fail because they fail to overcome the very real hurdles. These challenges are both creative challenges, they're political, they're effortful. There's lots and lots of pushback and barriers. They're overwhelming, so it's almost the assumed outcome that they will struggle anyway. 

Ralph Ranalli: You talk in the study about inherent paradoxes. Can you expound on that a little bit? 

Jorrit de Jong: Sure. There's a chicken-and-egg issue which is interesting to think about. For busy people and organizations with limited resources to commit to a collaboration, they need to know what's in it for them or why it would be important for them to participate. But you don't know that until you actually start looking at the problem together.  

For example, the growing house case did not include the fire department at first. It did include the tax office. Now, when you would have asked the fire department, "Hey, do you want to go chase organized crime in this neighborhood?" They're like, "Why would we do that?" They're like, "We got fires to put out. Organized crime is not in our job description," but because they learned more about the problem, and one part of it was the fire risk, then it became more relevant for the fire to be included. 

Here's the other thing. The tax office was less relevant, and you can imagine this poor tax inspector who would go to you about like, "What have you been doing lately, John?" and then, "Well, I've been finding illegal grow houses and detecting fire risk." Well, that's not your job description either, so you can see that, because all these problems were multifaceted, that a case has to be made for involvement and inclusion and participation. The inherent paradox there is that you need to have a broader group to work and look at the problem, but in order to get that group to look at the problem, you need to have a sufficient idea of what you're doing. That cannot be resolved one way or the other, other than just getting started and trying something out. 

Amy Edmondson: Yeah, and people who are willing to just be operating slightly outside their normal job description and willing to be creative and not worry so much about: "Is this my boss' number one priority right now?" because they glimpse an opportunity to make a real difference in something that speaks to them and matters to the community. 

Ralph Ranalli: Right, and you go back to the trust issue, too. You need to trust enough to have collaboration, but you also build trust through collaboration, so we're back to chickens and eggs. 

Amy Edmondson: It's chickens and eggs for sure. I'm not sure it's paradoxes. To me, the word paradox is overused. I shouldn't maybe say that, but it technically means two things that can't both be true at the same time, versus I think what we're talking about is a little bit more interesting and subtle, which is it's hard to get started and it's hard to know which comes first, the chicken or the egg. 

Ralph Ranalli: I love that you quoted the philosopher John Dewey and his saying that: “A problem well put is a problem half solved.” But that's not necessarily easy either. What happens when you can't even agree on the problem? I live in a suburb of Boston and our local political dividing line basically breaks down along the issue of affordable housing. One group identifies the lack of affordable housing as the problem, where the other basically views the impulse to build more affordable housing as the problem. What happens when you can’t agree on  whether a problem actually exists?  

Amy Edmondson: In a way, it's everything. It's the frame. With that frame, if you get stuck and stay in that frame, you will get nowhere. That is a guarantee because neither side is going to willingly change their view of the problem. What's needed is something that both sides care about, the future, the children and the future, or things along those lines, access to our schools, what have you.  

I won't try to solve that particular problem in your particular area, but the only way to break out and go forward is by finding an overarching shared goal or value that we both care about and then we get to start to take baby, creative steps toward what might this look like to help us resolve some of that very real tension. 

Jorrit de Jong: I would also say that a lot of this work was informed by Bloomberg Harvard City leadership program that Amy and I both teach in. It's a program for mayors and their senior teams. Mayors are often the ones nominating a problem for action. They run on a campaign platform, and they want to do something about inclusive growth or climate resilience or crime, and then, when they create a task force or try to build a coalition around that problem, it is important for them to know that, yes, they need to say, "This is the problem that I care about."  

But they also, as authorizers of this work, need to keep an open mind and be flexible because, if they're not flexible, the group will be reluctant to zoom in on one particular entry point that doesn't immediately make sense. Knowing what the nature is of this work—going back to Amy's notion earlier about the wicked problem—acknowledging and being explicit that you expect the group to learn rather than to deliver on the specific thing you're asking them to do.  What we've seen is that the role of authorizers is often understudied. One of the things that we see in the groups is those groups that felt like they had agency—they had the license to innovate and the permission to learn and develop as they went along—those groups were more successful in making progress. In our executive education program for mayors, both Amy and I spent a lot of time like, "How can leaders create the conditions for these diverse teams to do their work and to make meaningful progress?" 

Ralph Ranalli: I was interested in the personal aspect of when these collaborations start achieving success. What have you seen in terms of transformations in people's attitudes and outlooks when all of a sudden things start clicking and positive things start happening? What have you seen in terms of changes in the participants once this cross-boundary collaboration starts working? 

Amy Edmondson: I'll just say more abstractly, and then maybe Jorrit can give more concrete observations, but more abstractly, they start to feel like a "we" rather than, "I'm here. I'm from tax," or, "I'm from fire," or, "I'm from city hall.” They start to be part of the homelessness task force. They start to feel like each other as a mighty resource and that they start to care about each other, they start to care about their work together. 

Jorrit de Jong: Yeah. A colleague of ours, Ronnie Heifetz, uses the metaphor of a vegetable soup where you can throw different types of vegetables in a pan and add cold water, and then these vegetables will remain the same thing and there's no blending. You can also turn up the heat and cook them to pieces, and it's like one ratatouille, but the idea is to raise the temperature enough so that the individual vegetables still keep their taste and their shape, but they also start to form like a vegetable soup. Very often, we think of these processes of cross-boundary collaboration as pressure cookers. Without heat, there will be no dinner, but with too much heat, there will also be no dinner or it won't taste very well. Getting the temperature right, raising the pressure, creating a holding environment if you like around a group, which is what we do in our Executive Education programs, we bring people together and support them as they engage with the work and with each other and regulate the temperature so that they get to a level of productivity and trust that is required to make progress. 

Ralph Ranalli: You also teach this in the Executive Education program. Why is it important to connect with that audience? 

Amy Edmondson: I mean, I think, in professional schools, certainly in the Kennedy School and the Business School at Harvard, our goal is knowledge for action. Our research is always in the back of our minds. Sometimes, in the very front of our minds is how would this work? What can we learn about how to help people in tough jobs, tough leadership roles? How can we help them do a better job in achieving their results? 

One of the ways that we both share, but also develop our insights is in the executive classroom. We are teaching there, but we are also learning from them, from their feedback, from their examples, from their stories. We use the case method quite deliberately so that we have some principles that we're trying to convey and make them memorable and sticky through the stories, but we also want to hear their stories and how they've seen this work in practice, so that allows us to learn, that allows them to learn. 

Jorrit de Jong: Yeah, I would say I fully agree with that. A lot of the research questions come from practice and come from our interactions with mayors and their senior leaders and others. The work that we do at Harvard is  only good if it's both rigorous and relevant. If it's only rigorous and not relevant, we wouldn't want to do it because why? 

Amy Edmondson: If it's only relevant and not rigorous, then we don't feel so good either. 

Jorrit de Jong: Exactly, because you don't want to be sharing just ideas that are not rooted in research, right? That's why Amy and I and the whole group of authors, when we learned early on that mayors were struggling with cross-boundary collaboration and forming coalitions and task forces, we said like, "That's a really interesting research question." Amy had done research for many years on teaming and increasingly on wicked problem solving. I had been doing a lot of work on collaborative governance, but mostly at national or even international levels. We felt like, if we could combine our expertise and bring in some other colleagues, Hannah Riley Bowles, Eva Flavia Martinez Orbegozo, Jan Rivkin, and Mark Moore, then we could actually fill that gap. 

The studies that we've recently published are the first fruits of that labor, and we immediately bring it back to the classroom. When we teach now, we refer to these studies and we say, "Well, we don't have the definitive answer to the question how to do this, but we have some ideas that may help you guide the work as you go along." 

Amy Edmondson: We see if it resonates. Does it resonate? 

Ralph Ranalli: We've been talking about using this approach at the city level, but a lot of the problems that cities are facing are national and international in scope: climate readiness, the green energy transition, migration. Does the cross-boundary collaboration approach scale up? 

Jorrit de Jong: Well, we haven't done that research yet, but I think what we are seeing in the cross-sector collaborations in cities, those themes are not necessarily only happening in cities. It's much more about different professions, disciplines, organizational realities trying to work together than that it is about city-specific issues. Obviously, at the national level and at the international level, you have many more wicked problems, and some are the same, climate change, poverty, drugs, crime. Anywhere where people try to make progress on wicked problems, you will see the same types of mechanisms, barriers and patterns. Therefore, our hypothesis is that this applies to other contexts as well, but we haven't done that research yet. 

Amy Edmondson: We haven't done that research, but I think, if you look to any effective body that has trudged, made a dent in something, maybe child labor or human trafficking at a more global scale versus a local city scale, you will always find the requirement of different areas of expertise more often than not coming from multiple organizations, the NGOs, governments, business, large business players. Obviously, not all of these efforts are successful, but if they're serious, they will nearly always involve cross-boundary collaboration. 

Ralph Ranalli: We've reached the point in the podcast where we put the policy in PolicyCast, which is where I'm going to ask you for some specific recommendations, and in this case I think policy recommendations. Do you have any  policies that would encourage or make it easier to create successful cross-boundary collaborations or to help them along the road to success? What policies could turbocharge this process, which has shown that it can make a dent in big and intractable problems? 

Amy Edmondson: This is where I'm not a policy person, so I could just have a free ride here, but I will say one thing. I mean, one policy thing that occurs to me is making funding available. I think, oftentimes, funding is only available for things that are really clear cut and proven and have been done before. Making seed funding available for this kind of exploratory work is something that I think could be a policy issue. 

Jorrit de Jong: I don't think it is a policy question. I think it's a leadership question and a management question. What is helpful for creating and sustaining cross-boundary collaboration is for authorizers to be supportive of the process of, as Amy calls it, execution as learning, so try something out, come back and hold teams accountable for learning.  

What I always tell authorizers is that, if you say, "Well, have you fixed the problem?" then everybody is going to be very fixed on delivering exactly what they think the authorizer expects. And that may not be the best thing for solving the problem. What you have to do as an authorizer is to say, "Well, I expect you to do something" and whether it works or not … 

Amy Edmondson:  … learn from it … 

Jorrit de Jong:  ... it doesn't matter, but you have to come back and tell me, "This is what I've done. This is what worked. This is what didn't work. This is what I've learned or what we have learned, and this is the next step that we're thinking of taking, and we want authorization for that next iteration."  

I think that is a very different way of providing guidance and support and sponsorship than many authorizers are used to. I would say, if that's something, if you're a mayor or if you're a secretary, the national government or if you're a CEO even, then that's the difference in how you create the conditions for this type of work to be successful. 

Ralph Ranalli: Great. Well, I would just like to thank you both. This was a really interesting conversation that I enjoyed very much. Thanks for your time. 

Amy Edmondson: Thanks for having us. 

Ralph Ranalli (Outro) : Thanks for listening. Please join us for our next episode, when Harvard Kennedy School Professor David Deming and Harvard University Economics Professor Raj Chetty will discuss their research on how legacy preference affects college admissions.  

And please subscribe to PolicyCast on your favorite podcasting app so you don’t miss any of our great upcoming episodes. If you have a comment or a suggestion for the team here at PolicyCast, please drop us an email at [email protected]—we’d love to hear from you. And until next time, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously. 

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How americans view future harms from climate change in their community and around the u.s., 63% expect climate impacts to worsen in their lifetime.

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand Americans’ views of climate change and its impact on the country. For this analysis, we surveyed 8,842 U.S. adults from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1, 2023.

Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report , along with responses, and its methodology .

A new Pew Research Center survey finds a majority of Americans think climate change is causing harm to people in the United States today and 63% expect things to get worse in their lifetime.

When it comes to the personal impact of climate change, most Americans think they’ll have to make at least minor sacrifices over their lifetime because of climate change, but a relatively modest share think climate impacts will require them to make major sacrifices in their own lives.

July 2023 was hotter than any other month in the global temperature record , and the United Nations climate panel has warned of growing impacts from climate change barring major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

The Center survey of 8,842 U.S. adults conducted Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 2023, finds that 43% of Americans think climate change is causing a great deal or quite a bit of harm to people in the U.S. today. An additional 28% say it is causing some harm.

Looking ahead, young adults ages 18 to 29 are especially likely to foresee worsening climate impacts: 78% think harm to people in the U.S. caused by climate change will get a little or a lot worse in their lifetime.

About a quarter of Americans (23%) think they’ll have to make major sacrifices in their everyday lives because of climate change . A larger share (48%) expects to make minor sacrifices because of climate impacts and 28% of Americans expect to make no sacrifices at all.

Republicans and Democrats have much different expectations for how climate change will impact their lives. Just under half of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents expect to make no sacrifices in their everyday lives because of climate change. By comparison, 88% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents expect to have to make at least minor sacrifices.

These partisan gaps are closely tied to differing expectations about national impacts: 86% of Democrats expect harms from climate change in the U.S. to get worse during their lifetime; just 37% of Republicans say the same.

More broadly, the public believes individual Americans can make less of a difference on climate change than other major actors. For example, 55% think the energy industry can do a lot to reduce the effects of climate change and 52% say this about large businesses and corporations. By comparison, far fewer (27%) say individual Americans can do a lot to reduce climate impacts.

Climate change consistently ranks lower than other national issues like the economy, health care and crime on the public’s list of national priorities for the president and Congress. Nonetheless, 74% say the U.S. should participate in international efforts to address the issue and majorities support a number of specific policies intended to reduce the effects of climate change, such as providing a tax credits to businesses for developing carbon capture and storage technologies.

Views on climate activism

Despite widespread concern about future climate impacts there has been a slight decline in participation in forms of climate activism. The survey finds 21% of of U.S. adults say they have participated in at least one of four climate-related activities in the last year , including donating money to a climate organization or attending a climate protest. This is down slightly from two years ago when 24% of Americans said they had participated in a climate-related activity.

Furthermore, Americans are largely skeptical that climate activism builds public support for the issue or spurs elected officials to act. Just 28% think climate activism makes people more likely to support action on climate change and only 11% say it is extremely or very effective at getting elected officials to act on the issue. For more, read Chapter 3 of the report, “Climate activism.”

Consistent with the slight decline in levels of climate activism, there has been no increase in personal concern on the issue in recent years. Overall, 37% say they personally care a great deal about the issue of climate change. This share is down 7 percentage points from 2018 and about the same as it was in 2016, the first time the Center asked the question.

How Americans view the expertise of climate scientists

A related analysis finds only about one-third of Americans think climate scientists understand “very well” whether climate change is happening. An even smaller share says climate scientists understand the causes of climate change very well.

For more, read “Americans continue to have doubts about climate scientists’ understanding of climate change.”

The survey findings are organized into three chapters exploring the following topics in more detail:

• Expectations for future climate change impacts
• What groups Americans think can make a difference on climate change
• Climate activism and engagement

Public expectations of future climate impacts locally and around the U.S.

Experts predict that some regions of the U.S. will face more severe climate impacts than others . Americans also make distinctions when asked to think about future climate impacts on some different places around the country.

Majorities expect that coastal Florida (61%), Southern California (60%) and the Southwest (55%) will become worse places to live over the next 30 years because of the effects of climate change.

Assessments of other areas are less negative. Only around three-in-ten think New England (32%) and the Mountain West (30%) will become worse places to live over the next 30 years because of climate change; 27% say this about the Upper Midwest.

Americans’ assessments of the impact of climate change on their own communities tilt more negative than positive, though a sizable share do not expect much change. Overall, 41% think their own community will become a worse place to live over the next 30 years due to the effects of climate change. Just 7% think climate impacts will make conditions in their community better, while 41% think climate impacts won’t change conditions in their area much.

Democrats (59%), young adults (56%) and Americans living in the Western region of the country (51%) are among the groups most likely to believe conditions in their community will become worse in the next 30 years because of climate change. Read more about these differences in Chapter 1 .

Emotional reactions to climate news and information

Seven-in-ten Americans say they’ve felt sad about what is happening to the Earth , when they’ve seen news and information about climate change recently. Half say they’ve felt motivated to do more to address the issue when they saw climate news and information recently.

A sense of optimism about progress is not widely held: 38% say they’ve felt optimistic we can address climate change when they’ve seen news and information on the topic. A June 2023 Center survey found just 33% of Americans think the U.S. and other countries around the world will do enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Americans’ most common emotional reaction to climate news is feeling frustrated that there is so much political disagreement on the issue; 79% say they’ve felt this way recently.

A sense of skepticism toward climate advocates also registers with a sizable share of the public: 53% of Americans say they’ve felt suspicious of the groups and people pushing for action on climate change when they’ve seen climate news and information recently. An August Pew Research Center study used qualitative interviews to explore the views of those who do not see urgency on climate change; the analysis found that crisis language on climate change often drove suspicion and deeper mistrust among participants who see climate change as a lower-tier priority.

Republicans and Democrats have starkly different emotional responses to news and information on climate change.

Among Democrats and Democratic leaners:

• 88% say they felt sad about what is happening to the Earth.
• 73% felt anxious about the future.
• 72% felt motivated to do more to address the issue.

Still, fewer than half of Democats (45%) say they felt optimistic about addressing the issue when they’ve seen climate news and information recently.

Among Republicans and Republican leaners:

• 78% felt suspicious of the groups and people pushing for action on climate change.
• 58% felt annoyed there is so much attention on the issue of climate change.
• 51% felt confused about all the information out there about climate change.

Despite broad skepticism within the GOP toward groups pushing action on climate change, half of Republicans say they felt sad about what is happening to the Earth when they recently came across climate news and information.

One sentiment that registers with large shares of Republican and Democrats alike is frustration that there is so much political disagreement over climate change: 86% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans express this feeling.

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Table of contents, how americans view electric vehicles, fast facts about international views of climate change as biden attends un cop26 conference, 67% of americans perceive a rise in extreme weather, but partisans differ over government efforts to address it, most u.s. latinos say global climate change and other environmental issues impact their local communities, on climate change, republicans are open to some policy approaches, even as they assign the issue low priority, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

The 6 psychological responses to climate change - which one is yours?

When it comes to climate change, people tend to be classified in a strictly binary way: you are either a climate believer or a climate denier. Image:  Pexels/Google Mind

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'Sponge cities': An absorbing idea in the face of climate change

From china to montreal, urban planners are using nature to solve problem of flooding.

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At the bottom of a slope in a dense Montreal neighbourhood, there's a new park with benches, an open field and a playground — along with two small pedestrian bridges.

When there's heavy rain, water rushes down the streets and sidewalks into the green space, forming a small lake beneath the overpasses, in a carved-out area filled with grasses, shrubs and rocks. 

In the days that follow, the water slowly seeps into the soil and stormwater system. It's all been engineered to prevent flash flooding in nearby streets and homes, while nourishing the vegetation in the park.

"Instead of seeing the rain as something bad, we are now keeping the rain and turning it into something beautiful," said Philippe Sabourin, a spokesperson for the City of Montreal, on a recent tour of the area.

Montreal is building dozens of 'sponge parks' to soak up excess rain

As is the case in most cities, Montreal's drain systems are overwhelmed — and its streets and homes flooded — by torrential rains made more frequent by climate change . 

Pierre Danserau Park, built in 2019 on the grounds of an old rail yard, is one of seven "sponge parks" across the city. 

• Montreal building more sponge parks, sidewalks to soak up heavy rainfall

This fall, the city announced plans to build 30 more, in an attempt to curb flooding and keep flood water — which mixes with sewage when the city water system is under strain — out of the St. Lawrence River.

From grey to green

Similar spongy approaches to water management have taken hold elsewhere, from green rooftops in Toronto to lakes and wetlands alongside housing developments in Berlin.

Kongjian Yu, a Chinese landscape architect, pioneered the concept. Inspired by the way his childhood village coped with flooding during the monsoon season, Yu has made green solutions to water management his life's work. 

He has overseen the re-imagining of 20 "sponge cities" in China, with elaborate changes to infrastructure making way for more green spaces that can absorb water and keep the city cooler during heat waves.

Yu's vision goes far beyond a scattering of parks. His sponge cities feature vast stretches of green and blue, where ponds and wetlands are allowed to co-exist with highways and highrises.

The approach is well-suited to China, where the monsoon season routinely floods many cities. He said the traditional urban infrastructure "made of pipes, made of concrete, made of pumps" has no "resiliency at all" in the face of heavy rain fall. 

In a Zoom interview from his office in Beijing, Yu described the approach as the total opposite of "conventional grey infrastructure." 

"It is a fundamental change. It is an evolutionary change of the relationship between man and nature," he said.

Sponges, where they makes sense

In Canada, a greener approach to water management is also getting increased consideration as municipalities begin thinking "more creatively" about urban planning, said Alexandra Lesnikowski, head of the climate adaptation lab at Concordia University in Montreal.

"Increasingly, what we're discovering is that a lot of the systems that were built decades ago are no longer sufficient to help keep us dry and safe in a changing climate," she said. 

Lesnikowski said the effectiveness of a sponge park or any other green infrastructure depends on the details — that is, the location and the design.

• The fight is on to protect urban wildlife in Montreal

"We don't yet have ... really large, robust evidence based on what works where and what the limits of these types of interventions are for dealing with especially larger-scale climate risks," she said, adding that municipalities need to be "careful and strategic" in determining which projects to invest in.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Benjamin Shingler is a senior writer based in Montreal, covering climate policy, health and social issues. He previously worked at The Canadian Press and the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal.

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Fossil fuel interests have large, yet often murky, presence at climate talks, AP analysis finds

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The badges said they were there to participate in negotiations to curb climate change . They stated affiliations like the government of Brazil, Indigenous organizations of the Amazon, the Climate Registry. But in reality, the livelihoods of these participants were more aligned with what’s keeping the problem going: fossil fuels.

Close to 400 people connected in some way or another to fossil fuel industries attended last year’s United Nations climate talks in Egypt , a grouping that was larger than all but two of the national delegations sent by countries, according to a data analysis of the more than 24,000 participants by The Associated Press.

As United Nations leaders , scientists and others called for an eventual elimination of coal, oil and natural gas , various delegations included attendees who in some way owed part or all of their paychecks to fossil fuel burning. Many of these same people, and possibly even more connected to fossil fuels, will likely be at this year’s official climate talks, known as Conference of Parties or COP, being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a major oil producing country.

The sun sets behind the COP27 logo outside the venue of the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 12, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

“There’s outsized influence,” said Center for Biological Diversity’s Jean Su, who sits on the board that represents civil society and environmental groups at these meetings. “These COPs are often wining-and-dining fests for fossil fuel corporations that want to profit off of climate.”

While the presence is palpable—such as oil countries and companies with huge, flashy stands in the trades pavilions—the influence is hard to quantify because much of the negotiating is done behind closed doors.

These annual meetings, which have occurred since 1995, convene in different cities each year. The host city runs the event and sets the agenda. Because the upcoming summit, COP28, is in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates got to choose the president, picking the CEO of its national oil company, Sultan al-Jaber.

As to be expected at a summit focused on the environment, there are many environmental activists, more than 750 last year, by AP’s count. But they say their voices are not being heard, and instead the lobbying of fossil fuel interests are why climate talks have yet to produce an agreement to phase out coal, oil and natural gas, as scientists have repeatedly said must happen to stave off the worst impacts of climate change, like extreme weather events.

“People all over the world are suffering and dying from the consequences of the climate crisis caused by these industries who we allow to meet with our politicians and have privileged access to,” climate activist Greta Thunberg said in an October protest in London. “We cannot trust these politicians and we cannot trust the processes of the COPs because the fossil fuel industries are tightening their grip around their processes and dictating their outcomes.”

Environmental activists including Greta Thunberg, center left, march with other demonstrators during the Oily Money Out protest at Canary Wharf, in London, Oct. 19, 2023. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

WIDE RANGE OF AFFILIATIONS

The AP analyzed the affiliations of attendees of COP27, reviewing details they offered on their badges. Those details were checked against lists of operators and owners of coal mines, oil fields and natural gas plants, as well as manufacturers of carbon-intensive materials like steel and cement.

Attendees in 2022 included top executives of BP, Shell, Equinor and TotalEnergies. The head of the world’s largest oil and gas firm, Saudi Aramco, was at the site on a “sideline” event. And al-Jaber, chief of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, was also there and will be in charge of this year’s climate negotiations . The operations and products of those companies and others are huge contributors to climate change: global oil and gas use alone was responsible for more than half of the world’s 40.5 billion tons (36.8 billion metric tons) of greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency.

It wasn’t just fossil fuel giants that showed up.

Take Mercuria Energy. The Switzerland-based firm calls itself “one of the world’s largest energy traders,” with 69% of their 2022 traded volumes in oil and natural gas . The firm is also a part-owner in Vesta Terminals, which operates storage terminals that hold crude oil, petroleum products and other liquids, as well as a marine fuels company called Minerva Bunkering.

Mercuria sent six people to the COP in Egypt. Its chief trader, Magid Shenouda, went as part of the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin. Others from Mercuria went as members of delegations for the Brazilian government, the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Emissions Trading Association and Winrock International, a nonprofit that works to help poorer countries with social, environmental and agricultural issues.

“We attend these events because we believe the world needs to change to a global energy system that is reliable, affordable, and sustainable,” firm spokesman Matthew Lauer said in an email.

Steam rises from Schwelgern coking plant, which is in operation for German steel producer thyssenkrupp Steel Europe in Duisburg, Germany, Oct. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

COMPANIES ATTEND VIA COUNTRY DELEGATIONS

Mercuria was not the only company that sent people with a national delegation. Two employees with the China National Petroleum Company, which is state-owned and one of the largest energy companies in the world, attended as part of the delegation of Niger, the African nation where the company is constructing a pipeline. Thyssenkrupp, a German steelmaker with emissions in 2022 that rivaled those of some oil and gas majors, according to data they reported to non-profit CDP , sent four people with three different delegations.

Nearly a quarter of people with connections to fossil fuels in AP’s analysis attended with an electric utility. For many of those companies, fossil fuels remain the primary energy source. Take AES Corporation, which sent two people to the conference: More than half of the global company’s generation capacity is natural gas or coal, although AES aims to phase out coal by 2025, according to its most recent annual report to investors .

Houston-based Apache Corporation drills for oil and gas in Texas, Britain’s North Sea and Egypt, with more than 850 million barrels of oil equivalent in proven but yet-to-be-pumped oil reserves. Apache Executive Vice President David Pursell was at the climate talks, part of the six fossil fuel connected members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce delegation the AP identified.

“By inviting the oil and gas industry to participate in the conversation, we can create pragmatic solutions to addressing global energy poverty while minimizing our environmental impact,” Pursell said in a statement.

Demonstrators participate in a protest against fossil fuels at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 18, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

Alden Meyer, who has been to all but one COP and is an analyst for the European think-tank E3G , says the big numbers of attendees connected to fossil fuels show these industries see the summits as “either a threat or maybe an opportunity or both for their business,” but the system isn’t set up to tell motives and lobbying efforts.

Meyer and climate negotiations historian Joanna Depledge of the University of Cambridge in England say the fossil fuel interests have huge influence over the event, but the influence begins ahead of the talks.

“National positions are forged way before governments fly to the COPs,” said Depledge.

However, much of the advocating for fossil fuels doesn’t come directly from countries or companies. Last year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute sent four employees to the summit. Marty Durbin, the institute’s president and former executive of the American Petroleum Institute, says the institute is a “huge” supporter of natural gas, noting that in developing countries natural gas is an alternative to far-dirtier coal.

Durbin says the interests of the chamber’s wide business constituency must be represented in the negotiations, adding that chamber officials met with John Kerry at COP27 in support of that view and recently met with COP28 leaders in Abu Dhabi.

“I don’t know why we’re trying to push people away instead of saying, ‘Come in and let’s all work on this together,’” said Durbin, speaking from an oil and gas conference in October in Abu Dhabi.

For the upcoming talks in Dubai, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which organizes COPs, has changed its badging process to be more transparent. Attendees will be required to state affiliation and relationship to their delegation.

Children play in front of a blast furnace of German steel producer thyssenkrupp Steel Europe in Duisburg, Germany, Oct. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

LEGACY OIL INFLUENCE

Historian Depledge points to the first COP in Berlin for what has happened since. Thanks to oil industry lobbying, when setting its rules the convention decided against adopting decisions by majority rule and instead opted for the much harder consensus, she said. That means if a big player or several nations object, a proposal fails. India scuttled a 2021 proposal to phase out coal, watering the language down.

The No. 2 of the upcoming COP, Adnan Amin , told AP that consensus rule means that an agreement to phase out fossil fuels is unlikely. However, he said that in participating in the talks the oil and gas industry “will understand they need to move much faster than they’ve been moving” to reduce emissions.

Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of Edison International, a major California utility, stands for a photo in Rosemead, Calif., Oct. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Pedro Pizarro, president of Edison International, a holding company that includes a major California utility, is quick to say his firm doesn’t burn fossil fuels and he doesn’t consider it a fossil fuel company, even though they get at least 40% of the electricity they supply from burning natural gas.

When Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement , which set targets to limit global temperature rise, Pizarro still went to the negotiations, telling AP that “the U.S. was essentially absent; there were a few of us CEOs were there saying, ’Hey, we’re still in this’.”

Then in 2021, President Joe Biden returned the U.S. to the talks. Pizarro says he met with U.S. Special Climate Envoy John Kerry, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and domestic climate czar Gina McCarthy at those negotiations, talking about transitioning to clean energy and supporting Biden’s efforts to pass legislation.

Pizarro says he hopes that carbon capture and storage technologies will allow some fossil fuel burning to continue. Carbon capture removes carbon dioxide from the source of burning or from the air and is intertwined with fossil fuel businesses because promises to to abate emissions are critical to the net-zero pledges of many nations and companies, especially the oil and gas industry. However, the technology is years, if not decades, away from having an impact at scale.

“Right now the problem to solve isn’t fossil fuel,” Pizarro said. “The problem to solve is climate.”

Su disagrees and says all utilities are connected to fossil fuels.

“It’s the fox guarding the henhouse and they should not be at the table when it’s governments who have the jurisdiction to regulate,” Su said. “They are only accountable to shareholders and governments should have full say over what is best for the public.”

“The (COP) process is broken,” Su said. “It’s deeply frustrating.”

Vesta Terminals holding oil is reflected in Tallinn, Estonia, Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

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