(Photo by iStock/SeppFriedhuber)
In the midst of a pandemic that has claimed more than 3 million lives, the climate change crisis continues to challenge the world. Though emissions initially fell in 2020, the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere kept going up, ice is melting faster in the Arctic, and 2021 is shaping up to be one of the six warmest years. Everything from power grids to people's health has suffered as a result.
People's solutions to these immense environmental challenges are being informed by their responses to COVID-19, another crisis that, like the health of the planet, touches every part of everyone's lives. What does the global pandemic teach us about saving Earth? What role can civil society play in mitigating climate disaster? The following SSIR articles outline how advocacy, design thinking, collaboration, philanthropy, and social innovation can help build a better future for us all.
1. Using Design Thinking to Tackle Climate Change When ‘What You Know No Longer Works’
As climate change creates new ambiguity problems for farmers, communities need to better understand and assess their own environments.
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2. How Philanthropy Must Address the Climate Emergency
Breaking down silos means starting from intersectionality and emphasizing climate justice.
3. Dispatch From 2030: What a Global Pandemic Taught Us About Tackling Climate Change
A look back from 2030 reveals how ambitious industrial policies, high-quality data, and courageous leadership saved us from an affliction worse than COVID-19.
4. Africa’s Climate Activist
At the forefront of the effort to raise awareness about Africa’s climate plight is Vanessa Nakate, a 24-year-old Ugandan social media activist. (Learn more about subscribing to SSIR)
5. Cultivating Change Amidst Collapse
To meet the magnitude of this moment we must work collaboratively in ways that promote decentralization over top-down hierarchies, relationships over transactions, and emergence over control.
6. Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights as a Minimum Standard for Corporate Practice
By building strategic alliances with investors and shareholders, Indigenous Peoples are proactively protecting their rights by urging corporate respect of those rights in routine operations.
7. Book Excerpt: How Private Sector Leadership Can Fight the Biodiversity Crisis
An excerpt from Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning details the efforts of companies, governments, and communities to remediate polluted lands.
8. Climate Action Is Too Big for ESG Mandates
As a macro risk factor, climate change needs to be disentangled from the other social and governance mandates in the ESG investing rubric.
9. Farm to Table Corals
Over the last 30 years, half of all coral reefs have died, threatening marine species and people's livelihoods. To reverse this trend, Coral Vita uses a pioneering technique to grow coral in land-based farms up to 50 times faster than they grow naturally. (Learn more about subscribing to SSIR)
10. Book Excerpt: Stewards of the Land
An excerpt from A Better Planet describes how to harness American agriculture for a sustainable future.
11. Reducing Emissions
Research has found that the simple act of adding an unassuming seaweed called Asparagopsis taxiformis to cattle feed can lower the amount of methane that cows produce by a stunning 60 percent. (Learn more about subscribing to SSIR)
12. Why We Can’t Shop Our Way to Sustainability
Consumers will never solve the climate crisis. To build sustainability, business leaders must partner with government and society to re-focus their companies on new forms of market exchange.
13. The Complicity of Corporate Sustainability
Long hailed as a major piece of the climate solution, sustainable business practices have not only fallen short: They even enable the continued dominance of fossil fuel.
14. The Dawn of Responsible Finance
Since the Great Recession, leaders in finance and investing have aimed to make their industries more equitable, sustainable, and socially productive. Has the fight for financial reform found its moment amid the economic crisis sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic? (Learn more about subscribing to SSIR)
15. SSIR Guide to Taking On Climate Change
With temperatures in Antarctica reaching record highs and new calls to respond to the intensifying climate crisis, social change leaders can improve their work on environmental issues with the insights from these 10 articles.
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