Climate Tipping Point

With climate-enhanced droughts, heatwaves and fires ravaging three continents and the threat of a new surge in global warming, the world urgently needs to ramp-up solutions for slashing carbon pollution. But which solutions are most critical?

The organization Project Drawdown has detailed the potential, feasibility and cost of nearly a hundred climate solutions since it was set up in 2017.

Executive director Jonathan Foley, a leading climate scientist, spoke to AFP about how to assess and prioritize the actions needed to keep Earth liveable.

The following interview has been edited for length and flow:

Q: What are the three most important questions in assessing the usefulness and integrity of carbon-cutting solutions?

A: Is it available now and ready to deploy? Because we need to start bending the emissions curve immediately.

Is it cost-effective? Otherwise, it's not going to scale effectively.

Does it create co-benefits for people, especially in terms of health, jobs, equity, and justice? This will make it far more appealing.

Q: A lot of hope—and investment—is going into technological solutions such as filtering fossil fuel pollution or pulling CO2 out of the air. Comment?

A: While some very limited carbon removal will be needed by mid-century, the vast, vast majority of the work we need to do—more than 95 percent—is cutting emissions, and doing it now.

Of the five percent focused on carbon removal, I think it should be more than 90 percent nature-based removal, such as ecological restoration and regenerative agriculture. Machine-based removal is unlikely to work at any meaningful scale.

Q: We often hear that solutions are already available, all that's missing is political will. Is that it?  READ MORE...