3 Ways to Approach the Climate Crisis with Curiosity and Concern
If you've spent just 30 minutes Googling the words "climate change" or scrolling through Instagram on Earth Day, you'd quickly find out that that climate solutions come in all shapes and sizes.
Whether you've calculated your carbon footprint or joined the Climate Reality Project leadership, your action is making an indelible mark on the progress of this global movement to eliminate carbon emissions and become a more sustainable planet.
But if you're like me, you've begun thinking about systems of scale or conditions that can leverage your impact — changing your lights to LED and playing with #MeatlessMonday is great, but what else can I do?
Fortunately, many people and organizations before you have thought the same thing and formed coalitions to help answer these questions. For some, this might look like a venture-driven approach to climate resilience. To others, an education-focused approach presents the greatest opportunity for achieving environmental activism at scale. If you're like me, an operational-driven approach to combat the climate crisis provides the greatest platform for individual contribution multipliers. Regardless of your preference, the first step to any approach is self-education.
Venture-driven
When money is accessible, the venture-driven approach creates scale through currency. Accumulating wealth can be helpful when your network of LPs and investment partners is widespread and effective, mobilizing bank accounts and applying even pressure to ESG programs in corporate CSR departments.
Consider the work from C50, whose community platform was launched to highlight the impact behind the investor agenda. Their recent awards ceremony highlights the growing impact and recent boom in ESG-based investing.
Hundreds of venture firms are spending more money on what some are calling ClimateTech 2.0, where investors ranging from the early stage Urban.us to growth stage Breakthrough Energy Ventures are putting dollars to work to amplify the impact of thousands of new and growing climate-related businesses.
Education-focused
When community action is accessible, the education-focused approach is married with policy and coalition work to create scale through people. Creating a platform for mobilizing voices, driven by a unified goal of creating equitable living conditions for all people is possible when a coalition of activists, policymakers, and frontline community leaders are empowered to affect change.
While this may look like curbside petitioners to many, there are organizations that overlap and intersect at value points from climate justice to environmental education. The backbone of this education-focused, policy-driven approach is the coalition — simply an alliance of individuals, organizations, and governments to create policy, mobilize activism, and champion a cause.
From the early days of Climate Activism 1.0 when NRDC and Earthjustice carried the polar bear emblazoned flag for people against global warming to 2.0 where organizations like the Climate Reality Project have formed alliances with frontline communities all over the country to educate and mobilize educational forums and local protests, there has never been a greater collective movement towards climate resilience and justice.
Operational-driven
When professional skills and experience are available, the operational-driven approach is applied to green initiatives in the private sector, representing innovations in anything from sustainable construction materials to biofuels or from new urbanism to electrification — and the list goes on.
Operators find comfort in taking practical action. This might mean applying design skills to design the systems that encourage consumers to calculate their carbon footprints, reduce their energy consumption, or sign petitions. This might mean applying software engineering skills to develop platforms that regulate home energy consumption, detect faults in aging infrastructure, or deploy AI/ML to make skyscrapers more efficient.
For inventors, this could look like inventing meatless alternatives to our favorite foods or creating a marketplace or renewable energy certificates. For urban planners, this may look like making making our streets safer, more resilient, and convenient through data.
Prioritize action, then look for leverage
Whether you're an investor, activist, or inventor, the underlying theme in each approach emphasizes immediate action. The global movement to fight the climate crisis is a cause with multiple fronts. Find a lever, and pull. Curiosity and concern are what will push us as individuals to make change.
As an entrepreneur, I struggled with information overload. New studies and reports from leading climate engineers often pulled my interest back and forth between noble initiatives with no obvious path to choose. It wasn't until I considered the merit of all approaches and my own skills that I was able to channel my personal interests and curiosities towards an operational approach.
Looking back to 2018, it was my growing concern for homelessness that spurred my curiosity in affordable housing products that later became Bay Modular. Today, my curiosity and concern have led me to explore climate change through an urbanist lens — where I see urbanism as a leverage point for sustainability through built efficiency, policy-driven change, and technological disruption.
"Urbanism is a climate change antibiotic and our most affordable solution to foreign oil dependence. Urbanism is, in fact, our single most potent weapon against climate change, rising energy costs, and environmental degradation." - Peter Calthorpe, Co-Founder at UrbanFootprint
Urbanism presents a clear opportunity to design our cities in ways that prioritize people over cars, create safer and cleaner buildings, and encourage civic engagement in policies that impact the evolution of our built environment. It offers a chance to design streets and infrastructure in ways that make mobility safer, more efficient, and cleaner, while delivering critical services from emergency and utility to recreation.