We Need to “See the Whole Board” to Stop Climate Change
Addressing climate change is like playing chess. We need to use all the pieces, employ multiple strategies, and see the whole board. But, unlike chess, we have to play this game collaboratively to win.
It’s 2021, and the era of climate denial is over. We are moving beyond denying climate change and are now seeking ways to stop it.
The world understands climate change is real and addressing it is one of the most critical challenges facing us. That’s good news, but there are still many challenges ahead. The most important is overcoming our sometimes limited views about how to address the climate crisis.
In a nutshell, we aren’t always looking at the whole range of solutions we need to get the job done, or enough ways to scale them in time to make a difference.
Too many of our conversations focus only on a handful of climate solutions, usually in areas like power generation or electric cars, and forget about the many other solutions we need. And too many conversations focus only on a few ways to scale solutions — to the necessary size, at the necessary speed — to avert disaster.
Unfortunately, too many of us share these blind spots. It’s human nature. But, as a result, we’re still neglecting many important solutions, and are missing enormous opportunities to make progress.
After watching The Queen’s Gambit, an analogy comes to mind. Our approach to addressing climate change is like trying to play chess but only using a knight or a bishop. We don’t realize there are other pieces on the board, and that we will need them all. And we don’t realize we need a range of tactics, depending on the state of the board. We can’t just play our favorite move, again and again.
We need to use all the pieces and consider all the tactics to play a successful game — from the opening gambits, through the complex play in the middle, to achieving “climate checkmate” in the future. In other words, we have to see and play the “whole board”.
So, what are the pieces on the climate chessboard? And what are the strongest tactics? In other words, what are the rules of climate chess?
The first rule of climate chess is this: The board is bigger than we think, and includes more than fossil fuels.
We usually hear that climate change is a problem of fossil fuels. If we simply get rid of fossil fuels and the carbon dioxide emissions they create, we will stop climate change.
No, that’s an incomplete view. Only ~62% of the greenhouse gas emissions are carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels (Figure 1).
Climate change is caused by multiple gases emitted from multiple activities — linked to the production and use of energy, materials, and food. The other big sources include carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emitted from agriculture and land-use practices, emissions of methane from the energy sector, carbon dioxide emissions from cement and industrial processes, and emissions of fluorinated gases, especially refrigerants, from industry and buildings.
The second rule of climate chess is that we need to rapidly reduce all sources of greenhouse gases, not just a few.
Greenhouse gas emissions come from several sectors of the economy (Figure 2). Globally, the two biggest are electricity production (~25%) and food, agriculture, and land use (~24%). In other words, burning coal and natural gas to generate electricity is the single largest source, but the food system is nearly tied with it — and together they account for roughly half of our greenhouse gases. Industry (~21%), transportation (~14%), buildings (~6%), and other sources (~10%) make up the other half.
Six sectors — electricity; food, agriculture & land use; industry; transportation; buildings; and other emissions — are causing the problem. So that’s where the opportunities to reduce emissions will come from too.
It is useful to break down these emissions even more, exploring how each sector is contributing (Figure 3).
For example, in electricity, increasing energy efficiency in buildings and industry, as well as switching power generation from fossil fuels to renewables and other zero-carbon sources, will be crucial.
In food, agriculture & land use, most emissions come from three drivers. Deforestation — mostly to produce beef, soy (for animal feed & cooking oil), and palm oil — is the largest source. Next, methane from livestock and rice is the second biggest contributor. And third, nitrous oxide from overusing fertilizers and manure on agricultural soils.
In industry, a wide range of activities releases greenhouse gases. They include the production of metals, particularly steel, and cement. Chemicals, including plastics, are important too, along with the management and processing of wastes.
Transportation is responsible for ~14% of the world’s emissions, and the vast majority (~10%) come from road vehicles. Aviation is important (with direct emissions at ~2%), especially considering how a tiny fraction of the world’s population drives most of these emissions.
Buildings directly emit ~6% of the world’s greenhouse gases, mainly from furnaces, boilers, and leaking air conditioners. But buildings also have a large secondary footprint, accounted for in electricity (at the power plant) and industry (where building materials are made).
The remaining emissions (~10%) come from many sources, but they are dominated by the energy industry — including flaring and fugitive emissions of methane, energy used in processing crude oil, and so on.
The third rule of climate chess is that we need to protect and maintain nature’s massive “sinks” of greenhouse gases.
A “sink” is a process — found in forests, farms, oceans, or engineered devices — that removes greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere. And they play an important role in our atmosphere.
This may sound far-fetched at first. What could possibly remove pollution from the atmosphere at a scale that would matter to climate change?
But it turns out that nature does a great deal of it for free. In fact, ~55% of our carbon dioxide emissions are soaked up by forests and the ocean. Taking other greenhouse gases into account, this translates to ~41% of our emissions being removed by nature, leaving ~59% behind, accumulating in the atmosphere, fueling more climate change (Figure 4).
That’s important to reiterate: ~41 percent of our emissions are naturally absorbed by forests and the ocean, dramatically reducing the climate problem. That’s nature, by the way, not us. Our attempts to sequester carbon, so far, aren’t even noticed by the atmosphere.
Because nature is removing a whopping ~41% of our emissions, it is absolutely crucial that we protect natural sinks in forests and the ocean. If those sinks were to decline, as we degrade forests and the ocean, climate change may get even worse. Maintaining healthy forests, healthy oceans, and healthy carbon sinks is crucial.
The fourth rule of climate chess is that we should create new, long-term carbon sinks. But we need to be keenly aware of their limitations.
It’s important to stress that nature removes ~41% of our greenhouse gases, and human attempts to do this are not yet even visible to the atmosphere. So the priority today should be protecting nature and its sinks.
That said, it should be possible to add new carbon sinks by working with nature, or using new technologies.
To start, I think we should focus on natural processes on land and in the ocean — mimicking what nature does already — so that they absorb even more carbon dioxide. Planting forest, restoring carbon-rich soils on agricultural and degraded lands, restoring coastal ecosystems, and planting kelp forests and shellfish beds, are ways to do this right now. And there are many others.
There is a lot of excitement in the area of these nature-based climate solutions. Notions of planting billions of trees worldwide, or deploying “regenerative agriculture” across vast areas of farmland, are getting a lot of attention. While there are concerns about how large, how effective, and how permanent such solutions might be (see more below), they are attractive. By mimicking nature, we have a proven model to follow. Plus, done wisely, they could offer enormous co-benefits to water, habitat, and biodiversity.
It is also possible to build new technology-based carbon sinks, using industrial and chemical processes. These devices have been referred to as carbon capture & storage (linked to a power plant), direct air capture (in the free atmosphere), or generally as “negative emissions technologies”.
So far, machines that remove greenhouse gases at any meaningful scale are just a dream, and I’m skeptical of them. I’d rather help nature do the job, with a proven track record. But we should keep an open mind about these technologies — as long as they don’t become a distraction or an excuse to “kick the can” down the road.
No matter the mechanism — whether on land, in the ocean, or with machines — human-generated carbon sinks must overcome several challenges to be effective. First, some promised carbon sinks have proven difficult to verify and stand up to audits. Second, some sinks (especially those betting on trees and soil) often experience time lags compared to current sources — so they cannot effectively offset today’s emissions, which will cause warming for decades even as they are slowly offset by trees and soils that take decades to build up. And many carbon sinks, particularly those in trees and soils, may not be permanent — especially with increasing ecosystem degradation and climate-fueled disasters.
In short, human-generated carbon sinks are not a substitute for reducing sources of greenhouse gases or protecting nature’s existing sinks. They can be helpful, in the long run, but are not a replacement for more urgent action. Consider this a “both-and” strategy, not an “either-or” one.
The fifth rule of climate chess is that we need to actively manage a broad portfolio of solutions. And we need to consider solutions that come from outside traditional climate thinking.
At Project Drawdown — the non-profit I help lead — we define “solutions” as technologies and practices that materially lower the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Solutions achieve physical outcomes, with measurable impacts in the atmosphere.
It turns out that we have a lot of climate solutions today. There are solutions that dramatically reduce the sources of greenhouse gas pollution. There are solutions that maintain existing carbon sinks in nature. And there are solutions that can add new, human-generated carbon sinks.
Plus, it turns out that additional climate solutions come from other places — from actions intended to improve society, not lower emissions. For example, improving equitable access to health care and education is a powerful climate solution. So is supporting indigenous land tenure rights.
Project Drawdown has examined the most viable solutions to climate change, ranking them by their impact and cost. We find that roughly eighty solutions, taken together, are needed to stop climate change. Figure 5 shows how we organize them into a “solutions taxonomy”, starting with whether they work on sources, sinks, or society, followed by major sector categories, and 19 “solution clusters”.
Project Drawdown has also evaluated how solutions can work together, stopping climate change between the mid-2040s and the 2060s, and meet the Paris Accords goal of limiting warming to 1.5˚ or 2˚C.
We can address climate change with solutions we have today. And these solutions will return multiple dollars back to the economy for every dollar invested, plus helping us avoid incalculable damages to civilization. Moreover, these solutions also produce many other benefits to nature and society.
To avert the climate crisis, we will need to deploy dozens of solutions simultaneously. Unfortunately, too many of our discussions focus on only a handful of solutions — typically focused on technologies to generate electricity or remove carbon from the atmosphere — even though many others are needed. We have a long list of proven solutions available today — and yet most of them are neglected, ignored, or forgotten.
We need all the pieces on the chessboard. We need all of us.
The sixth rule of climate chess is that we need to pursue multiple tactics to bring solutions to scale.
Solutions do not scale themselves. We need tactics to lower the barriers to, and accelerate the deployment of, climate solutions.
But when we talk about scaling solutions, folks naturally like to focus on their favorite approach. I do it too. We seem attached to preconceived ideas about how the world changes — through changing politics, markets, business, behavior, or technology. We seem to favor one of these and dismiss the others. But we will need them all. We need to work with people with different views, and different ideas about how the world changes.
Here are some scaling tactics that may be needed. (In Project Drawdown, we called these kinds of tactics “Accelerators”, and discussed them in The Drawdown Review.)
We need to set and articulate useful climate goals. We can’t make progress on our journey unless we know where we are going. So setting bold goals — like the Paris Accords (to limit global warming to well below 2˚C) or being “net zero” by 2050 — are crucial to point us in the right direction and raise our ambitions. But we need to make sure goals aren’t too vague, too far in the future, or allow for ambiguous measures of success. The best goals are bold and long-term, but also include detailed measures of progress along the way to hold us accountable.
We will need to alter rules and policies to help shift the world towards climate solutions. Today, too many policy structures — laws, regulations, taxes, subsidies, trade agreements, and so on — favor destructive systems, including fossil fuels, unsustainable materials, and industrial agriculture. Instead, we need to disincentivize these systems and incentivize better ones — including renewable energy, better approaches to materials and waste, and regenerative agriculture. And good policies are needed at all scales — local, regional, national, and international.
We will need to shift financial capital. Trillions of dollars need to be moved from destructive activities to effective climate solutions. That means a combination of divesting (from fossil fuels, for example) and investing (in energy efficiency, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, advanced materials, etc.). These shifts in capital might begin with philanthropy and endowments managers, followed by impact investors and enlightened pension and sovereign funds, and grow to include more private investors. Government policies and spending will also be an instrumental part of shifting capital.
And we need to shift human capital and create new jobs to implement climate solutions. Climate solutions could create hundreds of millions of new jobs worldwide — often good-paying, “green-collar” jobs that cannot be outsourced or converted to AI algorithms. Unfortunately, jobs are being lost in communities that have been “locked-in” to fossil fuels, industrialized agriculture, and other unsustainable practices. To help people move from these dying jobs to other livelihoods will require serious attention, effective policy, considerable money, and empathy.
We also need to change the behavior of business. As long as business leaders and shareholders focus on short-term financial gains, we will only get short-term results. Long-term thinking is needed to address climate change, and we need such thinking and leadership in business. Smart business leaders see that addressing climate change gives them a competitive advantage — by reducing costs, attracting talent, growing market share, and reducing risks.
And we need to change individual behavior. It’s important to recognize that we can’t do everything as individuals. The systems we’re working to change are enormous, and personal actions can’t do it all. However, personal actions are needed. In fact, some solutions — like increasing energy efficiency, reducing food waste, and changing diets — require our personal attention. Beyond reducing the impact on the environment, individual actions are a catalyst for larger change. Think of it as voting with your wallet and actions every day, sending political, market, and social signals to the world. Just make sure this doesn’t distract us from pursuing other, meaningful actions in policy, business, and beyond.
We also need to make wise investments in technology, while avoiding unnecessary hype and distractions. Even though we have enough solutions to address climate change today, more are always welcome. Most of all, we need innovations to help scale existing solutions, making them cheaper, faster to deploy, and easier to use. We also need new technologies in a few key areas, where solutions are still lacking, including carbon-free cement and steel, carbon-neutral jet fuel and plastic, and viable carbon removal technologies. Most important, we need to avoid the “hype cycle” of technology leaders and investors that focus on distracting non-solutions, and create speculative bubbles that leave financial ruin, wasted time, and higher greenhouse gas levels in their wake.
The final rule of climate chess is see the whole board, and collaborate with others to play the game.
The portfolio of climate solutions we discussed above, crossed against this suite of scaling tactics, gives shape to the climate chessboard (Figure 6). And this is a game that will require all of us, collaborating, in order to play it well.
On this imaginary board, the columns are climate solutions (technologies and practices that materially lower greenhouse gas levels) — which reduce emissions sources, support sinks, and improve society. The rows are scaling tactics, which are needed to bring solutions to the necessary size, at the necessary speed, to avert the climate crisis.
We need to see, and play, the “whole board” — with a broad portfolio of solutions, scaled with multiple tactics. Favoring only a handful of solutions, advanced with a favored scaling tactic, will simply not get the job done.
We also need to realize this is a long, complex game — played out over the next few decades — best done in collaboration, not competition, with others. No one individual, business, organization, or nation can do it alone. We must find ways to collaborate, finding synergies wherever possible, to move forward together.
We need all of our collective solutions, all of our collective strategies and tactics, and all of our creativity and spirit to get the job done.
In the end, we will need dramatic, concerted, and informed action to address climate change. And to guide our actions, we should probably keep something like these notions of climate “chess rules” and “seeing the whole board” in mind.
To reiterate, we should always cut emissions first, which come mainly from fossil fuels, land use & food, and industrial processes. I’d focus on several issues to start, including enhancing energy efficiency, scaling up renewable electricity generation, reducing food waste, shifting diets to less damaging foods, improving agricultural systems, electrifying transport, retrofitting buildings, and electrifying heating systems. We should also target methane, and so-called super-pollutants, to help us buy time.
And we should look for ways to remove greenhouse gas emissions by maintaining nature’s existing sinks and developing new human-generated sinks. I strongly recommend protecting and augmenting natural sinks — by planting forests, “carbon farming”, and restoring coastal ecosystems — as an excellent “no regrets” strategy to start.
We also need different scaling tactics to bring solutions to the size we need, at the speed that is necessary. We need to see changes in policy, capital, labor, businesses, behavior, and technology. We can’t just pick our favorite, and dismiss the others.
We have to understand where the key issues are, and where the best opportunities might be to address climate change. And that requires that we see and play the whole board, together, not just a few favorite pieces and moves on our own.
Addressing the climate crisis is possible, but it won’t be easy. We will need to transform our world. And transform it together. But we must do it, and I believe we can — especially if we collaborate across many solutions and many ways of scaling them. Working together, we can do this. Working alone, in isolation, I fear we will fail.
To address climate change, and do it well, we have to do something even harder — change our mindsets. We need to look beyond our own biases, and see solutions and tactics that we are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with. And we must realize that the game is bigger than us and our individual views. And that we have to collaborate across many solutions, and many tactics. Only then, together, will we have a chance at winning.
Dr. Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) is a climate & environmental scientist, writer, and speaker. He is also the Executive Director of Project Drawdown, the world’s leading resource for climate solutions.
These views are his own.
Copyright © 2015–2021, Jonathan Foley. All rights reserved.
I want to acknowledge and thank Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, who pioneered our thinking about “Accelerators” (or scaling tactics) at Project Drawdown.
Note: Some passages in this essay were adapted from “The Three Most Important Graphs in Climate Change” and “Your Personal Action Guide for the Environment”.
