The Top 10 Solutions to Climate Change

AI picture of a future planet Earth

In 2013, Paul Hawken created an organization called Project Drawdown. The term drawdown is referring to the time at which greenhouse gases peak and begin to decline on a year to year basis.

A coalition of researchers and scientists came together to gather a comprehensive list of climate solutions and then they narrowed down that list to those that have the greatest potential to reduce emissions or sequester carbon from the atmosphere. They then devised the climate and financial models for each solution. There is also a ranking of the solutions based on the total amount of greenhouse gases they can potentially avoid or remove from the atmosphere globally.

Below are the top 10 solutions, gigatons of reduced CO2 if the solution is implemented, and a short summary of each:

1. Refrigeration -

89.74 gigatons reduced CO2

Refrigerators, supermarket display cases, and air conditioners rely on chemical refrigerants to absorb and release heat. During the 1970s, scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), which were commonly used as refrigerants, were damaging the ozone layer. As a result, these chemicals have been largely phased out of use. The ozone layer is now beginning to recover, but refrigerants continue to pose an environmental challenge.

The replacement chemicals, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), have little effect on the ozone layer, but they are extremely powerful greenhouse gases and can contribute significantly to global warming. They trap heat in the atmosphere hundreds to thousands of times more than carbon dioxide.

In 2016, officials from more than 170 countries agreed to begin phasing out HFCs under an international agreement known as the Kigali Amendment. This transition will take many years and require significant investment. Refrigerants can produce emissions throughout their lifecycle, but the greatest opportunity for reducing these emissions comes at the end of their life. Rather than releasing refrigerants into the atmosphere, they can be captured and transformed into other chemicals that do not contribute to warming.

Phasing out HFCs in accordance with the Kigali Amendment could avoid emissions equivalent to an estimated 25 to 78 gigatons of carbon dioxide, making it an important opportunity to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

2. Wind Turbines

84.6 gigatons reduced CO2 for onshore

15.2 gigatons reduced CO2 for offshore

Wind energy has its challenges because wind varies by location. However, it is the combination of wind and solar energy that could power our planet. It is almost as if our planet was designed to be powered by the sun and the wind.

The US EIA (Energy Information Administration) states that wind turbines supply 10% of global electricity (reference here). For example, ten million homes in Spain alone are powered by wind. Denmark is another country that has made significant progress with wind energy. Nearly 60% of the country’s electricity comes from wind power (reference here).

Drawdown says, “In the United States, the wind energy potential of just three states—Kansas, North Dakota, and Texas—would be sufficient to meet electricity demand from coast to coast.”

Wind farms also use relatively little of the land on which they are located. The turbines and associated infrastructure occupy only a small portion of the total land area, allowing farming and other activities to continue around them.

The cost of wind turbines has also continued to decline. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the lifetime cost of wind and solar energy is now lower than the cost of building new fossil-fuel power plants.

3. Reduced Food Waste

70.53 gigatons reduced CO2

The food we waste contributes approximately 4.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, equivalent to about 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Approximately one-third of the food produced or prepared around the world never makes it onto people’s plates. At the same time, hunger remains a major global issue, affecting approximately 800 million people.

Food is wasted for many reasons. It can rot on farms or spoil during storage and transportation. Food may also be rejected because of bruising, unusual shapes, or other aesthetic imperfections. These losses can occur at nearly every stage of the food supply chain.

Feeding the 5000 is a program and public event where five thousand people are provided a free lunch from ingredients that would otherwise have been thrown out. This event was started by Tristram Stuart.

Addressing food waste requires improvements throughout the supply chain, including better infrastructure for storing, processing, and transporting food. Another important solution is finding ways to redirect unwanted but still edible food toward human consumption.

Drawdown also points to national goals and policies as an important way to encourage widespread change. For example, France passed a law prohibiting supermarkets from throwing away unsold food and requiring them to redirect it to charities, animal feed, or composting facilities.

I can see why reducing food waste on a global scale would require significant dedication from national governments. Such an endeavor would require organization and dedicated groups focused on improving the food supply chain, reducing waste, and ensuring that surplus food reaches people who need it. What makes this solution especially compelling is that it can address two problems at once: reducing greenhouse gas emissions while providing food to those that need it.

4. Plant-Rich Diet

66.11 gigatons reduce CO2

Raising livestock accounts for approximately 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, with some of the most comprehensive assessments of direct and indirect emissions estimating that the figure may be more than 50 percent.

In many countries, people consume well above their daily protein requirements. Adults generally require around 50 grams of protein per day, yet in the United States and Canada, the average adult consumes more than 90 grams.

Reducing our protein consumption could not only benefit our health but also help lower healthcare costs. Excessive consumption of animal protein has been associated with an increased risk of certain chronic diseases, including heart disease, stroke, and some cancers. Shifting toward a more plant-based diet could therefore have significant economic benefits by reducing healthcare costs.

In the books I’ve read by climate scientists, many recommend reducing protein consumption by a modest percentage rather than eliminating it altogether. Even a relatively small reduction, when multiplied across millions of people, could make a meaningful difference for both human health and the environment.

5. Tropical Forests

61.23 gigatons reduced CO2

Tropical forests have suffered extensive clearing and degradation. Tropical forest loss alone is responsible for an estimated 16 to 19 percent of greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.

Approximately 30 percent of the world’s forestland has been completely cleared, while another 20 percent has been degraded. More than 4.9 billion acres worldwide offer opportunities for restoration. Achieving this would require a mosaic approach to forest restoration, blending forests, trees, and agricultural land uses across the landscape.

As forests are restored, trees, soil, and other vegetation absorb and store carbon, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Forests also play an important role in the water cycle, protect habitats and pollinators, and provide homes for countless species of animals.

One approach to restoring tropical forests is to release land from non-forest uses, such as agriculture or dammed valleys, and allow a young forest to regenerate naturally. Another option is to cultivate and plant native seedlings while removing invasive species. In many cases, combining natural regeneration with active planting and management can help forests recover more quickly.

Restoring tropical forests on a meaningful scale will require global commitment, collaboration, and funding.

6. Educating Girls

59.6 gigatons reduced CO2

Girls’ education can have a significant impact on climate change by helping to slow population growth. If all nations achieved 100 percent enrollment of girls in primary and secondary school by 2050, there could be 843 million fewer people worldwide.

The difference in family size between a woman with no years of schooling and a woman with 12 years of education can be as much as four to five children per woman.

Educating girls and women has benefits that extend far beyond population growth. Greater access to education can lead to higher wages and contribute to economic growth. It is also associated with lower rates of maternal and infant mortality, as well as lower rates of HIV/AIDS and malaria. Educated women are more likely to have productive agricultural plots and to provide better nutrition for their families.

Educating girls can help break the cycle of intergenerational poverty while also helping to mitigate climate change by slowing population growth and, consequently, reducing future carbon emissions.

7. Family Planning

59.6 gigatons reduced CO2

An estimated 214 million women in lower-income countries want the ability to choose whether and when to become pregnant but lack adequate access to contraception, resulting in approximately 74 million unintended pregnancies each year. In the United States, about 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended.

Ensuring access to voluntary, high-quality family planning services around the world could have significant benefits for the health, well-being, and life expectancy of women and children. This includes making contraception affordable and accessible, providing comprehensive education, and expanding supportive healthcare services.

There is widespread agreement that population growth places additional pressure on the planet’s resources. Family planning can help address this challenge, but its primary purpose is to improve people’s health, well-being, and ability to make decisions about their own lives. The environmental benefits—including reduced pressure on natural resources and lower future carbon emissions—are an important secondary benefit.

8. Solar Farms

36.9 gigatons reduced CO2

Solar farms are large-scale arrays consisting of hundreds, thousands, or, in some cases, millions of solar panels, with a generating capacity ranging from tens to hundreds of megawatts. These facilities operate at a utility scale, producing amounts of electricity comparable to conventional power plants. However, unlike fossil-fuel power plants, solar farms generate electricity without the same harmful air emissions.

Solar power is an obvious solution to global warming. The sun provides an abundant, clean, and free source of energy, with a supply that doesn’t fluctuate in price. Once solar panels are installed, they can generate electricity for decades with relatively little ongoing cost, unlike fossil-fuel power, which requires a continuous supply of coal, oil, or natural gas.

Solar power is rapidly becoming one of the fastest-growing and least expensive sources of energy in the world. Solar farms can also be constructed much more quickly than new coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants, allowing clean energy to come online faster.

In addition, solar power does not produce the air pollution associated with burning fossil fuels. Solar farms can avoid the vast majority of the carbon emissions produced by coal-fired power plants and eliminate emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, mercury, and particulate matter. These pollutants are major contributors to air pollution, which is responsible for millions of premature deaths worldwide each year.

The book Drawdown was published in 2017, so some of its information about solar power is now outdated because the solar industry has grown so rapidly. For this reason, I’ll use the more recent figures discussed by Bill McKibben in his book Here Comes the Sun.

Solar generation grew more in 2024 than coal-fired power has grown in total since 2010. By 2026, according to the International Energy Agency, solar is expected to generate more electricity than all of the world’s nuclear plants combined. By 2028, it is projected to generate more than all the world’s hydropower. By 2030, it could surpass natural gas, and by 2032, coal. If we remain on the IEA’s net-zero-by-2050 pathway, solar energy could become the Earth’s largest source of energy—not just electricity—by the 2040s.

9. Silvopasture

31.19 gigatons reduced CO2

Silvopasture is a type of agroforestry that integrates trees, forage (plants eaten by livestock), and animals into a single system for raising livestock.

Cattle and other ruminants require 30 to 45 percent of the world’s cropland and pastureland, and livestock production accounts for roughly one-fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, there is growing interest in finding better ways to manage pastures and reduce or offset the methane and other greenhouse gas emissions associated with livestock.

Pastures that incorporate trees can sequester five to ten times as much carbon as similarly sized treeless pastures. The trees also provide livestock with shade and protection from wind, while their leaves and other vegetation can provide additional sources of food. In return, the animals naturally fertilize the soil through their manure.

Silvopasture can also reduce farmers’ costs by decreasing the need for purchased feed, fertilizer, and herbicides. Because integrating trees into grazing lands can improve soil fertility and overall ecosystem health, farmers can maintain healthier and more productive land over time.

Silvopasture is currently practiced on approximately 351 million acres of land globally. If it expanded to 554 million acres by 2050, it could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 31.2 gigatons.

10. Rooftop Solar

24.6 gigatons reduced CO2

Solar power can replace electricity generated from coal and natural gas, as well as kerosene lamps and diesel generators in areas where people lack access to the power grid. Globally, roughly one billion people still lack access to electricity, making solar power an important tool for expanding access to clean energy.

In Bill McKibben’s book Here Comes the Sun, he says that by 2024, 1.5 million Germans had installed solar panels on their apartment balconies, and Germany had surpassed the 50 percent mark for generating its electricity from renewable sources, with a goal of reaching 80 percent by 2030.

In France, the government has mandated that large parking lots install solar canopies. Norway’s national football stadium, has one of Europe’s largest vertical solar installations, using upright, two-sided panels that can generate up to 20 percent more energy.

Solar panels also have a long lifespan. A solar panel sold by LONGi in 2024 could continue generating electricity for decades, and most panels come with 25-year warranties. By comparison, the oil and natural gas extracted and sold today will largely be consumed within months.

Batteries store solar energy for use when the sun goes down. Manufacturing batteries requires mining minerals such as lithium, but once those minerals are incorporated into a battery, they can remain in use for a decade or two before the battery needs to be replaced. The minerals can then be recovered and recycled. This is very different from fossil fuels such as coal: we mine the coal, burn it, and it is gone, requiring us to continually extract more.

Eventually, batteries degrade to the point where they can no longer be used for energy storage and need to be recycled for their component materials, such as lithium and cobalt. Battery recycling technologies are being developed to recover these valuable materials. For example, batteries can be processed in a high-temperature furnace, or calciner, to separate and recover their component materials. Recycling allows us to continue using these minerals rather than continually mining new supplies, potentially keeping valuable battery materials in circulation for generations.

To summarize, the key themes among the top 10 solutions in the book are phasing out HFCs in accordance with the Kigali Amendment, wind and solar energy, education for women and girls, reforestation, reducing our protein consumption, and smarter agricultural practices.

There were also a couple of solutions that weren't in the top 10 that I wanted to highlight:

• Regenerative agriculture, which I’ve discussed in previous blog posts ranks number 11 on the list. This solution is very similar to silvopasture, with a focus on using smarter agricultural techniques to capture and store carbon while improving the health of the land.

• For other energy solutions besides wind and solar, geothermal energy ranks number 18 due to the fact that it's difficult to know where reservoirs are and expensive to drill wells to find out. Nuclear energy ranks number 20, partly because of its high cost. Onshore wind, for instance, costs about one-quarter as much as nuclear power.

• Electric vehicles ranks number 26 and has the impact of reducing CO2 by 10.8 gigatons.

Drawdown was published in 2017 but when I checked, the solutions are still highly recommended. There are more solutions added to the library on the website now. You can follow the Drawdown project on facebook and find the website at https://drawdown.org/