🌱 Solutions-focused thinking: 3 ways to use Project Drawdown to drive climate action today
Featuring The Climate Game, Playin' Choc, Willicroft and more
Happy Earth Day!
Earth Day, a day to think of environmental conservation and sustainability. Not that we need a special day for that, we are over here thinking about it daily (and especially on a Monday when relaxing into the latest FTF newsletter, amiright?). However, Earth Day IS a great opportunity to get some climate air time with your colleagues at work and remind them of the good fight!
This week we look at an organisation we often quote in the newsletter, Project Drawdown, our fabulously uplifting Good(s) News, and some quizzes. All to spark conversations and catalyse actions in your workplace this Earth Day!
So grab your megaphone, kick your eco-anxiety to the curb and let’s dive in…
> In Focus
How Project Drawdown can help you have positive conversations about climate change at work
By Laura Matz
This newsletter is, and has always been, about educating and inspiring each other to help make our environmental mission less daunting. We want to focus on solutions and action to avoid letting the, often grim, science of climate change overwhelm us to the point where we just want to put our heads in the sand. Project Drawdown shares our mission (though they would probably wipe the floor with us in a science competition).
What is Project Drawdown?
Project Drawdown is a non profit organisation funded by individual and institutional donations. You can visit the website to get educated about the causes of climate change, the solutions that are available and how to adopt them, as well as stories from everyday people who are looking to play a role in stopping climate change. And the catchy name? It comes from the concept of the ‘Moment of Drawdown’ — the point when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start declining — as a result of the interventions proposed.
A tough, but achievable challenge
Many conversations about climate change start with a photo of the world on fire and a message of “we shouldn’t do this,” or “we need to stop that”. Those conversations are absolutely valid and essential in many circumstances. But there is also time for conversations rooted in positivity! The message from Project Drawdown: We know the solutions, the solutions are all achievable with the technology we have right now, and if we implement all of them we can stop climate change. If that sounds like it’s going to be easy, that isn’t their message. Both scenarios call for aggressive action but at an individual level the actions are realistic and achievable. Not only achievable… their financial models tell us that over the long-term, many of the solutions are predicted to make a financial return on investment (without even accounting for avoided costs of dealing with the effects of climate change).
Solutions sound good! Tell me more…
The solutions fall into three connected categories: reducing the sources of GHG emissions, supporting sinks by supporting nature’s carbon cycle, and improving society. Reducing the emissions and supporting the sinks are direct solutions while those which include social interventions, such as girls’ education and supporting efforts to protect the rights of Indigenous people to traditional lands, are classed as indirect solutions. The graphic below gives a more granular view of the different solutions. This graphic is really useful when illustrating why carbon removal initiatives are important, but can’t be your only focus when it comes to climate action (making up only ~6% of the portfolio of necessary interventions).
3 ways to use the Project Drawdown as your company’s environmental champion:
Set aside time to watch the Climate Solutions 101 series as a team and some time to discuss together what you learned and what action you can take as a company and as individuals. The educational videos are made up of six units, each about 5-20 mins in length.
Share Action Guides focused on specific job functions. Let’s take an example: Marketing. The website provides a checklist of 12 actions you can take to make your job a climate job. Actions for marketers include:
If you’re on the agency side, avoid working with fossil fuel companies and other businesses that prop up the fossil fuel industry—and include climate considerations in your client proposals.
Collaborate with and learn from other brands leading on climate to scale the impact of campaigns.
Extra points (from us…and maybe from B Corp or ecovadis or whatever framework you are using) if you add job function related actions to your annual personal performance or team performance goals!
Check if your climate transition plan is utilising as many solutions as possible by comparing it to the Solutions Library. Each solution has a callout box titled ‘What You Can Do’ and a list of co-benefits that will help you get buy-in from your team.
> Follow up with…
Interactive Game: Challenge your co-workers to play The Climate Game and see if you can reach Net Zero by 2050. This interactive game was created by The Financial Times in partnership with Infosys.
Quiz: Take an Earth Day Quiz to see what everyone learned after diving into the Project Drawdown resources.
> Last week in consumer goods x climate…
The Good(s) News
Up and coming brands…
🎯 Willicroft performed an impact assessment on their products. They found that their plant-based dairy products create 25 times fewer emissions than their dairy counterparts.
🎯 Solar Foods opened their first commercial production facility to produce Solein, a protein powder made from microorganisms. The factory grows the same amount of Solein protein per day as milk protein from 300 cows.
🎯 Endura, Playin Choc and Tails.com all announced they are B Corp certified!
Bigger organisations…
⭐️ Aldi UK have swapped their plastic packaging for cardboard alternatives for their own-brand toothbrushes. They estimate that this change will save 17 tonnes of plastic packaging per year.
⭐️ Upfield released the world’s first paper tub for their Flora margarine in UK stores. Starting with Sainsbury’s stores, the margarine will be available for purchase from this week.
⭐️ Albert Heijn have added farm-to-store CO2e emissions information to many of their own-brand products. Specifically for proteins like pork, chicken, eggs and salmon, the carbon emissions are calculated using primary data. Along with the CO2e information, they have also provided emissions information of the recipes on packaging, indicating “very low” to “very high” emissions.
⭐️ REWE Group opened their first fully plant-based retail store in Berlin. They’re stocking both their own-brand products and other brands, displaying the vast variety of products now available to consumers.
Want good news sooner? We post our top 5 stories every Friday on LinkedIn! If your CPG brand has good news to share, let us know.
> In case you missed it
Want more? Here’s what’s happening across FTF at the moment…
We interviewed Joe Hill of One Planet Pizza. Catch up on what he had to say about their journey and the food industry at large in last week’s edition of The Check-Out.
Working on sustainability in a consumer goods brand? We’d love to hear from you - first, for a cool once-a-week group chat we’re trialling, and second for an upcoming brand spotlight (it’s your time to shine!).
Finally - Looking for more inspiration for how your business can contribute to global net zero? Take a moment to recap how Pukka and Energy Garden teamed up to power a green London.
That’s it for today!
Want more? Check out ‘The Check-Out’ this Thursday for the latest brands in our basket. In the meantime, if you want to get involved in our community activities (like the group chat), reply to this email or reach out at info@followingthefootprints.com to say hi.
Much love,
Team FTF